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: Re: Improved Schrodinger's Cat Experiment Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2016 08:18:49 -0600 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 27 Message-ID: <57236D49.40902@comcast.net> References: <571FC38D.2000701@comcast.net> <45079ff3-6166-4fd1-8976-27150b5a1030@googlegroups.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="62ee42a07f483fa216482a4ddac3de70"; logging-data="14183"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+A6UX95c3zcwkpljLLgkEb" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.7.2 In-Reply-To: <45079ff3-6166-4fd1-8976-27150b5a1030@googlegroups.com> Cancel-Lock: sha1:uoKxGyNJWFE38cy+C5dOGh06Oik= Xref: csiph.com sci.physics:574156 On 4/28/16 3:31 PM, Timo wrote: > On Wednesday, April 27, 2016 at 5:37:53 AM UTC+10, Mike Fontenot wrote: >> Schrodinger clearly believed that human consciousness was required >> to collapse the wave function into either the "live cat" state or "dead cat" >> state. > > Schroedinger didn't believe in collapse of the wavefunction, so why would he > have believed that human consciousness was required? > "The collapse of the wave function" simply refers to the fact that we humans never directly observe superpositions of different states of a single object ... we never observe a simultaneously live and dead cat, or a single photon that ends up simultaneously in two different spots on a photographic plate. Yet many experimental outcomes demand that a superposition of states has existed before the observation. The only "there IS no collapse" interpretation is the "many worlds" interpretation (which Schrodinger didn't endorse, at least at the time he wrote the "cat" paper), which says that we humans never observe a superposition because when we make an observation, we ourselves become part of the superposition (and each instance of ourselves sees only one state of the cat). -- Mike Fontenot