Election 2012: tonight we finally open the box…
…and find out whether Schré¶dinger’s cat is alive or dead.
I know, I know; it’s not really a great analogy. Nor do I actually understand the physics. So, chalk it up to poetic license.
But right now the cat is both dead and alive, and late tonight (unless we have some sort of repeat of Florida 2000) we will know which of the two it is:
Unfortunately Schré¶dinger’s cat, in this case, ought to be quite dead. The stench has been overpowering for years! But Progressives seem to love the stench, don’t they? I hear the NBBP thugs are back, in Philly. Only a Holder-less DOJ can lock the thugs up, huh?
Kill that cat, people! 😉
Since the outcome of this election is going to stink regardless of who wins, I see no reason to stay up late or spend all evening watching election coverage. After I vote for the dingbat Romney, I’ll probably go out for a nice dinner, come home, watch a movie, have a nice glass of port and go to bed.
I go to work at 4 this afternoon, so I won’t be watching the tube until I get home. I wonder if I should buy some vodka. To drown my disaapointment, or to celebrate a victory. Hmmmm …
If Obama loses–as we all hope–and thugs riot–as we all fear–then the aftermath could resemble the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. So in case you didn’t know where this was going…the cat–named “church?”–is both dead, yet horribly alive! at the same time. When the forces of the undead go head-to-head with the forces of quantum physics, you get weird graveyards and weirder old men who will tell you: “sometimes dead is better.”
Schré¶dinger’s cat – made more alive than dead thanks to “The Big bang Theory”!
Neoneocon readers- get out there and take a friend with you!
Nor do I actually understand the physics
First, one must understand that our brains are quite interesting. that people who spend a lot of time putting really good information into it, get really good inferences and information out of it.
however, the beauty of the brain is in abstraction. that one need not necessarily know what the “explorer” of reality has to know to find things, or establish some underlying principal, they need only get the idea in abstraction. if their fundamental knowledge is good, the abstractions ability to transfer the concepts and induce the rest of the information in the others model, is better. if not, then it suffices that it shows less, but in many ways, people can still intuit the ideas and even apply conceptual rules of logic using them.
in the 30s, physics in terms of conversation was all about gedankens. thought models that when engaged, illustrate and transfer a concept to anothers mind model.
there are a few fundamental abstractions to be understood to help ‘get’ this abstraction.
one is that some of these abstractions depend on which model of the universe your considering. sometimes the problems of one model, end up being overcome in another model. which tends to imply that your models good, but not that good. like newtons model is good but not that good. without relativity its predictions deviate in special cases.
So the cat problem is generally within what is called the Copenhagen interpretation.
now this is where it will get real interesting for you neo if you can connect this to what i said in another thread as to certainty and “counting on”something.
now. the big question would tend to be whether the concept here being discussed is real, or a mathematical artifact of the model that the real universe does not necessarily suffer. (the reason i said this is that recent work has claimed to split the hair of Schrodinger cat in an attempt to shatter Heisenberg uncertainty principal which this is all about as well).
the concepts are not hard to understand in the abstract, whats hard is BELIEVING THEM and ACCEPTING THEM.
to use a distant example, the young kennedy died because he believed his senses more than he believed what his instruments told him. he had not yet learned to jettison his senses in favor of better senses. (or rather, he refused to accept that the interfaces sensors giving him in formation on a dial, was a much better source for his information than directly attempting to pick that up without the sensors being in between the two)
the reason i said it has to do with establishing belief is that each time this will be discussed among people who do not have the background to manipulate the quotients but enough to conceptualize, will attempt to refute with gedanken stories too. except that the gedankens of the classical physicists had math behind them that made the gedanken just an easier way to communicate accurately.
this all has to do with the realm of quantum mechanics, and so, the realm of the tiny, where reality often meets the philosophical and even religious concepts.
now, even today, so many years on, there is no real good explanation behind what your about to be told. there are lots of theories, and even i have my own theory (That so far has predicted a few things and they have been discovered. one thing was corkscrew polarized light, as the existence of that was a make or break moment for the concept. it sought to explain the duality your about to hear in terms of space time. the math is nice. it explains why and how the effect can exist and in simple terms, and made a series of predictions. anyway, that’s a digression).
