The point that the cat was to prove it was a stupid discussion but ended up being the perfect model with which to explain the concept of superposition to people who don't understand it?
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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Ha look at that, it's the same way I'm looking at people dropping the "c" from a German "sch"
Because you can imagine him looking down on you from heaven it must exist in at least one possible universe, but you won't know if you live in that universe until you die.
but isn't the quantum superposition still how we understand quantum mechanics to work? he may have coined the metaphor to criticize but if it ended up being an accurate representation of a useful concept then who cares if he intended it to be absurd?
It's how we understand it but it does show, or at least suggest, that we still don't fully understand what's going on at the quantum level.
The point is only misunderstood when someone hears it, before then the point is in a super position where it's both understood and misunderstood at the same time.
It says something about modern physics that possibly the two most famous bits of it were named by people trying to call bollocks.
What it says, though, is too many STEM folk skimp on humanities and are just really bad at naming things.
Big Bang?
Darm Matter and Dark Energy?
Exactly.
If you make a point, but no one hears it, was the point ever made?
I understood that by purposefully misunderstanding it ..... what are we talking about again?
Only the best child groomers get into heaven:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dinger#Sexual_abuse_allegations
Thanks for sharing, I never heared about that.
Yiiiikes. That quote from him is an insane way to justify being only attracted to minors.
Best I can figure it translates to "They are naive".
What's the correct interpretation and the common misunderstanding?
he said that the superposition is stupid as the cat cannot be both dead and alive.
the misunderstanding is that people think that he tried to explain superposition with the cat.
Heck, I love explaining quantum physics.
Ask me questions! I can dumb it down enough that even a child can understand!
Do time and space realy change places if you go past the event horizon of a black hole? How does that work?
Maybe not the right field of knowledge, but i heard this recently and haven't come along anybody able to dumb it down enoth for me to understand. So I thought I might ask anyway :-)
As far as we can figure it, basically, yeah. Wrapping your brain around the concept is less tricky than you'd think.
So gravity gets stronger the closer you are to a black hole, but at the event horizon things get weird. The extreme curvature of spacetime forces space itself to flow toward the singularity at its center faster than the speed of light, so on the inside there's no "other" direction to point to, even photons emitted straight "out" can't reach the event horizon and end up moving in the same direction as everything else. So space becomes timelike, proceeding inexorably from point A to B.
Time is more complicated, because it's really hard to visualize. If you fall into a black hole, you'll pass through all the outward-pointing light that's been failing to escape since the event horizon formed, which makes all the past history of the black hole visible below you. Meanwhile, anything that falls into the black hole after you can be seen falling from above as the downward-pointing photons catch up. The timeline of the inside of the black hole is laid out with the past and future being directions you can point to, making time spacelike.
Thanks for your answer. The space part is easy but the time part still goes over my head.
It helps a bit if you think of time inside a black hole like an onion. The outer skin is the event horizon where information about the moment the black hole was created is "stored". Going deeper leaves that past behind you and surrounds you with more recent light, and each new layer is smaller than the last because there's less past left to pass through between the moment the black hole was created and the moment you fell in. The singularity is the point at the center where there's no more past left to see but future light can reach you from all directions, like a big bang in reverse.
So, would it be incredibly bright ‘above’ and absolute darkness ‘below?’
That depends on one's position on the path from the event horizon to the singularity. At the event horizon you'll pass all the outward-pointing photons that were emitted the instant the event horizon formed, making all of "down" impossibly bright. Deeper, the only light that reaches you from "down" is light that entered the black hole at an angle and looped around the singularity before you caught up to it, creating a ring of light around a circle of absolute dark. That ring grows thinner and the black circle expands as you get closer to the singularity.
Photons from "above" have the opposite appearance, with an expanding ring of blackness around a contracting circle of incoming light paths.
Please explain entanglement and how two particles can be inexplicably connected despite being gajillions of light years apart! Bonus question, do you believe time exists?
Okay!
Entanglement is what we call any sort of quantum interaction that causes some property of two particles to become linked, like photon gun that always spits out two photons of the same polarization, or bouncing a couple of molecules together so that they spin in opposite directions. So long as nothing comes along to disrupt that state, we could measure one particle and we'd know the state of the other particle no matter where it is without having to measure it. So a couple of intergalactic hydrogen atoms could exchange a photon across light years and become entangled for the rest of time, casually sharing some quantum of secrets as they coast to infinity.
The "inexplicable connection" there is just information about a quantum pair, but it's spooky because that information literally doesn't exist until it is measured. Schrodinger's cat isn't "either dead or alive but we don't know which until we check", the entangled possibilities are both equally real and can interfere with themselves like the electrons in the double slit experiment.
Bonus answer, I think time is real but isn't like what we imagine it to be.
His point was to shine a light on the ridiculousness of superposition.
He was not wrong. It is ridiculous. It is also true.
… as far as we can tell currently.
Is he looking down on us or waving to us?