On 11/7/2019 6:39 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:
On Thursday, November 7, 2019 at 6:25:37 PM UTC-7, Brent wrote:
On 11/7/2019 5:01 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:
There is no paradox. It's just some hang up you have that a
cat can't be dead and alive at the same time. It's as though
your physics was stuck in the time of Aristotle and words
were magic so that "Alive implies not-dead." was a law of
physics instead of an axiom of logic.
In fact a moments thought will tell you that quite aside from
quantum mechanics there would be no way to identify the
moment of death of the cat to less than a several seconds.
It would be simply meaningless to say the cat was alive at
0913:20 and dead at 0913:21.
Brent
You can imagine a different experiment, without cats, with the
same paradoxical result. The point of Schroedinger's thought
experiment was to demonstate tHE title of this thread; that
there's something wrong with the prevailing interpretation of
superposition. In your view I am hung up with Aristotle? In my
view, you're seduced by some quantum nonsense. AG
Prevailing when? 1927? There is no problem in the prevailing
2019 interpretation, except in your mind because you assume that a
cat cannot be in a superposition of alive/dead even for a fraction
of a nano-second...because...WHY? The radioactive atom can be in
a superposition of decayed and not-decayed for a nanosecond. Why
doesn't that violate your Aristotelean logic?
Brent
What's wrong with the interpretation that the radioactive atom is
either decayed OR undecayed with probabilities calculated by Born's
Rule? AG
Being in the quasi-classical state of either decayed or undecayed
assumes the superposition of decayed and undecayed has decohered by
interaction with the environment. The interactions that produce
decoherence all proceed at less than the speed of light, so it is not
instantaneous. So the atom and the cat are no different...except the
time for which one can keep them isolated from the environment.
Brent
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