• Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyz
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    6 days ago

    It’s refreshing for me, to see someone respected within the academic community, calling superimposition bullshit.

    I always saw the idea that particles were in multiple places at the same time with suspicion; for me it was always more like “you don’t know where the particle is, if you try to measure it you’ll fuck its location up, so you pretend it’s in multiple locations”. It’s useful because, statistically speaking, you won’t notice the difference.

    Applying this to Erwin’s kitty: it’s like you have a bunch of cats. Each is trapped in a separated device, that releases poison depending on the decay of some radioactive atom. You have no clue if any individual cat is alive or dead, but when dealing with all of them, you can say “x% are alive, (100-x)% are dead”. And you apply those proportions to an individual cat, just to make your maths easier: “this cat is x% alive, (100-x)% dead”.

    So it’s an abstraction; and sure, we need abstractions, but we should not confuse them with what is being abstracted.

    I’ll go further. I feel like someone will eventually find a theory that describes accurately small and big, massive and light, fast and slow objects. The so-called theory of unification. Perhaps it might resemble the theory of general relativity from a distance, but it’ll look nothing like QM.

    We have to try to phrase things more precisely to keep public misunderstandings from wreaking havoc on science.

    That’s a losing battle. Assumers gonna assume.

    • enkers@sh.itjust.works
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      6 days ago

      Wasn’t Schrödinger’s cat originally supposed to be a refutation of superposition anyways? Like it literally makes no sense that the cat is simultaneously alive AND dead, and that’s why Schrödinger sent the example in his letter to Einstein.

      It’s wild that it still gets trotted out as an explanation of Copenhagen interpretation to this very day. Total pet peeve. (Pun intended?)

      • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyz
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        6 days ago

        Yup, it is a refutation. But people seem to be eager to ignore reality, to keep things consistent with the bullshit they believe (in this case, the Copenhagen interpretation):

        • what Schrödinger wanted to show - if the cat can’t be dead and alive at the same time, then superimposition is bullshit
        • what people did with the thought experiment - if superimposition is true, the cat is dead and alive at the same time