Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "Кот Шрёдингера: мысленный эксперимент в квантовой механике — Чад Орзел" video.

  1. If that is what you want to study, then you have to go to the psychology department. The physics department is not the right place to ask why an otherwise very intelligent man blanked out when it came to a relatively simple problem like this.
    1
  2. You are not allowed to access the contents of the box. That is what "isolated" means in physics. Chemistry is also of no use here because it is always focused on the statistical mechanics average, which is a short term approximation (short compared to the age of the universe, but long compared to the molecular vibration and collision time scale). The actual physics here happens on the Poincare recurrence time scale, which is much, much, much longer than the age of the universe.
    1
  3. @ Learning would have been useful, but that's probably too late for you. ;-)
    1
  4. Superposition is what makes quantum computers potentially faster than ordinary computers. Why? Because superposition is the description of what we don't know about systems and what we don't know can grow exponentially with system size, whereas what we know only grows in a linear fashion.
    1
  5. TED ed is nonsense. You might as well listen to Trump explaining germ theory. ;-)
    1
  6. He may not have been high, but he was highly confused.
    1
  7. A cat in a completely isolated box is always dead, but only on the intermediate time scale. On the Poincare recurrence time scales it gets periodically resurrected. Of course so do two kittens and a turtle that were never in the box to begin with. ;-)
    1
  8. It wasn't supposed to. It was meant to invalidate the Copenhagen interpretation by giving a nonsensical counterexample. What it actually does is to give us a flawed analysis, i.e. it is at most a paradox, which is a teaching tool to demonstrate how not to think about something. Since it never comes with a resolution it doesn't do that, either.
    1
  9. Schroedinger was confused and he made the mistake of airing his confusion publicly.
    1
  10. An observation in physics is an irreversible energy transfer.
    1
  11. You are correct. It was devised like that, but all it proved was that Schroedinger didn't understand quantum mechanics.
    1
  12. @ You can do the calculations and you will see that he was wrong. Oh, wait... you don't know how to do the calculations. Now that is a problem, isn't it? :-)
    1
  13. The wave function isn't "provable" at all. The wave function was always a mathematical abstract. Nature doesn't know anything about it. There are systems to which it applies and then there are systems to which it doesn't. The trick is to learn about the pre-requirements for when a wave function can be used to describe nature. We rarely teach those, which makes it seem that it's a universal description. It isn't.
    1
  14. @ You won't find Schroedinger's cat discussed in a well organized class on quantum mechanics. At most you could make a lesson titled "Poor thinking patterns in quantum mechanics- Schroedinger's cat, Wigner's friend and the EPR paper", but it's not good practice to overwhelm beginners with historical false ideas. It's bad enough that we are teaching the Bohr model and de Broglie waves, but they are historical precursors to the real theory, so one has to mention them in the same way as one would teach Aristotelian physics or the Ptolemaic model of the solar system in passing. Schroedinger's cat, Wigner's friend and the EPR paper, however, are scientific strugglers that were muddying the otherwise crystal clear waters of von Neumann's work.
    1
  15. Schroedinger's cat came years after von Neumann had clarified all of this in his textbook. Schroedinger simply couldn't keep up. Neither could Einstein, by the way.
    1
  16. It is a completely isolated box. Nothing can get in or out. And by nothing we mean "absolutely nothing".
    1