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To: LibWhacker
These are only words - the math behind them must be awesome.

But if I can dig one implication out of them (highly debatable by itself) it concerns the cat that Shroedinger never really was entirely happy he used for an illustration, and it is this: the cat is perfectly aware whether it is dead or alive, hence has collapsed the wave function from its point of view. It is only uncertain from the point of view of the observer. So any mathematical representation of this that is intended to consider whether it is in some invariate state space must account for both points of view and two different levels of uncertainty.

Somebody who actually does know this stuff - and I know perfectly well you're on FR - just tell me "Bill, yer fulla crap" and I'll shut up... ;-)

32 posted on 08/18/2009 11:25:51 AM PDT by Billthedrill
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To: Billthedrill
See #30. What you say is correct. The Schrödinger's Cat Paradox has been given a lot of mileage by people who don't know what they're talking about, and encouraged by confused Buddhists, Taoists and New-Agers who want to read some kind of subjective reality metaphysics into QM. 99% of what has been written by lay people about Schrödinger's Cat is pure crap.

The experimental apparatus itself in the SCP is designed to collapse the cat into an eigenstate of the life operator. Once that measurement occurs, every observer -- including the first observer, the cat -- will agree that the cat is in the eigenstate. She is definitely alive, or definitely dead, and we all share that same reality.

This "new perspective" doesn't answer the basic question: sometimes the same experiment produces a live cat, and sometimes it produces a dead one. Substitute "Invariant Set" for "Because that's what happened," and you have all that I can see this theory provides (at least on the basis of what's written here.)

39 posted on 08/18/2009 11:43:38 AM PDT by FredZarguna (It looks just like a Telefunken U-47. In leather.)
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