Deflating Hyperspace

[bekah]

At 4:52 AM -0700 4/1/07, Mark Kohut wrote:
>Yes!.......Pynchon is using that incredible aspect of consciousness 
>and the world, the "fact'
>that some" physical reality is created by our consciousness of 
>it".....as it says on the flap copy of a new book I have just 
>speed-read called Quantum Enigma from Oxford....
>


Pg 137?

"Not a wisp of smoke, not the last, wind-muted cry of a steam siren, 
only the good-by letter waiting this morning on her work-table, held 
now like a crushed handkerchief in her pocket, in which he had given 
her his heart - but which she  could not open again and read for fear 
that through some terrible magic she had never learned to undo, it 
might have become, after all, a blank sheet."

Schrödinger's Cat
<http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Harrison/SchrodCat/SchrodCat.html>
In the early 1930's Erwin Schrödinger published a way of thinking 
about the circumstance of radioactive decay that is still useful. We 
imagine an apparatus containing just one Nitrogen-13 atom and a 
detector that will respond when the atom decays. Connected to the 
detector is a relay connected to a hammer, and when the atom decays 
the relay releases the hammer which then falls on a glass vial 
containing poison gas. We take the entire apparatus and put it in a 
box. We also place a cat in the box, close the lid, and wait 10 
minutes.

We then ask: Is the cat alive or dead?

The answer according to quantum mechanics is that it is 50% dead and 50% alive.


Also:   <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat>

Bekah
whose hubby worked with this but who knows virtually nothing herself 
- can follow Hawking etc.



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