Ursula Le Guin: the author we should thank for popularizing Schrödinger's cat | Hacker News Reader

Ursula Le Guin: the author we should thank for popularizing Schrödinger's cat

physicsworld.com

42 pointssohkamyung12 comments

Any quantum physicists here? The cat is a macroscopic object. Actually the hammer and the detector already are. So any quantum phenomena like superposition are gone by the time the detector experiences something like a voltage in an amplifier. The detector is already the observer.

Otherwise put: impinging light cones from the rest of the universe will contain disturbances with negligible energies but arbitrary phases, resulting in decoherence to classicality.

(I believe this phenomenon is why large arrays of qubits are so difficult to construct?)

Hmm, so in your theory, if the box could be a perfect disturbance barrier, the cat would actually be in superposition? What's then preventing to scaling this to the whole universe and everything being in superposition all the time?

That is pretty much what many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says.

In my/Gell-Mann's theory, the universe decoheres the box, randomising its phases, and it in turn decoheres its contents.

If you can find a perfect disturbance barrier, you can put qubits inside. Now the problems which would remain be: how to initialise them, and how to read out the final result...

The point of the gedanken experiment is it's mocking quantum mechanics. It's supposed to be ridiculous.

Exactly! But people interpret it as being true.

Schrödinger's cat is a "modern" image, but note that unresolved ambiguities were explored by visual artists centuries before physicists got into the game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguous_image . See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24403135 .

Lagniappe: https://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large-5/a-ve...

Why does Ursula Le Guin keep coming up in these posts?

Does she really have that big of a tech following?

When I see articles like this, I assume it's part of a publicity campaign for an upcoming movie.

Like how we saw so many articles about Oppenheimer before the movie. Even some legit news was likely part of the PR campaign - such as the DOE "pardoning" Oppenheimer.

Am I just cynical and jaded?

She's one of the most influential science fiction writers of all time, of course she has a tech following.

Haven't read that one. While my crowd also went to Hain and Earthsea, Robert Anton Wilson's "Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy" is what I recall really got us interested in this idea.

Why would we be thankful for that? It was meant as an ironic illustration that highlighted some fundamental issue with our theories about quantum states.

However irony never survives popularization and it instead it became the opposite in popular discourse.

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