Name: Anonymous 2008-03-22 18:25
OK, so can someone explain to me the difference between these two scenarios:
1 - we do Schroedinger's cat experiment.
2 - we stick a dude in a box with a coin, a cat, and a club, and he kills the fucking cat if the coin flip comes up heads.
Assume that there's no way for information to get out of the box until we actually open it and look inside. In either situation, it seems to me that we've got a 50/50 chance when we open the box of seeing a live versus a dead cat. After the magic moment has passed (one half-life or the dude's flipped the coin), we've got either a dead cat or a live cat, not like 50% of a live cat, we just don't (can't) know which until we actually look.
I've seen people arguing that setup (1) is different because of QUANTUMS, but I've never had it adequately explained to me how a random quantum event is different from any other random event.
1 - we do Schroedinger's cat experiment.
2 - we stick a dude in a box with a coin, a cat, and a club, and he kills the fucking cat if the coin flip comes up heads.
Assume that there's no way for information to get out of the box until we actually open it and look inside. In either situation, it seems to me that we've got a 50/50 chance when we open the box of seeing a live versus a dead cat. After the magic moment has passed (one half-life or the dude's flipped the coin), we've got either a dead cat or a live cat, not like 50% of a live cat, we just don't (can't) know which until we actually look.
I've seen people arguing that setup (1) is different because of QUANTUMS, but I've never had it adequately explained to me how a random quantum event is different from any other random event.