Curiosity Killed Schrodinger's Cat

I'm not even clued up 5% on quantum physics, maybe this is a dumb question.

If so, please don't hesitate to say so, don't worry about sparing my feelings.

Has a blind man ever been used as 'the observer' when the double slit experiment has been performed and if so I presume the experiment went as one would expect?

Mods please move to general chitchat if needed thanks.

a reply to: 19Bones79

I am not buying the cat is alive and dead while in the box. I just see it as alive or dead, we don't know until we open it up. The longer it takes to open up the box, the greater the chance the cat is dead.

As for the double slit experiment, the interference pattern generated proves that light does travel as a wave.

Most modern breakthroughs in physics cannot be recorded or explained through math or script. You would be surprised what has been abandoned for lack of explanation thus never receiving any interests in funding.

a reply to: 19Bones79

I am not convinced of the double slit experiment. It might be quad knife edge propagation interference.

A wave passing a sharp edge bends slightly. The double slit is four sharp edges. The bending at these edges might be what makes the interference pattern. I haven't figured out a way to perform an experiment to determine this yet. You can use the knife edge trick to make microwaves bend around the corner of a building.

Years ago while watching Nova on PBS, I had such a laugh at several physics experiments. Especially the one where energy traveling through a solid mass is 1/3 faster than through air or vacuum. They had no explanation. That is simply valocity factor. A correction factor used in making antenna phasing harnesses. A wave travels 33% faster through a solid and the cable lengths need to be corrected for it. This is caused by the fact that the atoms in the wire make up 1/3 of the space, the rest of the wire is empty space. It takes no time for the wave to push an electron in one side of an atom and another electron to pop out the other side.

The problem is scientists are too well schooled in a small field of study and not very knowledgeable in other fields of possibilities.

Has NOTHING to do with a person seeing through the eyes that affects the experiment. It is the active measurement that affects the experiment..it is the interaction between the macroscopic apparatus and the microscopic quantum system.

I'm not new here...Just got back in after all the hacking. using a reply to: 19Bones79

a reply to: CataclysmicRockets

I'm very sure I would be surprised.

As it stands my knowledge is pop culture level at best.

a reply to: inflaymes69

It is the active measurement that affects the experiment..

Ok thanks. That does clear it up for me.

Next question I had was what the mathematical formula would look like especially wrt how a measuring instrument would be represented in said equation.

After watching a YouTube video on this I can confidently state that observing the mathematical formula explained does not in fact change the outcome of my understanding even on a quantum scale.

I'm gonna stop talking now.

look up "Delayed Choice Experiment".

There are videos about it,
and it was a much better, more comprehensive experiment.

a reply to: TheValeyard

God that's gonna break my brain isn't it?

Your devious plan is to kill me by overclocking my brain.

Well, the joke`s on you!

It won't get through my defenseless.

a reply to: 19Bones79

lol
one would say the 'observer' is a blind man

photographic plate, a scintillation screen, or a CCD camera*
the interaction has nothing to do with any observation but is merely a result of decoherence ie different material (atom fields) interacting with the incoming electron wave.


Schrödinger's Cat is a whole different kettle of fish though, as that is a thought experiment to get peeps used to superposition, when two different possibilitiies are equally likely

* before anyone says; but it is a camera; A charge-coupled device is an integrated circuit containing an array of linked, or coupled, capacitors. it is not a video camera just google it

a reply to: ButterfliesAndPonies

See?

This is what you get when you make science readily available for people like me.

Me people.

originally posted by: kwaka
a reply to: 19Bones79

I am not buying the cat is alive and dead while in the box. I just see it as alive or dead, we don't know until we open it up.

That, is exactly the point of the Scrodinger's cat experiment. It's supposed to be such a simple thought experiment that anybody can see the absurdity of the the quantum mechanics prediction of the cat being alive and dead at the same time! Any person should know the cat is not alive and dead at the same time, and any prediction of quantum mechanics that says it is demonstrates a problem with quantum mechanics.

originally posted by: ButterfliesAndPonies
Schrödinger's Cat is a whole different kettle of fish though, as that is a thought experiment to get peeps used to superposition, when two different possibilitiies are equally likely

Sorry but you missed the point of the thought experiment completely, it's sort of the opposite of that. The point is, the cat is NOT in a state of superposition!

So far, we have not been able to explain precisely how that is so, using the math and language of quantum mechanics, though we can say approximately the reason has something to do with decoherence. Our failure to describe the details of this situation is a famous problem called the measurement problem.

