watching the price of bitcoin is like watching "how I met your mother", you get pissed because of not knowing the mother but at the same time you do not want to know who is the mother because simply the show will end
Read up on
Schrödinger's Cat, it is a thought experiment in a similar vein, it will blow your mind
.
I am trying to understand the experiment but Quantum physic in general is one of the things that I want to spend more time to study ( try to understand ).... thank you for the link already bookmarked it to read the full article later.
this is a little off-topic, but physics is my thing, and i'd love to try to give a layman's interpretation of such a technical thought experiment
the idea is that the classic notion of determinism, that one can use trajectory and velocity and momentum to determine the future state of a given system (similarly to how one judges and executes shots on a pool table), breaks down completely on small enough scales.
in pool each of the balls has a definite location. you can strike one, giving it a definite velocity in a definite direction and with practice pretty handily work backwards through the physics that governs the behavior of the balls and, remarkably consistently, make difficult shots.
if the pool table were the size of an atom, however, and the balls were subatomic particles, the game would be significantly harder. the early pioneers of quantum mechanics (quantum meaning "unit", like the indivisible subatomic particles) realized quickly that the smaller something is, the more strangely it behaved when they tried to "find" it -- that is, determine its location.
it turns out that
nothing has a definite location, which is hard to wrap one's head around, but for small things at small scales it's very obvious and a whole new physics needed to be developed. when measuring an electron, for instance, its location seemed to correspond with
the amplitude of a wave, with different probabilities of finding the particle in a certain location corresponding to the amplitude of the wave at different points. this, incidentally, is the basis of Schrodinger's Equation, which formalized de Broglie's work.
in the image i linked, the sharp and pointy distribution corresponds to a very massive thing, like a billiard-ball, whose location is much more definite than a very light thing, like an electron (lighter by about 30 orders of magnitude!), about which it isn't an exaggeration to say that it could be
anywhere in the universe.
this brings us to the star of Schrodinger's thought experiment, a heavy atom undergoing radioactive decay. one of the insights that quantum mechanics gave us is an explanation of this strange phenomenon. some atoms, for reasons previously unknown, randomly and violently ejected bits of the nucleus from time to time. the strangest thing about this is that is is impossible to know exactly
when this event would occur for a single atom, but groups of the same isotope always obey a half-life rule, such that after one half-life (a constant) for a given isotope has passed, exactly half of a given sample of isotope will have decayed.
sounds like quantum weirdness, doesn't it? that's because it is!
what's actually happening is that the particles in the nucleus
suddenly find themselves outside of it and are ejected away by the electrostatic force that causes protons to repel each other.
weird.
but this leaves us in a quagmire of conceptualization. is it really true that the deterministic world we perceive is really made up of unfathomable masses of fuzzy, random, indistinct processes?
Schrodinger tried to bridge the gap to demonstrate just how weird the implications of this are. if we arrange things so that the radioactive decay of an atom, for which it is
literally impossible to know whether or not it has decayed after a certain time t, is tied to a mechanism that will kill a cat (why a cat? ask Schrodinger), then we end up in a situation in which the entire state of the box becomes quantumly uncertain. generally, we model this uncertainty on the subatomic scale as a superposition of every possibility, i.e. a probability curve, but it seems extremely counterintuitive to try to conceptualize the contents of the box as a superposition of live cat and dead cat (and if time t is the isotope's half-life, the chances are exactly 50-50!).
anyway, i hope you appreciated the explanation
i tried to give a complete picture of the conceptual underpinnings without going into too much detail. lots of good vocabulary to wiki for future inquiries, too!
--arepo
Wow thanks for the pre-coffee read. I was fascinated by this stuff in high school but went to a conservatory to study music instead. Very cool.
