Schrödinger's box

David Papineau

By way of an example, Lewis imagines your being invited to join Schrodinger’s cat in its box for an hour. This box will either fill up with deadly poison fumes or not, depending on whether or not some radioactive atom decays, the probability of decay within an hour being 50%. The invitation is accompanied with some further incentive to comply (Lewis sets it up so there is a significant chance of some pretty bad but not life-threatening punishment if you don’t get in the box). Lewis argues that the many minds theory implies that you should get in the box with the cat, despite this making it 50% likely you will die.

Valdir C. Aguilera-Navarro, J. F. Gomes, Abraham Hirsz Zimerman +1 more

The energy eigenvalues of harmonic oscillators in circular and spherical boxes are obtained through the Rayleigh-Schrodinger perturbative expansion, taking the free particle in a box as the non-perturbed system. The perturbative series is shown to be convergent for small boxes, and an upper bound for the radius of convergence is established. Pade-approximant solutions are also constructed for boxes of any size. Numerical comparison with the exact eigenvalues-which are obtained by constructing and diagonalising the Hamiltonian in the basis of the eigenfunctions of the free particle in a box-corroborates the accuracy and range of validity of the approximate solutions, particularly the convergence and the radius of convergence of the perturbative series.

Ijaz Durrani

Luca Viganò, Diego Sempreboni

Phil Maguire, Rebecca Maguire

We reopen Erwin Schrodinger's thought experiment involving a cat in an informationally impenetrable box. A common view is that the cat enters a superposition of alive/dead because of a lack of observation, leading to uncertainty about the state of the cat. We, on the other hand, argue that the cat only enters a superposition if everything about the cat is known prior to the box being closed. The superposition results from a lack of uncertainty inside the box. Rather than interpreting this state of affairs as a live and dead cat interacting with each other, we suggest that the more natural interpretation is that of an inability to precisely position events within spacetime due to the lack of uncertainty. We clarify how stable measurement depends on a diversified portfolio of statistical uncertainty, and how the lack of such uncertainty in Schrodinger's box precludes stabilization.