the big point here is that this work shows that underlying the nice newtonian world that seems to tick tock like a clock, is a big complicated mess of actions and reactions that actually are not tick tock at all.
in fact… everything is real and unreal…
the point is that the facts are right, but we are not sure what they mean, so there are different interpretations and as yet, no way to actually test some feature to tell if they are right, wrong, not even wrong, or right and wrong at the same time, etc (though professors will assert to pick one. i see no reason to till, like the cat, some information tells me to)
now… to those physicists out there who will slam me, do note that i am not talking to you, i am trying to convey concepts to someone that does not have the background at all. and at all means at all.
things around you are not as they seem.
and things change as scale changes. the whole of it obviously is connected. the atomic stretches past to the galactic (And larger. much larger).
its easy for us being so small to look up and see the things so large so far away they are small. most of the ‘stars’ you see in the sky are not stars. they are whole galaxies. only the closest are stars, the rest are so far away that their view is a tiny dot.
well, turn around and if you could look down in scale (ie, the view of scale is only one way because of the quantity of information differs depending on which way you look on the ruler. you can see up in scale, because the information is larger and so, you can see a huge galaxy as a sampling of that larger information. but you cant see an electron as the amount of information it showers you with is nothing unless it emits a photon or two. and then its just that tiny thing in a sea of stuff like that).
at our scale, things are solid. but that is an illusion. the idea of surface breaks down if you get small enough. and there is a hell of a lot of space below our scale.
so like looking up, we try to look down, to see the bricks and mortar of reality. (and its funny, but the more we drill down and the more complicated and amazing it is, the less reverent the people who cant see it get – while the honest physicists aren’t so sure (and unlike others would be loath to make a claim that they could not back up)).
well, we look down and look down till we get to look at single atomic particles. we cant look at subatomic particles unless we add enough energy that the cohesiveness of the larger objects breaks down. which is what they are doing in a collider, and they are so big because they move matter so fast that the curve of the accelerator bleeds off energy as if the whole thing was a big atom.
sorry this is so long, but the play has to have the first few acts to set up the story.
now, since we cant look at things directly, unless they are transmitting energy on their own we capture, we cant look at an atom as it does not show its existence like a tiny sun.
so we have to examine things indirectly as we cant look at them directly, and its in this that Schrodinger cat and Heisenberg uncertainty come in. (and a hell of a lot of implications for other areas that are often ignored)
so, one of these tests is to try to determine if light is a wave in space time (a kind of soliton), or is it a particle. is it a desert topping or is it a floor wax? (shows that SNL and even Monty Python put in secret messages that only the edumacated would pick up on)
so the apparatus of the famous slit experiment was then arranged. funny, but todays laser pointers for a buck would make the this test so much cheaper than it was the first time they set it up.
basically they shine light at two slits.
one can illustrate this by using a pan of water with a glass bottom. a wave tank. you can put a wave source on one part, and you can put obsticals in its way and you can explore the waves.
a light wave, a sound wave, and a water wave, all follow the same basic math. a wave is a wave is a wave.
put a wall dividing the tank, and you can put openings in the wall to see what happens. put a slit in the wall, the slice of the wave becomes a fractal source of new waves (with relationships to the width of the slit).
put two slits and they act as emitters and the waves spread out from each, and they interfere with each other. creating a interference pattern.
so, they sought to do this same experiment with light.
and that and playing with the parameters and then expanding that play based on results. led them down some really freaky paths.
they set up the experiment.
and the results? light is a wave. hazzah!
but then they decided to see if the light that is a wave can be detected as a particle.
then a curious thing happened.
what einstein said was “spooky action at a distance” (and today has to do with all kinds of things like entanglement and tons of stuff that would take a book to get into).
spooky action at a distance was that the photons being examined were also connected to each other. and that they seem to talk across huge distances, instantly. ie. outside of time. (though we do not know, our senses dont go down that far to measure).
when they checked to count a photon, the wave pattern dissapeared… ie. all the photons in the grouping basically stopped being waves and instead became particles.
