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this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Quantum superpositioning. Schrödinger was right, it's absolutely ridiculous and the cat can't be alive and dead at the same time, box or not.
The problem is it provably does work that way, or at least in a way that is indistinguishable from it, ridiculous or not, and we don't really know why. We've learnt many of the rules, managed to trap particles in superimposed states, even discovered that plants take advantage of it to transport energy more efficiently, and it's just a thing that happens, an apparently fundamental rule of existence. And it doesn't make any fucking sense.
I’ve kind of always assumed it was a problem of observation, which is what a lot of folks talk about re Schrödinger’s Cat. The cat knows if it’s alive (obv won’t know if it’s dead), but from the outside it’s unobservable.
A lot of quantum mechanics (to my understanding) is impossible for us to understand because we can’t observe it without impacting its behavior. But if it had consciousness, it would know what state it’s in.
This is super armchair headcannon shit, but it’s what I’ve taken from everything I’ve read on the subject.
Observation in quantum physics isn't about a consciousness being able to see it happen, but about it interacting with the universe in a way that could potentially be measured. There doesn't need to be a physical observer, just a theoretically measurable result of it interacting with something.
Copied from my other reply because I’m curious what you might think too:
Yea I didn’t convey myself well.
Our ability to observe the effect, at this point in time, results in us disturbing the thing.
Like with Schödinger’s cat, in order to observe the outcome we have to open the box which may result in the poison being released and killing the cat. So if we open the box and the cat is dead, it may be due to our interference rather than the gas being released by the radioactive decay. In order to know the position of the cat, we’d have to be able to see through the box in a way that doesn’t impact the outcome of the experiment. Yet, the cat is either dead or alive, it’s just unknowable to us due to our inability to observe the cat without disturbing the scenario. Only the cat really knows if it’s alive.
Similarly, we largely don’t have great ways to observe quantum happenings because our technology to measure the outcomes disturbs whatever we’re observing. Yet, the thing a we’re looking at either are or are not happening the way we posit, our ability to know doesn’t change that.
Ah, I see what you mean - that the superposition is a model of our uncertainty of unobserved actions, rather than the actual state of the particle. While that was my understanding initially too (because it makes sense) our testing, things like the double slit experiment, has shown behaviours that only make sense if they do occupy both states simultaneously. Quantum computing is actually reliant on qubits being in a 0/1 superposition for it to work. It's what makes the entire thing so maddening, because experimental evidence has disproven every attempt to make it make sense.
First thing my quantum mechanics professor told us was that if you think you understand quantum mechanics you definitely do not understand quantum mechanics. He was at the time one of the world's leading experts on quantum applications, and had just proven the existence of an additional state of matter that quantum theory predicted, and straight up told us to our faces that he didn't understand it, he just knew that it works.
Consciousness has nothing to do with it, observe in this case means "affected something we can measure".
Yea I didn’t convey myself well.
Our ability to observe the effect, at this point in time, results in us disturbing the thing.
Like with Schödinger’s cat, in order to observe the outcome we have to open the box which may result in the poison being released and killing the cat. So if we open the box and the cat is dead, it may be due to our interference rather than the gas being released by the radioactive decay. In order to know the position of the cat, we’d have to be able to see through the box in a way that doesn’t impact the outcome of the experiment. Yet, the cat is either dead or alive, it’s just unknowable to us due to our inability to observe the cat without disturbing the scenario. Only the cat really knows if it’s alive.
Similarly, we largely don’t have great ways to observe quantum happenings because our technology to measure the outcomes disturbs whatever we’re observing. Yet, the thing a we’re looking at either are or are not happening the way we posit, our ability to know doesn’t change that.
Something that's important to note though, is that the Cat example isn't a great way to envision this phenomenon in general. Schrodinger's Cat was actually made as an argument against this interpretation, by blowing the behavior up to a macro scale, where it seemed absurd. While you can draw analogues and all that, I'd recommend against really thinking that macro scale objects are in a multitude of obviously different states at once, all the time. It's a path to some of the really kooky fake-science "quantum" stuff that get's repeated.
Like, you're never going to see a physicist argue that a person is both alive and dead in another room, because of the technical chance that they tunneled halfway through the wall.
That bomb detecting thing is absolutely crazy, I think it's one of those things most people have heard of but consigned to the bin of things that couldn't possibly be true
It makes a lot more sense if you stop believing in the fiction of objects. There are no objects. Particles are a fiction, waves are a fiction. There is a single process, that we call the universe, and every single thing we refer to is a portion of that process from a subjective perspective. Once you give up on objects the idea that a process can be observed to produce subjective experiences that appear to violate expectations of object-oriented conceptual frameworks becomes less difficult to grasp.