Tuesday, February 17, 2015

What If Schrödinger's Cat Meows?

While playing with my cat last night it hit me this question: what would happen if the cat in Schrödinger's thought experiment was meowing? You would know if the cat is dead or alive because the meowing would stop. Or maybe you will be in the same superposition with the cat inside the box and you will both hear the meowing and not hear it. Well, technically hearing the meowing is observing that system, so the assumptions of the experiment are not met. But the real question is how well can you isolate such a complex system (you know that cats are complex animals, they can love and hate you :)) from the environment in order to do such an experiment like the one Schrödinger proposed? I googled this and I found a similar question on a physics forum here. It turns out that if a system interacts with its environment (and we are talking not only about meowing, think about gravity influences as the weight of a cat is significant by quantum mechanics standards) then the quantum superposition collapses to only one of the possible options (the term used in physics is quantum decoherence) and you don't have that limbo of a cat that is both dead and alive anymore.
This is the nice part of thought experiments: you don't need to hurt anybody, you just need to think really hard a and you will eventually find your answer :)

P.S. I have to remember to write on how I found out that communism is bullshit via a thought experiment years ago. Remember how many lives were destroyed for this idea, only to learn it the hard way that communism is crap. And some still believe in it...

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