[spacemonkey]

i've got a book somewhere that had a virtual reality game being decided with a cat in a box, rather than a coin toss. all i remember are the words 'the cat was very definately dead'. and then another thing i read: after schroedinger came up with the theory, someone else called Wigner decided that until someone was observed to observe the cat, it could not be decided what th outcome was. and then the observer of the observer, and so on. boils down to an ultimate end to everything with someone watching the final quantum state collapse, if it ever can.

as for the rest of this, if you died and switched, you'd remember having an accident. maybe you don't puncture both your lungs in a fall and survive. but yahtz seemed to be saying that you'd switch when you realised the inevitability of the fall, ie. at the exact point where you decide to jump. has he been watching the animatrix too much?

[Bob]

That doesn't make much sense. If opening the box and seeing that the cat was dead closes off the possibility of its being alive in this universe, why would that entail another universe containing a live cat? In Schroedinger's Box the cat is always either live or dead; it cannot be both (or neither) regardless of observation or not.

When you look at it closely enough, the idea of observation collapsing quantum phenomena just points out the obvious: there are infinte possibilities, but only one true one (in this reality anyway). Why would a false (as in it didn't occur) possibility create a parallel universe?

[Stalky]

My brain hurts.

[Yahtzee]

Finally, this forum gets some fucking intellectual debating going on.

[Chris]

Bob, the idea is that the cat isn't just "in one of many possible states," it is in fact in both states until some interaction makes a definite result necessary. It's as if the universe works backwards from an effect to work out what must have caused it.

Example: a beam of radiation comes off of a radioactive source. Which way did it go? Every way possible, simeltaneously. UNTIL it comes to collides with an object AND has an effect on it (ie. does not bounce straight off leaving no effect; an elastic collision), at which point the beam which WAS going in every direction collapses into one beam with a definite trajectory, as it must have travelled in a straight line from the source to the object. Parallel universes then spawn playing out all other scenarios in which the beam came off at alternative angles. In the cat scenario, certain angles correspond to cat death, certain angles to cat life. Of course the scenario falls apart under inspection, as the air the cat does/does not breathe collapses the possibilities into definite cat life/death, but it's a neater explanantion than one involving subatomic particles.

[Amber-Nicole]

Can it be like, a spider instead of a cat? Cats are cute. Let's not kill the cat.

EDIT: Bloody typo.

This post has been edited by Amber-Nicole: 11 October 2004 - 07:19 PM

[Yahtzee]

Well, Amber is today's winner of the 'interrupt the intellectual conversation with the kind of non-sequitur that only a total girl could make' award.

[Amber-Nicole]

What? Can't we intellectually debate the demise of something that's NOT a cutey wutey fuzzy wuzzy little furry soft fuzzball of adorableness?

[Brick McRunfast]

When the game of life makes you feel like quitin,
It help a lot if you kill a kitten.
Mark my words, 'cause from where I'm sittin',
You can't go wrong if you kill a kitten

There's no crime that you'll be commitin',
I know the law, you can kill a kitten.
And if you need yarn for that scarf you're knittin',
You'll get plenty when you kill a kitten.

Feed it turpintine,
Or break it's spine.
Hit it with your shoe,
as long as you
Kill a kitten.

If the one you love isn't quite as smitten,
She'll like you better when you kill a kitten.
And I'll quote the bible 'cause that's where it's written,
"If ye loveth Jesus, ye must kill a kitten."

Flush him down the can
Hit him with your hand
Throw him at a train
Make him snort cocaine
Throw him in a lake
Make a kitty cake
Stick some TNT
Up his cat pooftie
Do what you must do
as long as you . . . kill a kitten.

Killing kittens isn't easy,
And if the thought makes you queesy,
Grab a pitchfork from the shed,
And kill a puppy dog instead.

God bless you, Stephen Lynch.

[Jane Sherwood]

And god bless you, Brick McRunfast. I love that song.

Now can we please return to the topic? I'm not going to be saying much because when science-talk gets too in-depth, I tend to go cross-eyed and my thoughts are reduced to words of one syllable or phrases of three words or less, most of which simply being variations of “What the hell?”.

For this topic, all I can keep thinking of are all of the events in the past where I very well could have died in an accident or killed myself in some way. Like at any point over the past seven months, I could have overdosed on sleeping pills, or two years ago, there were two different times in the same day where I could have snapped my neck falling off of a four-wheeler. Maybe it did happen in those split-second blackout periods. Who's to say?

