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Everyone here is familiar with S’s box, where a cat, isolated from the world in a box with a maybe broken vial of poisonous gas, is neither dead nor alive.
Here, it works in reverse. A human climbs into an S box, totally isolating herself from the outside world. The outside world is then a quantum
wave of unrealized possibilities. While in the box, no one is murdered, no bills become due…no worries at all!
I know that this sounds an awful like hiding in the closet under the stairs. But it isn’t. Its science…
Schrodinger's box explained, sort of...
http://www.halfbake...27s_20Toilet_20Seat
Heavens! I didn't mean to be presumptuous. [pluterday, Oct 06 2004]
[link]
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Or is it that everyone is murdered, all bills are past due, and everyone is worrying? |
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However, if you come out of the box to find that something bad has happened, your observation of the probability function is what forced it into a defined state - in other words, it's all your fault. |
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But [notme], take a look around... |
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//Everyone here is familiar with S’s box// Not everyone. How presumptuous! |
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We beg to differ. A comprehensive knowledge of Physics and Quantum Mechanics is a prerequisite for participation in 1/2B debates, and one must be able to correctly quote and identify the work and equations of Heisenberg, Heaviside, Planck, Bohr, Maxwell and of course Erwin Schrodinger, including making very very sad physics puns at every available opprotunity. |
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There's even an old halfbakery proverb - "Can't gas a cat, shouldn't have joined. Or maybe you should". |
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Could there be a small hole in the side, so passers-by could use a stick to poke the occupant? |
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Ignorance is bliss. (no, not you, dearie). |
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I need Schrodinger's mailbox for my bills. |
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Or here's one: Schrodinger's weapons of mass destruction. Put Saddam, Bush, and Blair in a box with a possibly poison gas until the inspectors have done their job. Or just leave 'em there. |
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Now that’s how to think ‘outside of the box’. + |
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Excellent, [pluterday]! Well written, too. |
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Hm. You could always just get blinkers. If it's not in your field of vision, it probably doesn't exist. |
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Umm, is there food in the box? Or women? |
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8th: An A-Level Physics student as I am, I am familiar with [some of] the work of Planck and Bohr. Unfortunately, not all of us are as wise as thee (apparently). |
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So basicly it's a room with a free Internet connection in your parents basement. |
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I do like this idea but (a) isn't this just a box, and (b) it's Schrodinger's cat, so really, shouldn't you climb inside a cat? |
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// shouldn't you climb inside a cat // |
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That's one big cat you're contemplating, Mr Silly. |
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Maybe this is Saddam Hussein's Cunning Plan. Down in a Baghdad basement, there is a large, airtight box, next to which is a radioactive source and a huge tank of poison. President H. climbs in the box, slams the lid, and waits. At that point, the status of the rest of the universe (and life on Earth) becomes indeterminate until he opens the lid and collapses the wave function. |
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Scary thought: maybe he's already climbed in his box ..... |
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Hans Blix re-iterates that he sees no sign of a smoking cat... |
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8th, no. Saddam is definitely out of his box. |
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//That's one big cat you're contemplating, Mr Silly.// |
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Lion-tamers do this all the time. |
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Yes, but just the once. When you're inside the lion, an encore is difficult. That's my point. Your wave function would be pretty well collapsed, as would everything else. |
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Jonah did it (allegedly) with a whale and survived. Simple, reclassify whales as cats and Schrodinger's your uncle. |
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The Queen has set up something like this at the palace. |
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I have a sudden horrfying vision of a Sperm Whale wriggling its way into the house though the Whale Flap and dropping a half-chewed Architeuthis on the kitchen floor. And just how big is the litter box going to be ? |
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You'd have a major problem with choosing your box, methinks. After all, you wouldn't want to climb into a box only to find that you've chosen one in which the laws of quantum uncertainty don't apply. |
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// …only to find that you've chosen one in which the laws of quantum uncertainty don't apply.// |
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Zen master DrBob poses an interesting meta question, which boils down to this: can you be certain of uncertainty. I’ve been thinking about that all night. |
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To limber up, I cracked my mental knuckles on “the sound of one hand clapping”. Easy! Many other koans fell before me in the early hours. But this one, this one was a bear… |
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It was morning before I realized that this koan could be answered with a thoughtful reading of the Trafalgar Smith-Smith saga. As the answer to this question brings immediate enlightenment, I will leave it to the reader to find it for herself… |
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8th of 7's first anno. of Jan 13 last year is scarily prophetic. |
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The inside-out Schrodinger's box is all very well until someone finds it and thinks 'I wonder what's in here?' |
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I tried this once, but the constant meowing from the cat drove me nuts. (WTAGIPBAN) |
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the idea of course exactly depicts actual reality. We are all by definition in that state. |
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if you are in the box you are effectively dead as far as the rest of the world is concerned, mainly because it doesn't matter. |
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But more importantly the rest of the world is dead to you. For the same reason. Or at least half dead. |
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[krelnik]. You were doing the experiment wrong!