Regarding your chatGPT, and the OP question, there are multiple "observers" in various double slit experiments. That talks about the observer that detects the patterns for experiments using electrons, let's call the CCD detector the "screen" where the pattern appears. There is also another "observation" that can be done, to see which slit the particle goes though. This link talks about how that's done with photons using polarizing filters.

Single Photon Interference

The which-path marker consists of two, mutually perpendicular, polarizing filters. When either the vertical or the horizontal filter covers both slits, the double-slit interference pattern is preserved, albeit at a reduced intensity compared to no filter. However, when the vertical filter covers one slit and the horizontal filter covers the other, the double-slit pattern disappears completely. Two superimposed single-slit patterns are all that remain. This new arrangement changes the setup to a which-path experiment in the sense that it is now (in principle) possible to know which slit the photon passed through; this destroys the quantum interference. Introducing a third polarizing filter, the quantum eraser, between the marker and the detector thwarts the which path experiment if it is oriented 45 degrees with respect to the marker filters. Every photon reaching the detector is now polarized in the direction of the third polarizer, and it is no longer possible to know which slit each photon passes through.

Collapsing the wave front?

a reply to: Arbitrageur

lol you remind me so much of every physics teacher I ever had...

though we can say approximately the reason has something to do with decoherence

let's just give me a D on that, thematically fitting and I mean decoherence starts with a d so it just works...

look I've fairly recently encountered this argument that the observer is 'proof of God' as the ultimate observer.
Fact is the pattern collapses if and only if you build a detector in it.
So to me it can't be some weird magic happening because any type of consciousness 'observes' anything it has to be 'mechanical' or the wave would collapse at least occasionally when 'otherwise observed'

And the cat being in all possible states until measured is superposition

a reply to: ButterfliesAndPonies
You're right that the "observer" need not be conscious, nor is consciousness required for "observations" to occur in a quantum mechanical sense. The Earth is a big rock that has been "observing" photons for billions of years, and while there's some wacky Gaia theory that the Earth isn't a rock, ok it's a complicated rock but it's still mostly a big rock, that isn't conscious.

Bringing Schrödinger's Cat to Life

And the cat being in all possible states until measured is superposition

I'll take a crack at explaining why this is wrong, and if you don't get it from the following explanations, I'll probably give up and let you wallow in your ignorace which I'm trying to deny.

Decoherence means in layman's terms that the cat is NEVER, ever, not in a state of being "observed" though interaction with air molecules (it is always "observed" by air molecules bouncing into it). So saying "something something something until the cat is observed...." doesn't work for living cats.

You can isolate small particles, or even a quantum computer chip, in a vacuum and near absolute zero and then you can say "something something something until the particle is observed" and it's perfectly valid. But if you put the cat in a vacuum and near absolute zero, it's dead in what, 30 seconds? Not an experiment I want to do, but if you really tried to conduct the experiment that way to have an "unobserved" cat, it would be dead before the experiment started. Those are often the very cold conditions under which quantum mechanics tests and even quantum computers operate, in fact trying to maintain those conditions in quantum computing is one of the challenges of quantum computers and the super-cooling systems they require is why I'm not expecting to have a quantum computer at home.

Bringing Schrödinger's Cat to Life

what happens when quantum objects are coupled to a macroscopic one, like a cat? Extending quantum logic, the cat should also remain in a coherent superposition of states and be dead and alive simultaneously. Obviously, this is patently absurd: our senses tell us that cats are either dead or alive, not both or neither. In prosaic terms, the cat is really a measuring device, like a Geiger counter or a voltmeter. The question is, then, Shouldn’t measuring devices enter the same indefinite state that the quantum particles they are designed to detect do?...

Zurek is the leading advocate of a theory called decoherence, which is based on the idea that the environment destroys quantum coherence. He formulated it in the 1980s (although some of it harkens back to Bohr and other quantum founders) and with various collaborators has been investigating its consequences ever since.

The destabilizing environment essentially refers to anything that could be affected by—and hence inadvertently “measure”—the state of the quantum system: a single photon, a vibration of a molecule, particles of air. The environment is not simply “noise” in this theory; it acts as an apparatus that constantly monitors the system.

Having the environment define the quantum-classical boundary has the advantage of removing some of the mystical aspects of quantum theory that certain authors have promulgated. It does away with any special need for a consciousness or new physical forces to effect a classical outcome. It also explains why size per se is not the cause of decoherence: large systems, like real-life cats, would never enter a superposition, because all the particles that make up a feline influence a vast number of environmental parameters that make coherence impossible.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Since that is kind of exactly what my point was in the original post you disagreed with, I reluctantly accept your detour and grudgingly nod.