#esp2017schrocat

[delicateblazenacho-blog]

"In Search of Schrödinger's Cat"

I enjoy paradoxes since they are a way to play with your mind and there's never a wrong answer in my opinion. There is always an explanation to them but the answer is not limited to it. The passage about electrons reminded me of my chemistry class. One of our lessons was about quantum mechanics. We can't know the position of of an electron at an exact time, and we can't know the time when an electron is somewhere. That really made me think because we are able to know position and time of things in our realm, but at a subatomic level we're not. What's the difference? We were able to calculate the speed of light; the fastest thing known to men. Do electrons move faster than light? Why is it that we can't know both the position and time at once? I was really confused when my teacher talked about it during class. I thought science was advanced enough to solve this problem, but we haven't reached that point quite yet. I did some research but it's a really technical and complicated topic. After some time, I decided to accept the fact that we don't have an answer to that yet. Before reading the passage, I never thought that was a paradox. Now that I read it, I can see it be a type of paradox, not entirely, but it definitely has the traits of one. Since we don't have a concrete answer yet, all we have are theories. There's an explanation behind them, but we can't really say if it's right or wrong.

[tenaciousblizzardtastemake-blog1]

Schrodinger’s Cat

It’s no surprise that Schrödinger's cat, one of many paradoxes, has undergone many inconclusive debates since it’s commencement. Honestly for me, it’s pretty straightforward at first. The cat is both dead and alive if it is not being observed. It doesn’t make sense at all to me, it rejects any notion of common sense, but it is a relatively easy concept to grasp. In fact, this chapter specifically mentioned that it is easier to make sense of an electron “in some superposition of states” than to mentally configure a cat simultaneously being dead and alive.  With this simple paradox in mind, I read through this particular section of the chapter with more confusion as each beings in the box progresses more in intellect.

“Wigner’s Friend” is described to be a “competent observer” with the ability to “collapse wave functions.” If he makes it out of the box alive, he will not recall being both dead and alive just because there was no one to observe him for the duration of his time in the box. I’ve known about Shrodinger’s cat for a while now, and I’ve never thought to replace the cat with a human being. To add to that, the person still occupies a superposition of states, until he is being observed. Does that mean that his testimony of being alive and well in the box carries no weight to physicist?

At this point in the chapter, things become a little weird. The author now replaces the humans with computers which lack the capacity to physically, mentally, emotionally react to any environmental stimuli. They can, however, report with extraordinary accuracy every second of information about the radioactive decay. Do they have the ability to collapse the wave function? The author asks himself this question as well, but goes on to say “at least inside the wave box.” From here, I double take. This implies that the human wasn’t able to break the wave function inside the box. As I read through this chapter, I was convinced that Wigner’s Friend could at least disturb the wave function inside the box. Turns out said friend can neither break the wave function outside of the box or inside of the box. This, for whatever reason, totally blows my mind. So I readx on to see if this computer can break the wave function. The author know says that human observation or awareness has no effect of quantum level physics. The fact that the each radioactive atom is being recorded on a quantum level broke the wave function. This reminded me of the Doctor Quantum Double Slit video. Observing the atom, recording it’s every move eliminates any possibility of superposition, meaning one can definitely say whether whomever in the box is alive or not.

[sheepandsnowflakes-blog]

Physics: Schrodinger’s Cat

From John Gribbin’s In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat, I have found many thought-provoking concepts and experiments which perplex me. However, the portion which most stands out to me is the “Clock in the Box” experiment. While the experiment itself is fascinating, I would like to concentrate more on its description. In his concept, Einstein discusses a box with a shutter and spring. He uses familiar objects in order to make the process easier to comprehend, but Bohr seems to find fault with the descriptions. Gribbin writes, “The dilemma of quantum uncertainty arises because we try to express quantum ideas in everyday language, and that is why Bohr stressed the nuts and bolts of the experiments” (180-181). There are two main reasons for why I am so compelled to this line. The first is this notion of “everyday language”. I am caused to stop and ponder after this term, as I feel that its meaning is purely situational. To me, everyday language may be completely different from perhaps a European, Asian, or a Texas resident. Everyday language varies upon slang, dialect, and context. In the case of Einstein’s experiment, everyday language is clearly English, but the concepts themselves seem to be far more complex than everyday terms. To that end, despite the overall complexity of the concept and description, I feel that Einstein has done his best to relate perplexing principles to normal objects which readers will be familiar with, causing the ideas to be conveyed more effectively than if a less familiar situation or object was exemplified. The second aspect of this passage of which I would like to take note of is Bohr’s emphasis on the “nuts and bolts of experiments”. While I have heard this phrase uttered countless times in my life, I never truly grasped this reasoning behind it. When the phrase initially arose, Bohr was referring to actual nuts and bolts crucial to the outcome of Einstein’s experiment. Today, this phrase is commonly used to reference the basics or key pieces of a task. I find this very interesting, for it just goes to show how so many phrases which are commonplace today were once remarks based upon situations. This leads me to wonder about how many other sayings I have heard or uttered which hold a similar unnoticed meaning. Overall, I am drawn to Gribbin’s literature, in particular his “Clock in the Box” example, as it leads me to question the terminology and significance of every situation.

