sci.physics.research

Hello Gerry:

I found your "Simplified Schrodinger's Cat Experiment" amusing to
think about :-) It opened up a question: why is the system not
really like quantum mechanics? My reply is that cats have all kinds
of unique identifiable parts. With a group of electrons or a vast
pool of photons, one cannot pick out one in particular, and say, the
electron left of Ginger is Gilligan. No amount of money can label two
electrons. We can tell if they happen to be in different states, but
the electrons could swap positions while we were not looking, and we
would not be able to tell.

In my SSCE, there would be 1000 boxes, each with 1000 Siamese cat
clones. In about 500 boxes, the cat has died, in the other 500, the
cat clone is alive. Take a picture of all cats in all boxes with your
mega pixel Nikon D300, import into the Gimp, overlay all the
images and average. One thing you notice immediately: the cat looks
like a gas! Superimposing this many images makes what was once so
solid look very flimsy indeed. I did this for animations of a simple
harmonic oscillator which was quite cool (URL at end). You could tell
from the ghostly image that many of the states of the cloned cat in a
box have a dead cat in it.

Now you do the experiment of picking one of these 1000 boxes, which is
an act of observation, not of action. You open a box - you cannot
number it and say it is box 27 because the boxes are all
indistinguishable - and see a dead cat. Repeat 50 times, and about
half the time the cat is dead, half the time alive. The observation
is NOT killing the cat. The superpositon does look half alive/half
dead because that is exactly what goes into the Gimp from the D300.

Doug

Simple Harmonic Oscillators: Visualizing Classic and Quantum
/watch?v=efYhDxm1m-g