It sounds kind of like instantaneous reincarnation, only instead of starting over, you pick up right where you left off...that's the best way I can think of it. Those science-y words you’re all using confuse me greatly.

And yes, I know how very pathetic that sounds. I suppose I should have just stuck with those stupid tits.


Note to self: No matter how curious you are, never ever ever click on a mysterious link put up by Yahtzee. Ever.

[Brick McRunfast]

Wasn't there a Jet Li movie that was built around this theory? The One, I believe it was called. Thousands of versions of the same person existed, one for every universe. When one died, his energy was shared among the remaining versions. So one bad Jet Li went and killed all but one other of himself, and those two fought it out with god-like powers.

The idea doesn't hold with the energy transference thing, or else the elderly would be picking up cars and sprinting across water, since so many of their alternate universe selves would be dead, but it's a cool idea.

Death to the kittens.

[Amber-Nicole]

Someting like that. I remember our Wuantum discussion at the lunch table led to us all making fun of Jet Li movies.

Note to self: No matter how curious you are, never ever ever click on a mysterious link put up by Yahtzee. Ever.

Meh. They're just tits. It's not like it popped up scary Hentai pictures. With tentacles.

Death to the kittens.

The kittens are way cuter than you'll ever be.

[Dark Comet]

If you like kittens, check out Rathergood.com. The funniest flash animations I've seen for a while, and there are some really funny kitten vids.

If you wanna see Northern Kittens sing Independant Woman while playing the Accordion, Xylophone and French Horn... Look no further.

Right. Back the the Science.

[SimeSublime]

Also, if observation collapses quantum phenomena, how do we explain observable quantum phenomena, like single-photon diffraction (ie. throw a single quanta of light through two parallel slots, and observe a diffraction pattern when there are no other photons around to have interfered with one another)

Taking this from my QM notes from last year. Feyman came up with an experiment. Try shooting a stream of particles(such as bullets)at a wall with two splits, then measure the diffraction pattern on a second wall behind the slits. Now do the same with a waves(such as water). It's found that with particles the majority of the 'bullet holes' were behind the two slits, with a standard deviation either side. With the waves, there was a diffraction pattern of repeating peaks and troughs, culminating in a central point between both slits(sorry if this is hard to visualise without pictures). Now, the idea is to do it with electrons. This gives a pattern the same as a wave. This implies that it is impossible to conclude which of the two slits that the electrons travelled through. So, we slow the experiment down, and instead of fire a continual stream of electrons, we shoot them one at a time and watch where it goes. If we do it this way, then the dispersion pattern is the same as that for particles. Hence we come across Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle, which for our purposes here means says that by measuring the system we interfere with the outcome.

That being said, after typing all of this, I realise that you stated photons and not electrons. Perhaps thats different, I can't remember at the moment.

[SimeSublime]

That doesn't make much sense. If opening the box and seeing that the cat was dead closes off the possibility of its being alive in this universe, why would that entail another universe containing a live cat? In Schroedinger's Box the cat is always either live or dead; it cannot be both (or neither) regardless of observation or not.

When you look at it closely enough, the idea of observation collapsing quantum phenomena just points out the obvious: there are infinte possibilities, but only one true one (in this reality anyway). Why would a false (as in it didn't occur) possibility create a parallel universe?

The idea of the experiment is to point out the problems with current QM understanding. QM says that in a completely random situation, everything will happen. So, in the previous example of the light ray, it goes in every direction at once. This can be imagined as rather infinte universes branch off, in each the light ray traveling a slightly different direction. As there is only one light ray though, it can only travel in one direction, and hence when somebody/thing observes the situation, they then 'fix' which direction it is traveling in. So, the light ray is now travelling in the direction that its seen to be travelling, or, all the universes in which it is travelling in a seperate direction to that which it's seen to be travelling collapse into the one universe with the correct direction. That should(hopefully)explain why a false possiblity would create a parallel universe.

Back to the topic of S's cat. As I said, the idea was to point out the holes in QM. So, we have a completly random event, namely the radioactive decay of an isotope. If it decays, it will break open a vessel of poison gas. As there is a 50% chance that the isotope will decay, until it's observed, it has both decayed and not decayed. Hence, the gas vessel is both broken and not broken, and hence the cat, puppy or spider is both dead and not dead. Hence the problem. Death is a discreet quantaty. That is, by definition you are either alive or dead, you cannot be both. Hence, there is a problem with logic which implies that our current understanding of QM is lacking. There is the counter point of course that the cat itself could be an observer, hence observing its own death/survival. But thats pushing into semantics.