when they stopped counting photons, the light stopped being a particle, and the wave interference pattern returned. [the pattern itself is made by particles that hit the surface. remember this]
the more they probed this, the more freaky it got. (and my theory explains how, but hey, i am a never been)…
since they saw this effect happen, they decided, lets try to measure the speed at which it happens. well, then it got real freaky. some experiments eventually went so far as to filter light from a star and do the test.
with time and space to traverse, the particles would have to know whether they were to be a particle or a wave a million years ahead in time. ie. the effect was instantaneous as far as we could tell, even over galactic distances.
now, this is where schrodinger comes in as heisenberg and his gedanken try to INTERPRET These findings within the framework of Copenhagen definitions
they puzzles and puzzled over the implications and the rules bheind this behavior, and of course other experiments and math.
what they discovered or interpreted is that the observer was part of the experiment and that the observer could not remove themselves from such.
so Schrodinger came up with a gedanken to try to explain this without having to get into a lot of what i got into and more.
his abstraction was also to imply and play games with scale. ie. to what limit does this spooky thing work?
going back to the photon slit experiment…
if you detect a particle, the interference beam disappears. there is an in between state as well, because your eyes detect particles, not waves… so the wave pattern is really a particle pattern coming off the wall as defined by the wave pattern striking it.
so to ‘see’ the wave pattern, you have to convert it. so when they try to detect a particle, they are doing it in between the wall and your eyes as detector, and the rest of the system. and so, if they detect a particle prior to your seeing a particle, the wave pattern disappears. remove the detector and the detector of your eyes see the artifact of wave behavior.
now. what if there is no wall, or there is no detector? they realized that this wave pattern would continue… there would be no reason to stop it. what if somewhere along the line some detector detected a particle? then this wave construct would instantly collapse (outside of time) and all the points of the thing would resolve to particles instantly
trying to scale this up to a world in which people dont disappear and spontaneously appear… Schrodinger posits a cat in a box where the information cant get out to the detector which is a person (a thinking being).
the point is that what is inside the box is indeterminate. what our intuition says is that reality exists even when we turn away. this was established back during our time playing peek a boo, and our separation anxiety, and when we were able to abstract a map as a model of another thing (a la Piaget)
but the facts of these experiments were telling them that reality was NOT that way. ie. the facts at the quantum level described a world that was not what we intuited about the universe around us.
that outside the view of an observer, reality doestn exist in any substantial form. (remember this is an interpretation, and there is always going to be someone that will say that this is not acceptable then pull out another interpretation. we as yet have not found a way to resolve this, and we are still stuck with the mechanics of it, and they have held up)
the cat in the box being alive or dead is representative of a very long chain of quantum states, and that until some observer opens the box and looks, the state will not resolve itself. the cat will be both alive and dead.
so why all that crap about the slit experiment?
well, the experiment is key as the detector is tied to that experiment. not to the opening of the box itself. that is, to open the box is to look at the detector which is to then examine a photon as a particle, not a wave, and so the choice made will collapse the wave and resolve reality. but not until then.
they also tried this experiment on larger things like electrons, as photons are energy carriers and have no mass and so can pass through each other as waves, yet hit things with mass which are particles.
turns out that its not so simple… the particles are also waves… and thats been confirmed.
so this is what this abstraction is illustrating. that reality does not exist without the observer observing, and so causing the wave functions to collapse across time and resolve to that observation.
so Schrodinger cat is about the implications of this scaled up. just as the atomic behavior of atoms in chemistry scales up to galaxies… (now you now why i brought that up)
Heisenberg uncertainty principal was more about the mechanics and what you can know or not know as an implication of this kind of thing.
you see… if the observer is part of this and causes the collapse. then what can you know about a particles defining properties? its position in three directions of space, and one direction of time…
the implication going the other way is that the viewer by viewing influences all events they watch. they always participate.
to find out where an atom is in space time, you have to affect it, or it emits and you capture that.
so you can put a wall up, or your eye, or some detector… when the atom slams into it you know exactly where it is. but you cant know where it bounced off to!
if you want to measure the momentum to know where its going in vector space, you have to affect it, and so it will change its direction after said measurement.
these qualities slide back and forth.
to know one with certainty is to not know the other…
the observer cant get information (energy transfer of some sort) without changing the reality.
