APOD Firearms

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The #1 community for Gun Owners in Texas

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  • majormadmax

    Úlfhéðnar
    Aug 27, 2009
    15,966
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    Helotes!
    Why don'tcha just use the image tags?!?

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    Jan 5, 2012
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    HK
    • In the hypothetical experiment, which the physicist devised in 1935, a cat is placed in a sealed box along with a radioactive sample, a Geiger counter and a bottle of poison.
    • If the Geiger counter detects that the radioactive material has decayed, it will trigger the smashing of the bottle of poison and the cat will be killed.
    • The experiment was designed to illustrate the flaws of the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of quantum mechanics, which states that a particle exists in all states at once until observed.
    • If the Copenhagen interpretation suggests the radioactive material can have simultaneously decayed and not decayed in the sealed environment, then it follows the cat too is both alive and dead until the box is opened.
    • Common sense tells us this is not the case, and Schrödinger used this to highlight the limits of the Copenhagen interpretation when applied to practical situations. The cat is actually either dead or alive, whether or not it has been observed.
    • “[It] prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality,” Schrödinger wrote. “In itself, this would not embody anything unclear or contradictory.”
    • Schrödinger’s Cat has been used to illustrate the differences between emerging theories in quantum mechanics, by testing how they would approach the experiment.
    • For example, the ‘many worlds interpretation’, developed in the 1950s, would argue that when the box is opened, the observer and dead-and-alive cat split into two realities, in one of which the observer sees a dead cat and the other an alive one.
    • The experiment has also been widely influential in popular culture, having been referenced in TV shows such as Futurama, Doctor Who and The Big Bang Theory as well as appearing in the works of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett.
     
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