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Determining When Schrödinger's Cats Die

Ken Krechmer

Published Jun 16, 2023• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

E. Schrödinger proposed a thought experiment to illustrate the discontinuity, not fully understood, that appears in quantum mechanics when a measurement process occurs. The cats in his thought experiment appear to be both alive and dead. This unreasonable appearance has not been satisfactorily explained before. Calibration, which is required in metrology, is not treated in physics theory. This paper illustrates how calibration to a non-local time standard explains the alive and dead appearance of Schrödinger's cats.

DOI
10.32388/f05d6y.3

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E. Schrödinger proposed a thought experiment to illustrate the discontinuity, not fully understood, that appears in quantum mechanics when a measurement process occurs. The cats in his thought experiment appear to be both alive and dead. This unreasonable appearance has not been satisfactorily explained before. Calibration, which is required in metrology, is not treated in physics theory. This paper illustrates how calibration to a non-local time standard explains the alive and dead appearance of Schrödinger's cats.
E. Schrödinger proposed a thought experiment to illustrate the discontinuity, not currently explained, that appears in quantum mechanics when a measurement occurs. Schrödinger's cats in his thought experiment appear to be both alive and dead. This unreasonable appearance has not been satisfactorily explained before. Calibration, which is required in metrology, is not included in physics theory. Schrödinger's thought experiment is explained by including calibration in measurement theory.
Erwin Schrodinger first described the thought-experiment which has since become known as 'the paradox of Schrodinger's cat' 51 years ago. In recent years, popular accounts of quantum mechanics have tended to adopt one or other of the philosophically most extreme solutions to this paradox, i.e. the consciousness hypothesis or the many worlds interpretation. The author attempts to redress the balance by describing what he takes to be the orthodox solution to the paradox which explains the paradox, without recourse to such counterintuitive notions as a cat simultaneously dead and alive or a universe continually splitting into multiple worlds, as being due to a misapplication of the quantum formalism.
In 1935 Erwin Schrödinger proposed a thought experiment to show the absurd consequences of applying quantum mechanics to everyday objects. Schrödinger imagined placing a cat in a box, along with a vial of deadly poison that is connected to a radioactive atom. If the atom decays, it releases the poison and kills the cat. When the box is closed we do not know if the atom has decayed or not, which means that it can be in a "superposition" of two states (decayed and non-decayed) at the same time. Therefore, protested Schrödinger, the cat can be both dead and alive at the same time – which is clearly absurd. There was obviously, he thought, some boundary between the microscopic world of atoms and quantum mechanics, and the macroscopic world of cats and classical mechanics.
Quantum mechanics provides a theory for the behavior of elementary particles and atoms. The problem which confronted the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, concerning the behavior of subatomic particles, is best illustrated by means of the following experiment. Schrodinger’s cat escapes the dilemma of being neither dead nor alive in David Bohm’s intepretation of how the Schrodinger wave equation should be applied in quantum mechanics. Schrodinger’s cat also escapes the dilemma of being neither dead nor alive in the Gell-Mann and Zurek interpretation of how Schrodinger’s equation should be interpreted. All interpretations of quantum mechanics so far enumerated require the concept of non-local reality. A synaptic bouton may then have a paracrystalline structure which requires Schrodinger’s equation to describe its quantum states. Non-local reality may arise in a different way in the brain through quantum correlations involving phonons, as first suggested by Frohlich.
Abstract Complementarity tells us we cannot know precisely the values of all the properties of a quantum object at the same time: the precise determination of one property implies that the value of some other (complementary) property is undefined. E.g. the precise knowledge of the position of a particle implies that its momentum is undefined. Here we show that a Schrödinger cat has a well defined value of a property that is complementary to its “being dead or alive” property. Then, thanks to complementarity, it has an undefined value of the property “being dead or alive”. In other words, the cat paradox is explained through quantum complementarity: of its many complementary properties, any quantum system, such as a cat, can have a well defined value only of one at a time. Schrödinger’s cat has a definite value of a property which is complementary to “being dead or alive”, so it is neither dead nor alive. Figuratively one can say it is both dead and alive. While this interpretation only uses textbook concepts (the Copenhagen interpretation), apparently it has never explicitly appeared in the literature. We detail how to build an Arduino based simulation of Schrödinger’s experiment based on these concepts for science outreach events.