[freshenthusiastwhispers-blog]

On this week’s material, we read through an excerpt from “In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat” by John Gribbin, which focused on the paradoxes and possibilities of quantum physics. The reading overall provides a good explanation of quantum physics through discussing the history and past experiments of quantum theories. Unlike the other reading materials, this one delves into specifically quantum physics and thoroughly explains it through the organized sections of thought experiments. The experiments followed chronological order of time and gradually became more and more abstract. Personally the time space graph was the point where it seemed most abstract and hard to comprehend. Following the graph of electron/positron movement through time and space, the simpler and the most iconic experiment to quantum physics, Schrodinger's cat, was finally explained. What I found most interesting about quantum physics is the unique property of being difficult to explain with our language. It's follows a paradigm that seems completely unique from the common logic of everyday scientists, almost seemingly irrational. It's a completely new field that we know so little about. A while ago I was on a bus ride while chatting to a few colleagues about the idea of quantum physics and how engineers are looking at ways to manipulate its property for our advantages. It came to me that the different fields all have their unique perspective to a new paradigm such as quantum physics. As the last reading had shown, quantum theory could have a philosophical relation as well as possible applications to technology as how an engineer would approach the field. Overall this reading was more information than the past readings in my opinion. It was well written although I was unable to comprehend it completely until a classmate of mine pointed out the relation from an electron to a positron.

[tailored-to-perfection-blog]

Schrodinger’s Cat Response

Quite often, I take the time to ponder, what really is time? Is it a figment of our imagination. Is it our brains that interpret our surroundings, causing time? If so, can my sense of time be faster or slower than another person’s sense of time? Can time truly be measured by the movement of our planet? Why do we feel time. Time is such an abstract concept that I feel no one truly understands. Sure, when we were young we were taught how long a minute, hour, day, etcetera was, but what does time really mean? The flow of life. Oddly enough, the reading Schrodinger’s cat by John Gribbin only seems to add to the confusion. It talks about how, in reality, we should have no sense of time. Feynman diagrams demonstrate how, photons traveling through space and time can create an electron and a positron pair. When the positron meets another electron, it disappears. However, mathematically, this idea is the same backwards in time. An electron moving through time and space meets a photon, and absorbs it, putting it back in time until it “emits an energetic photon and recoils in such a way it moves forward in time again” (187). These electrons seemingly dance through time and space forwards and back. This fact alone represents that time travel is completely and utterly real, even if it is not completely what people would expect. It more or less a single electron than massive machinery with a human inside. However, a man by the name of Tipler came up with an idea for an actual time machine, as crazy as it is. His idea is to take a massive cylinder and pack it full of matter, as much matter as there is in our sun. This cylinder, however, only has a volume of 10,000 π km3. This is as dense as the nucleus of an atom. With this cylinder, one would have to rotate it twice every millisecond. This would drag the fabric of space and time, tearing it apart. While actual time travel may not ever happen, all our known laws of physics currently prove it true. There is always hope.

