posted June 12, 2006 05:18 AM         

Sorry to hear about the anguish people have put you through. That sh*t is unbelievable.

I don't know what neighborhood Schrodingers cat is in, but I think I'll stay away from there!

Other than mean people it sounds like we have a lot in common. I'm glad your son is doing well.

posted June 12, 2006 09:23 AM         

Kim

Schrödinger's cat:
Schrödinger's cat is a seemingly paradoxical thought experiment devised by Erwin Schrödinger that attempts to illustrate the incompleteness of an early interpretation of quantum mechanics when going from subatomic to macroscopic systems. The experiment proposes:

A cat is placed in a sealed box. Attached to the box is an apparatus containing a radioactive nucleus and a canister of poison gas. This apparatus is separated from the cat in such a way that the cat can in no way interfere with it. The experiment is set up so that there is exactly a 50% chance of the nucleus decaying in one hour. If the nucleus decays, it will emit a particle that triggers the apparatus, which opens the canister and kills the cat. If the nucleus does not decay, then the cat remains alive. According to quantum mechanics, the unobserved nucleus is described as a superposition (meaning it exists partly as each simultaneously) of "decayed nucleus" and "undecayed nucleus". However, when the box is opened the experimenter sees only a "decayed nucleus/dead cat" or an "undecayed nucleus/living cat."
The question is: when does the system stop existing as a mixture of states and become one or the other? (See basis function.) The purpose of the experiment is to illustrate a paradox; as Schrödinger wrote, "The (wavefunction) for the entire system (has) the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts".[1] Because we cannot get along without making classical approximations, quantum mechanics is incomplete without some rules to relate the classical and quantum descriptions. One way of looking at this connection is to say that the wavefunction collapses and the cat becomes dead or remains alive instead of a mixture of both.

The point of view that this thought experiment most clearly refutes is that the laws of physics are different for experiments than for other interactions. In the case of the cat dying, a necropsy would show a time of death that would be before the opening of the box. The geiger counter, in moving to one outcome or the other, is, in effect, the "observer", the same as a human observing the outcome with senses.

The original article appeared in the German magazine Naturwissenschaften ("Natural Sciences") in 1935: E. Schrödinger: "Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik" ("The present situation in quantum mechanics"), Naturwissenschaften, 48, 807, 49, 823, 50, 844 (November 1935). It was intended as a discussion of the EPR article published by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in the same year. Apart from introducing the cat, Schrödinger also coined the term "entanglement" (German: Verschränkung) in his article.

Albert Einstein was impressed; in a letter to Schrödinger dated 1950 he wrote:

You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality - if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality - reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gun powder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits. Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation.
Nowadays, the mainstream interpretation is that the triggering of the device is the actual observation that collapses the wave function. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrodinger's_Cat

posted June 23, 2006 12:48 AM         

Lynx.. they could be all shapes/sizes etc. folks would think twice about exposing thier units in pubic.. i mean public, LOL

feeling corny,

posted June 23, 2006 06:02 PM         

That is what a couple of cops said.
Weird huh?
And several handicapped folks I know of were told to get off the sidewalk with their motorized chairs. So I am not sure about the exact law concerning motorized "wheelchairs". That I suspect is someone's stupid interpretation of foot traffic on sidewalks only.