My college convocation is around the corner and for the past few days i had been debating with myself whether to attend it or not. Why debating?I mean its always nice to go back to your college, catch up with old friends, relive the memories and to top it all, formally be declared an engineer (as if it makes any difference though). But then i wanted to avoid running into certain people.Although there are a lot of people i really really want to meet( and yes it includes you too dumbsentis :P ), i wasn't sure that the joy of meeting these people would outweigh the unpleasantness of running into these other certain people.While i was still lost in my ambivalence,i chanced upon an article on Wikipedia and to my surprise, it was quantum mechanics which came to the rescue of my conundrum.
In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger designed a thought experiment to critique the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.The following is the jist of the experiment:
A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device(which must be secured against direct interference by the cat) : in a Geiger Counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.
For more, click here
Now you all must be wondering what the fuck has this got to with the the problem i was facing, right!!Well you see, according to quantum mechanics, the cat in the box, left to itself, is simultaneously, alive and dead. Yet when we look into the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, and not a mixture of both. So similarly my trip will have both positive and negative outcomes if left to itself. Only when i make the trip will i know which one of them it actually is.
Am sure Schrödinger, while devising this experiment would have ever imagined that it would be put to such use :P.
In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger designed a thought experiment to critique the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.The following is the jist of the experiment:
A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device(which must be secured against direct interference by the cat) : in a Geiger Counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.
For more, click here
Now you all must be wondering what the fuck has this got to with the the problem i was facing, right!!Well you see, according to quantum mechanics, the cat in the box, left to itself, is simultaneously, alive and dead. Yet when we look into the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, and not a mixture of both. So similarly my trip will have both positive and negative outcomes if left to itself. Only when i make the trip will i know which one of them it actually is.
Am sure Schrödinger, while devising this experiment would have ever imagined that it would be put to such use :P.
PS:Am pretty sure that this Cat's gonna be alive after the trip,coz running into the other undesirable ones really does not matter anymore. :P
Posts