[themostsarcasticperson-blog]

The following quote reflects on John Gribbin’s writing style. “Physicists often use a simple device to represent the movement of particles through space and time on a piece of paper or on the blackboard. The idea is simply to represent the flow of time by the direction up the page, from bottom to top, and motion in space across the page. This squeezes three space dimensions into one, but produces patterns that are immediately familiar to anyone who has dealt with graphs, with time corresponding to the ‘y’ axis and space to the ‘x’ axis. These space time diagrams first appeared as an invaluable tool of modern physics in relativity theory, where they can be used to represent many of the peculiarities of Einstein’s equations in geometrical terms that are sometimes easier to manipulate and often easier to understand. They were taken over into particle physics by Richard Feynman in the 1940s, and in that context the are usually called ‘Feynman diagrams’, in the quantum world of particles, the space and time representation can also be replaced by a description in term of momentum and energy, which is more relevant when dealing with collisions between particles, but I’ll stick with a simple space-time description here. The track of an electron is represented on a Feynman diagram by a line. An electron that sits in one place and never moves produces a line that moves straight up the page, corresponding to motion in the time direction only; an electron that slowly changes its position, as well as being carried along by the flow of time, is represented by a line at a slight angle to the line straight up the page, and a fast-moving electron makes a bigger angle with the “world line” of a stationary particle. The motion in space can be in either direction, to left or right, and the line may zigzag if the electron is deflected by collisions with other particles. But in the everyday world, or the world of simple space-time diagrams in relativity theory, we would not expect the world would correspond to movement backward in time.”

[friedjellyfishgladiator-blog]

Paradoxes and Possibilities

Time itself is debatable but yet predictable. These two aspects of time are the essence and representation of what direction time is capable of. For years, decades, and centuries, time has never failed to move forward and continue to the next day. Forward is the direction our lives and future lives promise to prevail; however, a major debate is whether time can move back. What we do know is that time is related to space. Of course, we think we understand the space we live in, but there are other aspects of space as humans we do not yet understand. As Gribbin argues in the text, time travel will not be surely known if time is not reconstructed and expanded into a new belief we have not explored. The notion of time as being intertwined with space is rejected by Gribbin. Throughout the reading, he details his perspective as space and time as being individual and independent quantities, which intersect perpendicularly.

To start his argument, Gribbin introduces the Copenhagen interpretation. In order to understand Gribbin’s argument, I found it necessary to research the Copenhagen interpretation. After reading about it, I understood it interpreted the world of atoms represented by quantum mechanics. Out of all the theories in science, quantum mechanics has proved to be the most successful as it has led to numerous improvements in the ideas of science we follow today. However, the theory of quantum mechanics was debated and disagreed upon by Bohr and Heisenberg, the two main founding fathers. Just as this theory challenged the founding father’s thoughts, the theory challenges our imaginations and perspective of the world daily. Quantum mechanics is what made time and space relevant. In fact, Gribbin stated that while discussing the “paradoxes and possibilities” the Copenhagen interpretation is indeed unavoidable.

The main thing that stood out to me in the reading was the type of relationship that time and space have. Does space increase as time increases? Or does time increase as space stays the same? The more I think about the concept, the more complex it seems to be. Time will always move on and will always change, but it seems to me that space does not always follow this pattern. A period of time represents a particular moment and what happens in that moment. As I am writing this reflection, I am taking up space by the second. Sometimes I may move so the time and space relationship would be proportionally related. However, this can vary from daily actions. I do not think time and space react perpendicularly to one another. Although I do not agree fully with Gribbin, I do agree that time has not been explored in all of its elements. Time has to be different in some way from our preconceived idea for other things such as time travel to be possible.

[spookymoongentlemen-blog]

Motion in space can proceed in any direction and back again. Motion in time only proceeds in one direction in the everyday world, whatever seems to be going on at the particular level. It's hard to visualize the four dimensions of space time, each at right angles to the other, but we can leave one dimension and imagine what this strict rule would mean if it applied to one of the three dimensions we are used to” (page 193) This reading to me was one that was slightly difficult to comprehend. Although I didn't not understand most of the things expressed throughout the reading the quote above was definitely intriguing and helped me understand the point being made by the author. Giving examples like “If we made this central rule in a children's game, and then told a child to find a way of reaching a prize off to the right - hand side (backwards in time ) it would not take too long for the child to find a way out of the trap. “ This example helped the author describe how motion in space can proceed in any direction and back again and how motion in time only proceeds in one direction. The author used several different writing styles and he transitioned between the two effortlessly. This made some of the author's writing very easy to read and some of the writing quite difficult. Some of the words were in languid terms but some were extremely difficult to understand because the words were not on the terms of normal writing. So while reading this I understood most parts by by the end of the reading it was difficult and most things were unclear.