Schrodinger's cat is dead.

 What could possibly lend legitimacy to a new blog more than a discussion of quantum mechanics, complete with contributions from not two but three Nobel Prize winning physicists and of course, my own two cents worth, which by the end of this blog post, you may decide deserves a penny in change back.

                        *******************************************************

 I'm ok with not knowing stuff.  There are way more things I don't know and never will know than those that have managed to stick with me.  And, as I said, that's just fine with me.  But all that stuff I don't know or have never seen still exists.  Or does it?  Well, of course it does, for there are others who have themselves seen, felt, or learned it.  But is that the only reason those things exist?  Well, it turns out there are some really smart people who think so.  They are physicists who have won Nobel Prizes and have  institutes named after them...and I don't agree with them.

 Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, among others, advanced what is known as the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics.  They were interested mostly at the time with particle research.  With regard to particles that had not been or could not be observed, said particles exist in all possible states until observed.  My summary is this - A thing doesn't exist until a human sees and ideally measures it.

 Along came another physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, who, like me, felt that a thing does not have to be directly observed to in fact exist.  He proposed a thought experiment intended to point out the limits of the Copenhagen Interpretation.  Again, it is a thought experiment - which came to be known as Schrodinger's Cat. No actual cats were harmed. Why he picked a cat, I don't know.  Maybe he was a dog person.  Simply stated, and simplified from the many details of his actual experiment, a cat is placed in a sealed box with a kind of time release poison which is sure to disperse at a given point.  All the bases were covered, as in enough poison to be lethal,  an indicator that the poison was dispersed, etc.  At a certain point, there could be no argument, Schrodinger said, that the cat was indeed dead even though it was in a sealed box and could not be directly observed as being either alive or dead.  Keep in mind that Heisenberg and Bohr et al would have sat right there saying that the cat was both alive and dead until someone cracked out a box cutter.

 What got me thinking about this again recently was a beautiful image of deep space sent back to earth by that wonder of telescopic photography, the Hubble Telescope.  I think you know where I'm going here. Checkmate, Heisenberg!  Would you actually argue that our universe and all that's in it is being created in a sense by the Hubble Telescope?  Are galaxies being born of our ability to observe them for the first time? Really?  I'm sorry, but the idea that only in human observation does a thing exist just feels like another example of human arrogance.  We are so very tiny compared to all that there is.  And only a tiny part of all that there is will ever be seen or even imagined by humankind - and they're doing quite well without us.

                        ******************************************************

 Anyone who knows me from my school days is either laughing out loud or rolling their eyes, as I probably begged and cheated my way to any passing grade ever received in higher mathematics and never even took physics.

So you can pretty much blame my friend Vance for all this...

Some thirty years ago Vance tried explaining to me some concepts of quantum mechanics and a smattering of other physics related stuff that apparently made complete sense to him, which is both cool and not at all surprising.  The only sliver of it that I remember was the bit about Schrodinger's Cat.  It's bugged me ever since.  Well, that, and the dropping something out of the window of a moving car thing, but I am not even going there...