Schrodinger's LOLcat

[bascule]

Not sure how many of you are familiar with LOLcats but I found this one to be funny:

 

[Phi for All]

Love it!

 

I had the idea once of manufacturing a half-moon shaped can (picture a Bumblebee Tuna can cut in half from the top down, so from above it looks like a D) with the label, "Schrodinger's Cat Food", but the few people I pitched it to looked at me in horror at the thought of 1) retooling to make something so odd, and 2) the limited market for such joke product. They didn't think we could find 100,000 people who would even get the joke, much less pay $10 for it.

[insane_alien]

actually the cat has been observed(camera) so its wavefunction has collapsed and we know that it IS in the box. we don't however know the velocity of the cat though. what you don't see is the red smudge on the side of the box less than a second later.

[GutZ]

wth it has a name?

[Phi for All]

wth it has a name?

wth do you mean?

[GutZ]

wth do you mean?

 

"LOLcat"

 

You know what I mean! Don't try that foolery on me.

[lucaspa]

actually the cat has been observed(camera) so its wavefunction has collapsed and we know that it IS in the box. we don't however know the velocity of the cat though. what you don't see is the red smudge on the side of the box less than a second later.

 

What you have is that this is no longer Shroedinger's Cat. Since you are looking at the cat, you do know whether it is dead or alive. Alive, in this case.

 

"know the velocity of the cat though" is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, not Schroedinger's Cat.

 

However, scientists have constructed a molecular version of Schroedinger's Cat and observed it with a quantum "mouse". It does turn out that the "cat" IS both dead and alive at the same time. Eventually, however, without observation, the waveform does collapse.

 

5. G Taubes, Atomic mouse probes the lifetime of a quantum cat. Science, 274 (6 Dec): 1615, 1996.

6. P Yam, Bringing Schrodinger's cat to life. Scientific American, June, 1997, pp. 124-129. Summary of recent experiments of superposition (coherence) and dechoherence.

[insane_alien]

i know its heisenbergs uncertainty principle. i was keeping in line with the quantum mechanical humour.

[geoguy]

i know its heisenbergs uncertainty principle. i was keeping in line with the quantum mechanical humour.

 

Akin to the uncertainty principle of a comedian not knowing whether a joke is going to be funny or not until it is heard by the audience.

 

Some folks in the audience just 'sort of laugh' because they are uncertain of the punch line....I participate in discussions on the quantum because it's a bravado earning me respect while being in cahoots with diverse geniuses as Einstein and Tweety Bird who didn't quite get the Unertainty Principle either.

 

"I tought I taw a kitty cat...I did...I did"

[lucaspa]

Akin to the uncertainty principle of a comedian not knowing whether a joke is going to be funny or not until it is heard by the audience.

 

No. Uncertainty in quantum mechanics and decoherence (Schrodinger's Cat) are 2 different things:

 

1. Uncertainty refers to the inability to know exactly BOTH parameters of an intertwined pair of parameters, such as the position and momentum of an electron. The more you know the position, the less you know about the momentum, and vice versa.

 

2. Dechoherence is when an object exists in two states at the same time. That is, the cat is BOTH dead and alive at the same time and the cat turns into one or the other upon observation.

 

What you have with the comedian is neither of these. Instead, you have "uncertainty" in the common usage that you simply don't know what the results of the experiment are going to be before you perform it. The joke and the audience response is the experiment.

[Sisyphus]

 

What you have with the comedian is neither of these. Instead, you have "uncertainty" in the common usage that you simply don't know what the results of the experiment are going to be before you perform it. The joke and the audience response is the experiment.

 

Says you. But many comedians believe the pre-joke audience exists as both a good and a bad audience, until interaction with a joke forces the probability function to collapse into one or the other.

[lucaspa]

Says you. But many comedians believe the pre-joke audience exists as both a good and a bad audience, until interaction with a joke forces the probability function to collapse into one or the other.

 

LOL! Well, I suppose that is one way for the comedian to try to save his ego when the joke flops! "It was just how the probability function of the audience happened to collapse; it wasn't that my joke was bad!"