Quantum Enigma by Bruce Rosenblum & Fred Kuttner

Author:Bruce Rosenblum & Fred Kuttner [Rosenblum, Bruce & Kuttner, Fred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199753819
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

Schrödinger’s argument fails because it rests on the assumption that macroscopic objects can remain unobserved in a superposition state. For all practical purposes, any macroscopic object is constantly “observed.” A big thing can’t be isolated; it’s always in contact with the rest of the world. And that contact is observation!

It’s ridiculous to even imagine that a cat could be isolated. Every macroscopic object anywhere near the cat effectively observes the cat. Photons are emitted by the warm cat to the walls of the box, and that means the box observes the cat. Take an extreme example: the moon! The moon’s gravity, which pulls on the oceans to raise the tides, also pulls on the cat. That pull would be slightly different for a standing, alive cat than for a lying down, dead cat. Since the cat pulls back on the moon, the path of the moon is slightly altered depending on the position of the cat. Small as that effect might be, it is easy to calculate that in a tiny fraction of a millionth of a second the cat’s wavefunction would be completely entangled with the moon’s, and thus with the tides and thus with the rest of the world. This entanglement is an observation. It collapses the superposition state of the cat in essentially no time at all.

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