🚀 go-pugleaf

Christopher Michael Cooney wrote:
> 
> Ron Schwarz (ron@schwarz.nethawk@com) wrote:
> : On 17 Apr 1997 02:13:00 -0700, John Gentile <bbobb@primenet.com>
> : wrote:
> :
> : >
> : >the light is neither on nor off...it's like the dead cat thing, where
> : >the cat is neither alive nor dead. (dunno if you've heard of that one,
> : >but oh, well ;-)).
> :
> : There's a whole dead cat in every bar of Dead Cat Soap.
> :
> : Really dead!
> 
> preposterous. the cat is dead or alive, but _you_ don't know which.
> if you needed a intelligent observer, who is watching you?
> 
> if you go into a room overnight with a bottle, is the bottle's state
> indeterminate until the maid finds you passed out ? does it collapse
> when a cat peeks into the room (schroedinger's cat?). this whole
> 'observer collapsing the wavefunction' is bollocks.
> 

	Geesh, what are they teaching these days at my alma mater.

The "cat" (wavefunction) IS both alive and dead.  Read up on double-slit
experiments and the like.

The Schroedinger's (sp?) cat is a macroscopic analogy.  Of course in
reality the cat is either dead or alive.  But a quantum cat can be both
alive and dead; just as a single photon can go through a slit and
interfere with itself.

> --
> coonec@rpi.edu          Comp. Science, Blah Blah Sparc MIPS Blah
> "Watch me not care" dilbert 19960219       |
> Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards,   |    Do not watch
> For you are crunchy and good with ketchup. |     this space

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