there is no such thing as a neutral observer in this universe
now, the LAST part which is salient to the prior conversation and so on. what does this mean to people who want to measure, predict, and work with reality?
well, it means that there is no such thing as a billiard ball universe. god does play dice, as the collapse of the wave is not the same every time. any little tiny thing can change it, and so its outcomes are random.
ie. the one thing that is not random is randomness itself. everything else is affected by it… (the one thing that cant change is change)
God does play dice
so everything in the universe is causational AND random… and the observer is not neutral and we are all connected at all scales.
the photon that leaves our sun has a measurable effect on an atom that it strikes a billion light years from its emission. in fact, a photon that leaves your candle, and makes its way to space, has the same effect on a distant galaxy if it does not strike something. (but note, it never strikes someting till someone looks at something connected to it, then it all collapses across time and billion trillions of wave forms)
so what this means ultimately is that when you look at reality, your really looking at a system that only exists statistically.
you cant tell where an atom will be, because if you measure it, it wont go where it was going!!!!!!!!!!!
so you can only look or predict this stuff statistically… however, added up to the size of a cat or person, the randomness is added up and you exist in certainty, and don’t wink out as the statistical chance that can happen is soooooo small.
but if you were smaller… you may sit and see particles just appearing and disappearing from the quantum soup.
a particle and anti particle just appear…
and then usually annihilate each other and disappear.
that alone given the abstractions above is enough to make only the largest scaled things completely 100% reproducible.
this has bearing in our modern world in things like chips. you cant place an atom where you want. but you can release them and use these odds and conditions to mostly put them where you want (and the ones that don’t are failed chips that are dropped)
this is where our most rigorous and abstract statistics come from… because you cant work with it directly, there is no F=MA type tick tock, its all odds making. and changing the odds by changing the conditions. [this also sets up the energy laws, in that the more control you want to have over more individual matter the more energy you have to expend. so to place atoms one at a time at IBM Center using an atomic force microscope, is a whole lot of energy compared to picking up a board in your yard… a very unspecific act]
this cant help but change your world view.
if you apply this to people, and treat people like particles, then guess what? you dont have to predict what each person does, any more than you have to predict and place each atom.
what seems impossible because of a lack of tick tock control, is possible using a whole other class of methods and understanding.
schrodingers cat ALSO implies that the same methods that allow us to work with the quantum world, also fractally allow us to work with things in the real world that are similar.
the crisis of god playing dice actually opened up and into the reality and super benefit of such…
we don’t strive to make perfect chips. we strive to make chips that have low statistical odds of failing because each step along the way has lowered the odds.
only recently have we started to move matter in tiny amounts with direction. but note, like the board, all that takes a lot more energy.
how much goes into making tiny chips? billion dollar fabs… but its easy to see why once you get this uncertainty.
so while people live in a world they think is certain. at all levels its not.
and in fact, all this causes a churning… that is, no matter can exist in a stable state. ever.
that is an illusion. when you walk out of the room, the chair becomes a wave of probability… when you walk in, it exists…
pyramids erode… the most enduring things are crystals… but even they are not forever.
the reality is constantly churning and shifting and mixing and sorting. it never stops, and that suffuses through all levels of it. from the unsubstantial quantum free lunch, to the great wall billions of light years wide…
well, thats my best stab at it today… 🙂
Very disappointed to see that FNC has non-stop campaign blathering from both sides this morning. I really hoped when I went to bed last night that that part of the election was over. Rhetorical question. Does anyone believe that a vote will be swayed at this point?
Nice of Rob to weigh in with his classy comment. I have concluded that those who continue to trash Mitt Romney, now that we really know him, tell us more about themselves than they do about Mitt.
I wish I still lived in Virginia for two reasons. 1. My Presidential vote might mean something. 2. I could escape to a mountain trout stream and miss all of the yapping today. (My wife will not turn the TV off for a minute, as though she might miss something that has relevance.)
The analogy notwithstanding, I prefer to think that The Man in the Yellow Hat (Axlerod) will put Curious George back in the box, and take him back to his house on Chicago.
3 airings of that ridiculous Colin Powell ad, this morning, Oldflyer. Somebody must think voters are still swayable.
