Today, August 12, marks the anniversary of the birth of Erwin
Schrödinger, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from Vienna, Austria, whose
work revolutionized the understanding of quantum mechanics. Google
honored the Nobel laureate today with a Google Doodle, in recognition of his birth 126 years ago.
Schrödinger is perhaps best known for his “cat,” which represented what he referred to as the absurdity of Niels Bohr’s and others’ interpretation of quantum mechanics. This collection of these ideas, called the Copenhagen Interpretation, hypothesizes that matter exists with both wave-like and particle-like properties, and that subatomic particles can simultaneously occupy multiple places, until an observation is made and the object accepts just one value. The atom is represented by a wave function until that occurrence, which is a mathematical formula that describes all the possibilities of what the object could be.
According to Schrödinger’s explanation of the experiment, “A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.”
In either event, the cat would be killed by suffocation after only a few minutes of being inside of the steel box, and it does not matter whether an atom from the radioactive material decays or not, to shatter the container full of lethal acid. The cat cannot exist anywhere else, so you cannot have both an alive and dead cat, regardless of the impossibility of observing the phenomena, which would occur if the Copenhagen Interpretation held true.
Schrödinger received the Nobel Prize in 1933 for his work in quantum mechanics, and while his application of the Copenhagen Interpretation to the cat in a steel box established the absurdity of the idea, his work was lauded by perhaps the finest mind in history: Albert Einstein. His work underscored the contradictions present at the time in the understanding of quantum mechanics.
Schrödinger is perhaps best known for his “cat,” which represented what he referred to as the absurdity of Niels Bohr’s and others’ interpretation of quantum mechanics. This collection of these ideas, called the Copenhagen Interpretation, hypothesizes that matter exists with both wave-like and particle-like properties, and that subatomic particles can simultaneously occupy multiple places, until an observation is made and the object accepts just one value. The atom is represented by a wave function until that occurrence, which is a mathematical formula that describes all the possibilities of what the object could be.
According to Schrödinger’s explanation of the experiment, “A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.”
In either event, the cat would be killed by suffocation after only a few minutes of being inside of the steel box, and it does not matter whether an atom from the radioactive material decays or not, to shatter the container full of lethal acid. The cat cannot exist anywhere else, so you cannot have both an alive and dead cat, regardless of the impossibility of observing the phenomena, which would occur if the Copenhagen Interpretation held true.
Schrödinger received the Nobel Prize in 1933 for his work in quantum mechanics, and while his application of the Copenhagen Interpretation to the cat in a steel box established the absurdity of the idea, his work was lauded by perhaps the finest mind in history: Albert Einstein. His work underscored the contradictions present at the time in the understanding of quantum mechanics.
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