Letting the cat out of the bag (box)
Warning!! Quantum mechanics post. DO NOT READ! Also mentions cats.
Despite naming my cat after the famous physicist, Schrödinger, I’ve never been a fan of his famous Schrödinger’s Cat analogy. Why not? Because, for me, it makes no sense, either from a quantum mechanics point of view, or from the perspective of putting a cat in a box. Let’s face it, if the cat doesn’t want to be in the box, you don’t have to open the box to know it is very much alive, and not particularly happy.
But, just in case you haven’t heard of Schrödinger’s Cat, here’s how it goes:
There is a box, and in that box we place a tiny amount of a radioactive substance. Also, in the box we place a geiger counter attached to a hammer mechanism, and under the hammer is a vial of Hydrogen Cyanide. Next, we put a cat in the box and close the lid.
Ignoring for a moment the reaction of said cat, let’s assume the only thing that can cause the hammer to break the vial, and thus kill the cat, is the random decay of one of the atoms in the radioactive substance.
Until we open the box, the state of the cat is indeterminate. It is both alive and dead at the same time. When we open the box, the state of the cat becomes known. In quantum mechanics this is referred to as the “collapse of the wave function”.
Schrödinger’s intent was to demonstrate the ridiculousness of the emerging thinking relating to wave function behaviour. Naturally, he chose an analogy that clearly demonstrated that ridiculousness.
The analogy doesn’t work for me because firstly, it implies the observer has to be human. It’s as if the universe is somehow mysteriously driven by conscious thought. This isn’t the intent of the analogy, but it is the effect it has on the reader. In reality, the cat, the box, and even the air in the box acts as that so-called observer. The state of the cat is very much determined long before you open the box. You just don’t know it yet.
When is a joke not a joke?
A person hearing Schrödinger’s analogy might naturally conclude that the logical interpretation is that a particle is already in a particular state, and observation is simply the act of discovering this state. The idea that the state might be indeterminate is foolish when viewed from this perspective.
It makes Schrödinger’s point, but it does it by deliberately misrepresenting the concept of observation. This is not how analogies are supposed to work. Analogies are supposed to give you a way to understand and analyse the real situation using familiar concepts.
So I fixed it. Or maybe I didn’t. You decide. I could call this new analogy “Ayre’s analogy” but that would be vain, so how about “Schrödinger’s Joke”. Basically it goes like this:
A man thinks of a joke. Naturally he thinks it’s funny, but is it? The joke appears to be in an indeterminate state. Only one way to find out for sure. Share it.
He tells his joke to his wife. She doesn’t find the joke funny. The wave function of the joke appears to have collapsed into the state “unfunny”.
Unperturbed, he tells the same joke to his work colleague, who finds it hilarious. How can this be? How can the joke be in more than one state simultaneously? How come this time the wave function collapsed to a different state?
The answer is clear. The joke is unchanged, but the state of the observer is different in each case. The joke does not, as such, have a state of “funny” or “unfunny”, and neither does the observer, but as a pair they do. This apparent state is a function of the interaction between the two wave functions.
Obviously there can be many other inferred states when you pair (entangle) two wave functions. The joke might or might not be offensive. It might or might not be appropriate. It all depends on what you’re measuring.
So, in conclusion, the state of the joke is indeterminate until you observe it, and then the resulting state depends on the observer.
Have I fixed it, or did I make it worse? It depends, I guess, on the observer.
No cats were harmed in the making of this analogy.