Only the best child groomers get into heaven:
trapped in the middle with u
Submitted 3 weeks ago by fossilesque@lemmy.dbzer0.com to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/ae98a1e9-b6a5-4b50-807a-cf1d7644fd94.webp
Comments
DarkCloud@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
HiddenLychee@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yiiiikes. That quote from him is an insane way to justify being only attracted to minors.
davidgro@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Best I can figure it translates to “They are naive”.
Gloomy@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
Thanks for sharing, I never heared about that.
ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
The point that the cat was to prove it was a stupid discussion but ended up being the perfect model with which to explain the concept of superposition to people who don’t understand it?
pcalau12i@lemmygrad.ml 2 weeks ago
The point wasn’t that the discussion is stupid, but that believing particles can be in two states at once is stupid. Schrodinger was doing a kind of argument known as a reduction to absurdity in his paper The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics. He was saying that if you believe a single particle can be in two states at once, it could trivially cause a chain reaction that would put a macroscopic object in two states at once, and that it’s absurd to think a cat can be in two states at once, ergo a particle cannot be in two states at once.
In his later work Science and Humanism, Schrodinger argues that all the confusion around quantum mechanics originates from assuming that if that particles are autonomous objects with their own individual existence. If this were to be the case, then the particle must have properties localizable to itself, such as its position. And if the particle’s position is localized to itself and merely a function of itself, then it would have a position at all times. That means if the particle is detected by a detector at t=0 and a detector at t=1 and no detection is made at t=0.5, the particle should have some position value at t=0.5.
If the particle has properties like position at all times, then the changes in its position must always be continuous as there would be no gaps between t=0 and t=1 where it lacks a position but would have a position at t=0.1, t=0.2, etc. Schrodinger referred to this as the “history” of the particle, saying that whenever a particle shows up on a detector, we always assume it must have come from somewhere, that it used to be somewhere else before arriving at the detector.
However, Schrodinger viewed this as mistake that isn’t actually backed by the empirical evidence. We can only make observations at discrete moments in time, and to assume the particle is doing something in between those observation is by definition to make assumptions about something we cannot, by definition, observe, and so it can never actually be empirically verified.
Indeed, Schrodinger’s concern was more that it could not be verified, but that all the confusion around quantum theory comes precisely from what he called trying to “fill in the gaps” of the particle’s history. When you do so, you run into logical contradictions without introducing absurdities, like nonlocal action, retrocausality, or these days it’s even popular to talk about multiverses. Schrodinger also pointed out how the measurement problem, too, directly stems from trying to fill in the gaps of the particle’s history.
Schrodinger thought it made more sense to just abandon the notion that particles are really autonomous objects with their own individual existence. They only exist at the moment they are interacting with something, and the physical world evolves through a sequence of discrete events and not through continuous transitions of autonomous entities.
He actually used to hate this idea and criticized Heisenberg for it as it was basically Heisenberg’s view as well, saying “I cannot believe that the electron hops about like a flea.” However, in the same book he mentions that he changed his mind precisely because of the measurement problem. He says that he introduced the Schrodinger equation as a way to “fill in the gaps” between these “hops,” but that it actually fails to achieve this because it just shifts the gap between from between “hops” to between measurements as the system would evolve continuously up until measurement then have a sudden transition to a discrete value.
Schrodinger didn’t think it made sense that measurement should be special or play any sort of role in the theory over any other kind of physical interaction. By not trying to fill in the gaps at all, then no physical interaction is treated as special and all are put on an equal playing field, and so you don’t have a problem of measurement.
TheThrillOfTime@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
What’s the correct interpretation and the common misunderstanding?
SchwertImStein@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
he said that the superposition is stupid as the cat cannot be both dead and alive.
the misunderstanding is that people think that he tried to explain superposition with the cat.
TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
but isn’t the quantum superposition still how we understand quantum mechanics to work? he may have coined the metaphor to criticize but if it ended up being an accurate representation of a useful concept then who cares if he intended it to be absurd?
JayDee@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
It’s how we understand it but it does show, or at least suggest, that we still don’t fully understand what’s going on at the quantum level.
Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Ha look at that, it’s the same way I’m looking at people dropping the “c” from a German “sch”
ThrowawayPermanente@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Because you can imagine him looking down on you from heaven it must exist in at least one possible universe, but you won’t know if you live in that universe until you die.
knightly@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
Heck, I love explaining quantum physics.
Ask me questions! I can dumb it down enough that even a child can understand!
Redfox8@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
Please explain entanglement and how two particles can be inexplicably connected despite being gajillions of light years apart! Bonus question, do you believe time exists?
knightly@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
Okay!
Entanglement is what we call any sort of quantum interaction that causes some property of two particles to become linked, like photon gun that always spits out two photons of the same polarization, or bouncing a couple of molecules together so that they spin in opposite directions. So long as nothing comes along to disrupt that state, we could measure one particle and we’d know the state of the other particle no matter where it is without having to measure it.
The “inexplicable connection” there is just information about a quantum pair, but it’s spooky because that information literally doesn’t exist until it is measured, at which point the connection is broken. A couple of intergalactic hydrogen atoms could exchange a photon across light years and become entangled for the rest of time, casually sharing some quantum secret as they coast to infinity.
Bonus answer, I think time is real but isn’t like what we imagine it to be.
Gloomy@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
Do time and space realy change places if you go past the event horizon of a black hole? How does that work?
Maybe not the right field of knowledge, but i heard this recently and haven’t come along anybody able to dumb it down enoth for me to understand. So I thought I might ask anyway :-)
knightly@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
As far as we can figure it, basically, yeah. Wrapping your brain around the concept
So gravity gets stronger the closer you are to a black hole, but at the event horizon things get weird. The extreme curvature of spacetime forces space itself to flow toward the singularity at its center faster than the speed of light, so on the inside there’s no “other” direction to point to, even photons emitted straight “out” can’t reach the event horizon and end up moving in the same direction as everything else. So space becomes timelike, proceeding inexorably from point A to B.
Time is more complicated, because it’s really hard to visualize. If you fall into a black hole, you’ll pass through all the outward-pointing light that’s been failing to escape since the event horizon formed, which puts all the past history of the black hole below you. Meanwhile, anything that falls into the black hole in the future can be seen above as its downward-pointing photons catch up. The entire timeline of the interior evolution of the black hole is laid out in the light coming toward you from either direction, making it spacelike.
MoonElf@hexbear.net 2 weeks ago
a tragic tale, he missed his dead cat and thought science would bring it back to life but all einstein could do was give him a zombie cat. let this be a warning to us all.
KingJalopy@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Is he looking down on us or waving to us?
slacks9579@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Also not looking down on Earth, as millions…
HappyFrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
The point is only misunderstood when someone hears it, before then the point is in a super position where it’s both understood and misunderstood at the same time.
DomeGuy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It says something about modern physics that possibly the two most famous bits of it were named by people trying to call bollocks.
What it says, though, is too many STEM folk skimp on humanities and are just really bad at naming things.
glimse@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Big Bang?
marius@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
If you make a point, but no one hears it, was the point ever made?
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I understood that by purposefully misunderstanding it … what are we talking about again?