And that was on the local FOX affiliate. Yeesh! 😛
I wish I could vote but as a legal resident alien I don’t get that privilege – I just have to suffer the results.
As I’ve said before here, I’m extremely nervous and, despite all the positive predictions on PJ etc., I suspect that Obama will win. Unfortunately I also believe that the Republican party will tear itself apart if he does resulting in 12 years of Dem presidents. This is what happened to the Conservative party in the UK over the issue of Europe after John Major lost.
The danger is that the Democrats tilt the playing field so far to the left over those 12 years that the Republicans end up to the left of where they are now in order to compete. Again this is what happened in the UK. My experience is that those on the right of the Republican party who say that an Obama victory will lead to a more conservative party are only correct in the short term. The long term result will be a shift in the party to the left.
I hope and pray that I am wrong.
Court-appointed Republican poll inspectors are being forcibly removed from voting stations in some Philadelphia wards and replaced in some cases by Democratic inspectors and even members of the Black Panthers, according to GOP officials.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/philly-gop-poll-inspectors-being-ousted-for-dems/article/2512714
Judge issuing order to reinstate booted
Philadelphia election officials, Republicans say
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/11/06/judge-issuing-order-to-reinstate-booted-philadelphia-election-officials/
“just under 70” Republican election officials were blocked from Philadelphia polling sites Tuesday morning by Democrats on site. One of them, the official claimed, “was shoved out of the polling place.”
New Black Panthers returning to the same Philadelphia polling place they were at in 2008
http://landing.newsinc.com/shared/video.html?freewheel=91074&sitesection=breitbartprivate&VID=23872144
Thousands of ballots unlikely to reach military voters in time
http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/265925-gop-senators-thousands-of-ballots-unlikely-to-reach-military-voters
MICHELLE: ‘Don’t let anybody push you out of line’… (is she talking to the representatives the dems pushed out?)
Russian attack sub detected near East Coast
http://freebeacon.com/russian-subs-skirt-coast/
A Russian nuclear-powered attack submarine cruised within 200 miles of the East Coast recently in the latest sign Russia is continuing to flex its naval and aerial power against the United States
The submarine was identified by its NATO designation as a Russian Seirra-2
officials also said that a Russian electronic intelligence-gathering vessel was granted safe harbor in the commercial port of Jacksonville, Fla., within listening range of Kings Bay.
(to avoid the “superstorm”. a Category 1 superstorm!!)
U.S. military spokesmen sought to downplay the threat posed by the air incursions, apparently in response to the Obama administration’s conciliatory “reset” policy of seeking closer ties with Moscow.
The U.S. is not the only country responding to increased Russian strategic bomber activity.
Just went over to salon.com for a morbidly curious peek. The first in maybe 9-months. Well, right there on Mars the election’s over and the celebrating has begun, dont’cha know!
Parallel FREAKAZOID Universe. In the 60s or early 70s I would ask’um for some of the s*** they’re snortinin’, smokin’ or swallowing. Gawd, there are going to be a few million Baaatshit Crazy Raging Lefties Wednesday. Wear Kevlar, Righties.
Art,
Masterful presentation of the Copenhagen Interpretation, but may be a bit irrelevant for the thread today. BTW, have you read about EPR experiments that basically confirm Bell’s inequality which supports the C.I.?
On a more practical note: LondonTrader, I hope that the US is sufficiently different from the UK that that won’t happen. I would tend to agree with you from living here in the Northeast, but I am heartened by the large number of people in”flyover” country whose view of the country is 180 degrees from the upper east side.
and peggy noonan is slamming in insinuations or comment… that if you didnt know the fact, you wouldnt ‘get’ it. i guess its her way of splitting hairs between two ‘classes’.
http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2012/11/05/monday-morning/
Artfldgr: I knew you’d come through.
Artfldgr: yeah, that’s what I was going to say about the cat. : ) Meow.
NeoConScum: just curious—are they celebrating based on some news they’ve gotten, or are they celebrating based on their previous certainty (from polls or pundits) that of course Obama will win?
NeoConScum – probably the CNN, CBS, and a few other MSM media polls showing BO with a 5 pt lead. If that’s all you watch, you’d still think this election was in the bag for Obama.
