Deflating Hyperspace

[David Casseres]

On 4/1/07, bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
>
> Schrödinger's Cat
> <http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Harrison/SchrodCa
> t/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.
>

Or neither, until we open the box and the wave-function "collapses" to
reveal either a live cat or a dead one.  Note that Schrödinger saw the
absurdity of this result, and in fact he proposed his thought-experiment in
order to express his discomfort with the "Copenhagen Interpretation" of
quantum mechanics.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20070403/7835807a/attachment.html>