On 11/7/2019 8:06 PM, Alan Grayson wrote:
On Thursday, November 7, 2019 at 8:47:15 PM UTC-7, Brent wrote:
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
Maybe isolation is an idealization which never exists in nature. That
would put this issue to bed. AG
Except that isolation admits of degrees, and interactions, even at the
speed of light, are not instantaneous. The atomic nucleus is relatively
isolated. That's why the environment has no measurable effect on its
half-life.
Brent
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