www.ditl.org

RK_Striker_JK_5 wrote:Mikey, try at least. Although... I chuckled, slightly.

Yeah, I guess I should stop... otherwise, as you know, everything comes back to you again.

Mikey wrote:

RK_Striker_JK_5 wrote:Mikey, try at least. Although... I chuckled, slightly.

Yeah, I guess I should stop... otherwise, as you know, everything comes back to you again.

Damn it!

Griffin, I'll hold him down. Get yer butchering tools!

Sneaks Mikey the car keys, go man go.......

Griffin wrote:

I still have no clue what the purpose that experiment is about. I guess I am the guy on the bottom.

McAvoy wrote:

Griffin wrote:

I still have no clue what the purpose that experiment is about. I guess I am the guy on the bottom.

It's not an actual experiment, it's a "thought experiment." Basically it just expresses how bizarre quantum rules are: there's a state in quantum mechanics which is a "superposition" of two discrete states (it's not A or B but has a certain chance of being either one). This can be applied to radioactive decay, so that if you had a radioactive element in a closed box you wouldn't know whether it decayed. The cat can't really be in a superposition of "dead" and "alive" since those aren't quantum states but logically if the radioactive element is in an uncertain state and the cat;s life depended on the state of the element, you don't know whether the cat is alive or dead until you open the box (and resolve the quantum state).

Captain Picard's Hair wrote:

McAvoy wrote:

Griffin wrote:

I still have no clue what the purpose that experiment is about. I guess I am the guy on the bottom.

It's not an actual experiment, it's a "thought experiment." Basically it just expresses how bizarre quantum rules are: there's a state in quantum mechanics which is a "superposition" of two discrete states (it's not A or B but has a certain chance of being either one). This can be applied to radioactive decay, so that if you had a radioactive element in a closed box you wouldn't know whether it decayed. The cat can't really be in a superposition of "dead" and "alive" since those aren't quantum states but logically if the radioactive element is in an uncertain state and the cat;s life depended on the state of the element, you don't know whether the cat is alive or dead until you open the box (and resolve the quantum state).

This was mentioned and explained by Sam Carter in a Season 1 episode of Stargate SG-1... I watched it the other day, I'm going through the entire collection again

You lost me at "It's a thought experiment"...

Also the first time i ever heard of this was from Sam Carter.

McAvoy wrote:You lost me at "It's a thought experiment"...

Also the first time i ever heard of this was from Sam Carter.

Thought experiment means essentially that you imagine a scenario, except it's not just a daydream since you follow logical rules. Obviously, the "Schrodinger's Cat" experiment (named after the physicist that proposed it) can't actually be performed.

The first I ever heard of it was in "The Big Bang Theory" TV show. I'm not much of a science guy, just a Sci Fi fan...

It's sort of a quantum extrapolation of the Heisenberg Principle, which is the scientific idea that you can't tell where anything is.^* The point is that you can't determine anything about the interior of the box without observing the interior of the box; since the quantum state of the decaying material is unknowable, and therefore in flux, it's state is at once decayed and undecayed until observed (and thus, the cat is both dead and not dead.)

^* - OK, it's a bit more complex than that... but not much. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is basically a codification of the fact that one can't accurately observe both position and velocity at the same time, being that the act of observing one affects the other.

So many things to say, but not one of them would end up being any more than obvious and extraneous.