Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!mx02.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Mike Fontenot Newsgroups: sci.physics Subject: Improved Schrodinger's Cat Experiment Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2016 13:37:49 -0600 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 26 Message-ID: <571FC38D.2000701@comcast.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="fe036c19b28ae633e442322b6e298257"; logging-data="23362"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX19Dr60/wnBSCMUlQsNBuTzi" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.7.2 X-Mozilla-News-Host: news://news.eternal-september.org:119 Cancel-Lock: sha1:k1emlWkQ29waBzxdrZ0qmnoR1Lk= Xref: csiph.com sci.physics:573514 Schrodinger clearly believed that human consciousness was required to collapse the wave function into either the "live cat" state or "dead cat" state. Penrose doesn't (see "Shadows of the Mind"). He suspects that as the "measuring device" is made more complicated than a "quantum-sized" object, at some degree of complexity, it would cause an actual physical collapse of the wave function of the combined "radioactive atom plus measuring device system". I suspect Penrose, not Schrodinger, is correct. It seems to me that this issue COULD have been easily resolved by experiment in Schrodinger's time. First, allow for the radioactive atom to be removed from the box after the one-hour time interval that should produce a 50/50 chance of a decay. In addition, instead of putting a cat in the box (which might have sufficient consciousness to itself cause the collapse), just include a classical-sized "measurement device" that would, upon a decay, turn off refrigeration of a bottle of milk in the box. After the one-hour interval, the experimenter removes and discards the radioactive atom from the box (without examining it to determine if it has decayed), and the leaves the box undisturbed for a week or so (without determining in any way whether the refrigeration had been turned off or not). After a week or so, the experimenter opens the box. If the milk is observed to be spoiled, then clearly the collapse happened days ago, not just now by the conscious observation. -- Mike Fontenot