“Artfldgr: yeah, that’s what I was going to say about the cat. : ) Meow.”
LOLOLOL! Good one, M of Hollywood!
….now starting my Google of “Schré¶dinger’s cat”…
@Artfldgr November 6th, 2012 at 10:27 am
Daayyum, artfl. That was one for the books.
…read the whole thing, actually.
Agreed.
So. It seems like in the scope of things, the most important “physics” book of the 20th century may turn out to have been CS Lewis’ Miracles after all.
…I’ve never been the same since I read that tome years ago.
Hell, I thought it better than Korzybski’s General Semantics (which I stumbled across as a freshman in college – due to an old sci-fi and an extremely idle rainy day in the library – I’d read by AE Van Vogt: The World of Null-A …which was waay more accessible than General Semantics was lol).
Bravo Artfl. Bravo.
And on election day. In an election thread.
I salute you.
/tips hat
Well…I found a web page entitled “Schré¶dinger’s cat for a 6th grader”. Thought that might help me understand what it’s all about. It didn’t.
Guess I’ll just go back to biting my nails about today’s election.
Neo,
May I offer that your Schrodinger’s cat reference actually offers a rejoinder and a finality to your previous Cloward-Piven post. In the Wiki entry, it references a letter that Einstein sent to Schrodinger in 1950):
This “assumption of reality” takes us back to the Bill Whittle obervation that either Obama or Romney will win. Period. That is our choice. Period. In this matter, we can not get around the assumption of the reality that either Romney or Obama will serve as president for the next four years. Period. All the rest, the agonizing, the moralizing, the standing on principle is bupkes. Period.
Neo,
On NeoConScum’s advice I also went over to the “dark side” of salon.com for a few minutes. I had to laugh as there were several articles that would have fit in rright here with titles along the lines of: “How can it be this close?” and “Why would anyone ever vote for that liar?”
I don’t think they were talking about the same person we were 🙂
Somebody will lose but nobody will win.
The country is too divided. In fact, the battle lines may not shift much at all, just get more entrenched.
Neo, did you once say you were a marriage counselor? We’re at the point of irreconcilable differences.
Armchair pessimist notes that:
Perhaps our political “marriage” in this country has simply changed. Perhaps it’s no longer June and Ward Cleaver, but Mary Matalin and James Carville. Somehow they seem to make it work, why can’t we?
“Somehow they seem to make it work, why can’t we?”
Because the left and the right have two mutually exclusive beliefs in the role of government.
The right believes that the purpose of government is to secure the rights of the people, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”
The left believes that the purpose of government is to provide for its subjects — to provide them with food and clothing, shelter and utilities, education and transportation, health care and retirement.
But the government cannot provide these things unless it takes them away from someone else, violating their rights.
The current welfare state is unstable. One of the sides is going to win. Whether that results in an amicable split or subjugation of the loser remains to be seen.
If we’re on the subject of science and scientists, I’d say this election is a test case for Einstein’s observation regarding the other infinity, the one he had no doubt of.
Here is a great YOUTUBE video that I received via email. It makes some fundamental points and is entertaining besides.
Dines d’Souza is a treasure.
Can’t link. Guess you need to cut and paste.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/rEM4NKXK-iA?feature=player_detailpage
Michael,
Give me a break. It was meant to be lighthearted.
While you may be, on the whole, correct about the current state of Dem politics, it is only because that party has been taken over by an Alinskyite extreme left-wing faction. Remember the current Dem party is most assuredly not the party of JFK and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and I suggest that a stronger and more small-govt oriented Republican party will eventually draw Dems back toward the center.
I have concluded that Peggy N has not recovered from her Obama-love, and so is not enough better than MoDo or Paullie “The Beard” Krugman or Tom “Mr. China” Friedman to make her worth the time it takes to even question the thought of reading her.
I have a meeting tonight which gets out after the polls close in the east.
I heard Clinton asking why anyone would vote for a president who lied to us. To him, to you, I say that lets Clinton and Obama out
To progressives the cat, the box, alive, dead, and reality are relative; there are no hard and fast principals. IMO the cat is alive in a box that does not exist except when its dead in a box locked inside Fort Knox.