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Have you ever heard of Schroedingers cat?
Put a cat, in a sealed box, with a poison set to kill it if a single atom decays. Because you cannot judge what that atom will do or when, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time, you can only find out by opening the box and invalidating the experiment. In the actual “thought experiment” the box is totally sealed, so that you cannot see inside it or otherwise sense what is going on with the cat. Also, the chance of the atom decaying within the first hour (and thus releasing the poison) is 50 per cent, and thus whether the cat is alive or dead after one hour is a 50-50 proposition. The application to quantum uncertainty (or indeterminacy) is then as follows: After one hour, and before opening the box, can we say that the cat is definitively alive or dead? In quantum mechanical terms the answer is no; rather the cat exists as a combination (or superposition, to use the technical term) of two quantum states, one in which it is dead and one in which it is alive. When we open the box to observe the cat we “cause” it to assume one of the two states; prior to our observation we cannot predict which state that will be. The conclusion usually drawn is that at the quantum level reality is indeterminate until we perform an experiment to observe it. (In this sense opening the box does not invalidate the experiment, opening the box is the experiment.) Since at the quantum level we have no way to observe reality except by performing experiments, in a fundamental sense “observers create reality”
Or, since we are all observers, “we create reality.” |
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