Miniature Wizards - Chefelf.com Night Life

QUOTE

Who's Schrodinger, anyway?

Famous physist, mostly know for his work in quantum mechanics and the Schrodinger uncertainty principle. Please note that I cannot spell his name, nor put the little dots that are supposed to be above the "o" on. Anyway, in lay terms, the uncertainty principle states that you cannot know exactly the position and momentum of something. You can say its roughly in this area going at this speed, but you can't say exactly. Infact, the more you know about one property, the greater the uncertainty in the other. As such, if you ever get done by the police for speeding, ask the officer if they were absolutly sure how fast you were going. If they say they were, you can then say that it wasn't you're car in the photo, as you were infact somewhere else when they took that measurement(preferably in a zone which allows the speed that you were traveling at).

But Yahtzee was refering more to Schrodinger's cat. Various experiments show(for example, diffraciton patterns of shining light through two slits)that an outcome is undecided until it is observed. So, say in the above example, a single photon is shone at a wall with two holes, with equal probability of going through either. Experiments show that watching the photon, it will go through one or the other, but if we don't watch the photon, it will seem to go partially through both(remember, this is a simplified version). As such, until the photon is observed, it is belived to take part in both available options. Enter Schrodinger's cat. He(Schrodinger, not his cat)stated that you can put a cat in a steel box, so that you can't observe it. Also in the box is a vial of poison and a radioactive substance. As the substance decays, it will cause the vial to break and the poison to come out, but radioactive decay is an inherently random process. This will have two possible situations at any given time: The radioactive substance has decayed enough to break the phial and the cat is dead, or it hasn't yet decayed enough(or at all) and they cay yet lives. But as we can't observe it(It's in a steel box, remember)It is actually both dead and alive simultaneously. Well, at least untill we open the box to check. By the way, this wasn't designed as a method to create zombie cats, but rather to proove the problems with quantum theory.

This post has been edited by SimeSublime: 27 June 2004 - 01:30 AM