this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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Okay, so, like, that's punchier writing than the actual truth, but how am I supposed to buy anything else about physics in the article after that? The level of oversimplification of relatively commonly known concepts does not give me confidence that the rest won't be pop sci drivel.
The concepts are basically right arent they?
I mean, they're both at least illustrative I guess. In the case of particles and waves I may be quibbling a bit over the distinction that something is a particle or a wave versus exhibiting the properties of one or the other.
In the case of Schrodinger's cat, the thought experiment suggests that if the life or death of the cat is tied to the collapse of the state vector, an eigenstate of the two implies simultaneous life and death. But the varying interpretations of this problem aren't so straightforward as 'both dead and alive', and it's kind of misleading to just leave it at that.
Personally, I find it odd that they'd discount the cat's own awareness of the state vector's collapse. Obviously when the atom decays and kills it, it's going to know before you are regardless of the presence of cardboard.
It just seems like a lot of kind of imprecise throw-away mentions of more complex ideas for one sentence. But again, maybe I'm being cynical.
Shrodinger’s cat wasn’t some simplified lesson for the layman. It wasn’t even an explanation. It was a commentary about the quantum model itself and how the current state of the model is laughably incomplete and unable to adequately answer or predict anything of value (yet). It wasn’t until more recently that some Newtonian physics might be explainable as emergent properties of quantum mechanics, but we are still a long ways away from a unified or blurred model.
https://betterexplained.com/articles/gotcha-shrodingers-cat/