Friday 2 March 2012

Guest Blogger: Box in a Cat by Loki

Ah, meant for it to show up on Friday, but it's already Saturday...

Anyways, I decided to have a friend help blog on my page! That person's post will hopefully go up on Friday, since I'm mostly out on Fridays for "Bro Night". My friend would prefer to be called Loki, rather than their original name. I known Loki for about... 8 years now. We met in high school (English class I believe!). Anyways, here is Loki's first post on my blog! It serves as an introduction for whats to come in the next following weeks! 


Box In a Cat
Prodigious philosophers and scientists throughout time have dedicated their lives in hope of a chance to one day peek behind the grand curtain of the majestic universe and witness all its wonders in secret. I am neither a philosopher nor do I have a science degree but similar to those philosophers and scientists I am embarked on the same epic journey to possibly nowhere. If you are like the billions of other who are fascinated by mind boggling philosophical conundrums and enthralling existentialist ideals and hopping to read about my epic odyssey then you are out of luck. Instead, this blog will be dedicated to the small things along the way that I find interesting.

The title of this blog is inspired by Erwin Schrödinger; the man who contemplated on murdering cats in the name of science. For those of you who haven`t tried or heard about this kind of animal abuse, the idea is to lock a cat inside a perfectly sealed box with a poison releasing mechanism. This mechanism that releases the lethal poison is trigger by the decay of a radioactive substance. Longs story short, based on quantum mechanics, the decay of this radioactive substance is completely random. This means that since nothing gets in or out of the box (Sound, Light, Air etc.), there is no way to indicate whether the cat is dead or alive a second later or a week later. This paradox is used to illustrate the idea that because there is no observer observing the cat in the box, the cat exists in a superposition of states where it can be considered both dead and alive or sort of dead and half alive. Although it might be awfully frustrating to not be able to tell for sure whether the cat is dead or alive inside this box, it is certainly comforting to know with high degree of certainty that in reality (based on common sense) the cat will be dead in under five minutes.

This experiment is inspired by the discussion from the famous EPR article. It tries to bring ideas derived from quantum experiments to the bigger world. The experiment inspired many new ideas such as theory of multiverse and brought mankind one step closer to nowhere. In honor of Schrödinger`s cat and the pursuit of the imagery ultimate truth of the universe I name this blog within a blog the Box In a Cat. I hope that together, we can use this blog to bring to light and discuss many obscure and interesting things in life.

Q: If a box is placed inside of a cat and no one looks at it, is it dead or alive


(I do not know why the picture is so small...)

EDIT: Am I on PT here?... It still says it's Friday!

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