BTW Regarding last two posts - It DOES matter. That's the point innit! |
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As a last resort, I give you 'Wonko the Sane', from Douglas Adams' 'So long and thanks for all the Fish'. He decided that since he recognised that the rest of the universe is completely mad then he must be, by definition, sane. So he built an inside out house (with the walls on the inside and the furnishings on the outside) so that he could keep away from the insanity within.
Bit like this, really. |
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This also reminded me of Hitchhiker's - Zaphod, in this case. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, and cowardice was the better part of discretion, he valiantly hid himself in a closet. |
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The problem with the Cat is that the collapse of a wave
function (which happens when you look in the box) is not,
as is usually supposed, an absolute thing. |
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The wave function collapses immediately for the atom,
the detector, the poison vial, and the cat. When the
scientist opens the box, the wave function collapses for
him. If the scientist and the box are in a sealed
laboratory, then the wave function collapses for the
outside world only when the scientist open the door to
reveal the fate of the cat. |
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So, depending on perspective, the wave function has both
collapsed and not collapsed. Likewise, when you turn it
inside out, things collapse for everyone outside the box,
even though they haven't collapsed yet for the guy in the
box. |
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That's the point: the collapse of a wave function is
relativistic, not absolute. |
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I like to listen to the news bulletins on the radio - the best bit is the fraction of a second's pause at the beginning, right before the newsreader begins to talk. In that pause, all news is possible. As they begin to talk, the waveform of news gradually collapses. |
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Brilliant [hippo] - that could almost be the basis of some form of Adamsian Spacedrive (Improbability, Bistromatic, NewsPause Drive etc). |
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Could be - I think that's what the Radio 4/GMT pips are for - when the last pip sounds you know you've reached the point of maximum news potential. For a moment of time the news possibilities are infinite. |
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Well, not infinite. You at least know the radio
station still exists. |
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Not necessarily - the radio station could have been destroyed during that brief moment of silence. |
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...although I suppose you at least know that you and your radio exist, so the news possibilities are not quite infinite... |
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Apparently, one of the fail-safe procedures for nuclear submarines surfacing from months of silent running, in determining whether Britain is still on the map, is to tune in to the Today programme, and listen to see if it's still there. |
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Though it is lost in the [sea of randomness] known as the [Universe], information traveles constantly between media under most conditions. The [randomness] is real however, and it exists because of Quantum Decoherence. I'll comment on Wiki's definition of this concept with [uncertainty]. |
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Wiki: In quantum mechanics, quantum decoherence is the mechanism by which quantum systems interact with their environments to exhibit probabilistically additive behavior. |
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-- That's right when waves start colliding, the result is new waves, with different properties. The new wave finds exclusive interactions and their existance is dependent on past events, so the event is decided. << to really get weird about it, perhaps we are only decided as far back as we can see via Informational Decoherence. Maybe all states are in [superposition] with respect to the big bang. But you can only see as far as the astronomers, so the wave collapses.>> |
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Wiki: Quantum decoherence gives the appearance of [wavefunction collapse]. |
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-- Basically, the wave can only go one particular way after it interacts with the environment for a limited period of time. This one way only is the wave function collapse. |
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Wiki: Decoherence occurs when a system interacts with its environment in a thermodynamically [irreversible] way. |
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-- [Thermodyanmics] can be read as "flow of [information]. |
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It is when you have a truly isolated event, regarding the flow of information, that the cat is [both alive and dead]. Otherwise, decoherence rapidly induces wave function collapse. |
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My final guess is that [mind] is essentially the parts of the universe where quantum waves are collapsing under the incessant reordering principle that is [quantum decoherence]. |
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//is to tune in to the Today programme, and listen to see if it's still there.//
I hope they don't ever surface after 9 a.m.! |
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