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Atlantis Press eBooks

A Chapter Full of Speculations: Bohr’s Atom, Schrödinger’s Cat, “Spooky” Interactions, and the Double-Slit

Theo van Holten

Published Dec 9, 2016• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

It may well be that you feel a bit disappointed at this point. You probably had heard about the utter magic of quantum theory, where particles may be in different places at the same time, where cats (Schrödinger’s cat) may be dead and alive at the same time, and where particles have a telepathic knowledge of the fate of remote particles.This chapter tells more about this “big magic”. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

DOI
10.2991/978-94-6239-234-2_15

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It may well be that you feel a bit disappointed at this point. You probably had heard about the utter magic of quantum theory, where particles may be in different places at the same time, where cats (Schrödinger’s cat) may be dead and alive at the same time, and where particles have a telepathic knowledge of the fate of remote particles.This chapter tells more about this “big magic”. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
The interaction between Schrodinger’s cat and a radioactive atom is the sort of thing that happens in a quantum measurement. The “measurement problem” of quantum mechanics is to explain how the cat can be considered to end up either definitely alive or definitely dead if the final state is an entangled state of the radioactive atom and the cat. This chapter discusses Bohm’s theory and the Everett interpretation as solutions to the measurement problem. The Everett interpretation is fundamentally a proposal to solve what Pitowsky calls the “big” measurement problem: how a quantum measurement can produce a definite outcome. On the information-theoretic interpretation proposed here, the “big” measurement problem is a pseudo-problem. The chapter concludes with some remarks on the “small” measurement problem: how a classical probability distribution over macroscopic measurement outcomes emerges in a measurement process – how probabilities of “what you’ll obtain if you measure” become transformed to probabilities of “what’s there.”
In quantum theory, a particle is allowed to be in a state of coherent superposition among a set of orthogonal states. A vivid picture of this concept is the “Schrödinger cat”: a cat is alive and dead simultaneously. This would be no surprise if one means a large number of an ensemble of cats with 50% alive and 50% dead. But, “Schrödinger cat” is a cat. People are talking about a cat being alive and dead simultaneously. In mathematics, the best word to characterize the relationship between states “alive” and “dead” is perhaps “orthogonal”. In quantum mechanics, the superposition of orthogonal states is used to describe the state of a quantum object, or a particle. The superposition principle is indeed a mystery compared to our everyday classical life experience. Beyond the superposition of orthogonal single-particle states, the superposition of orthogonal multi-particle states represents an even more troubling concept in classical theory.
The physicist Erwin Schrödinger described, back in 1935, one aspect of this strange phenomenon. He placed his cat in a sealed box with a piece of radioactive material which might or might not send out a sub-atomic particle. If it did, the Geiger counter was designed to trigger a release of poisonous gas in the box, and thereby kill his cat. The counter was set up to be triggered just enough to give a 50-50 chance of a particle being detected, and therefore the cat an even chance of being poisoned or not. (In those days, this sort of experiment was acceptable, particularly as it was only a thought experiment.) Radioactive behaviour is unpredictable (except in a general, statistical probability kind of way). There is no rule for working out whether or not the Geiger counter will be triggered. If the sub-atomic event does not occur, the cat lives. Otherwise, it dies. Just as a photon (in that famous experiment from ‘real-life’ physics) will quite happily go through both of two parallel slits in a screen – until someone tries to measure or detect it, at which point what the physicists call ‘the collapse of the wave function’ takes place – the particle can both trigger the poison gas and not trigger the poison gas. That is, until someone looks, Schrödinger’s idea is that his cat, for a while, is both alive and dead!