/sci/ - Science & Math

Only from the point of view of a first year philosophy student. The laws of physics don't require an object to be in one state or another until their state is resolved, which means that being in superposition isn't contradictory.

>>1219389
so its not in two places (or superimposed) its "indeterminate"?

>>1219389
..then quantum computers wouldn't work
superposition means it's in both states and the cat is really dead and alive until you open the box, well at least that's what quantum mechanics says

OP is trying to find logic when there is none

if you don't believe me right now OP
read about Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation ( or LASERs) how exactly do they work and why they work
if you're still not convinced read about the Bose-Einstein Condensate

>>1219401
>the cat is really dead and alive until you open the box, well at least that's what quantum mechanics says
Another person that doesn't Schrödinger's thought experiment and what he wanted to say with it.

>>1219485
>>1219485
>person that doesn't Schrödinger's thought experiment

inb4 "i accidentally the whole coca cola bottle"

it should be
>person that doesn't understand Schrödinger's thought experiment

>>1219485
yea Schrödinger wanted to show how ridiculous the Copenhagen double slit experiment's outcome was. but the origin of the idea does not necessarily discredit it.

>>1219476
so you'r saying logical absolutes aren't (absolute)?

ITT: MYSTERIES

>>1219509
/cruise control

>>1219485
you get it all wrong i was making fun of quantum mechanics but particles really do act like they're in a superposition states it may have other reasons as Schrodinger sugests

but still quantum computers work even in their infancy they work and they would not be able to work if there was no superposition
and experiments like the double slit experiment or the interferometer show that superposition is real (maybe it doesn't work exactly as QM describes it but it does work)

FOUR years ago, a particle accelerator in France detected six particles that should not exist (see Ghost in the atom). They are called tetraneutrons: four neutrons that are bound together in a way that defies the laws of physics.

Francisco Miguel Marquès and colleagues at the Ganil accelerator in Caen are now gearing up to do it again. If they succeed, these clusters may oblige us to rethink the forces that hold atomic nuclei together.

The team fired beryllium nuclei at a small carbon target and analysed the debris that shot into surrounding particle detectors. They expected to see evidence for four separate neutrons hitting their detectors. Instead the Ganil team found just one flash of light in one detector. And the energy of this flash suggested that four neutrons were arriving together at the detector. Of course, their finding could have been an accident: four neutrons might just have arrived in the same place at the same time by coincidence. But that's ridiculously improbable.

Not as improbable as tetraneutrons, some might say, because in the standard model of particle physics tetraneutrons simply can't exist. According to the Pauli exclusion principle, not even two protons or neutrons in the same system can have identical quantum properties. In fact, the strong nuclear force that would hold them together is tuned in such a way that it can't even hold two lone neutrons together, let alone four. Marquès and his team were so bemused by their result that they buried the data in a research paper that was ostensibly about the possibility of finding tetraneutrons in the future (Physical Review C, vol 65, p 44006).

>>1219401
both or neither?
I'm not nitpicking I'm honestly curious...

>>1219383
I cry foul! That cat's ears are still up, it is clearly still alive.

Stupid Question: Isn't the cat an observer as well?

The Wow signal

IT WAS 37 seconds long and came from outer space. On 15 August 1977 it caused astronomer Jerry Ehman, then of Ohio State University in Columbus, to scrawl "Wow!" on the printout from Big Ear, Ohio State's radio telescope in Delaware. And 28 years later no one knows what created the signal. "I am still waiting for a definitive explanation that makes sense," Ehman says.

Coming from the direction of Sagittarius, the pulse of radiation was confined to a narrow range of radio frequencies around 1420 megahertz. This frequency is in a part of the radio spectrum in which all transmissions are prohibited by international agreement. Natural sources of radiation, such as the thermal emissions from planets, usually cover a much broader sweep of frequencies. So what caused it?

The nearest star in that direction is 220 light years away. If that is where is came from, it would have had to be a pretty powerful astronomical event - or an advanced alien civilisation using an astonishingly large and powerful transmitter.

The fact that hundreds of sweeps over the same patch of sky have found nothing like the Wow signal doesn't mean it's not aliens. When you consider the fact that the Big Ear telescope covers only one-millionth of the sky at any time, and an alien transmitter would also likely beam out over the same fraction of sky, the chances of spotting the signal again are remote, to say the least.

>>1219543
it's probably a mistake or faulty equipment

>>1219562
The cat is disinterested by this experiment and has decided to take a nap.

We could try using dogs, but their handwriting is terrible.

>>1219547
both (according to QM)
of course a cat can't be dead and alive at the same time

The horizon problem

OUR universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you'll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.

This "horizon problem" is a big headache for cosmologists, so big that they have come up with some pretty wild solutions. "Inflation", for example.

You can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expand ultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang, blowing up by a factor of 10^50 in 10^-33 seconds. But is that just wishful thinking? "Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred," says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees.

So, in effect, inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another. A variation in the speed of light could also solve the horizon problem - but this too is impotent in the face of the question "why?" In scientific terms, the uniform temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly.

>>1219562Stupid Question: Isn't the cat an observer as well?

The mechanism that releases poison gas would be an observer as well. It's merely a thought experiment to try to describe how absurd the behavior of particles is.

>>1219561
>I cry foul! That cat is clearly still alive.

The cat is a Libertarian.
It's dead on the inside.

Ultra-energetic cosmic rays

FOR more than a decade, physicists in Japan have been seeing cosmic rays that should not exist. Cosmic rays are particles - mostly protons but sometimes heavy atomic nuclei - that travel through the universe at close to the speed of light. Some cosmic rays detected on Earth are produced in violent events such as supernovae, but we still don't know the origins of the highest-energy particles, which are the most energetic particles ever seen in nature. But that's not the real mystery.

As cosmic-ray particles travel through space, they lose energy in collisions with the low-energy photons that pervade the universe, such as those of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Einstein's special theory of relativity dictates that any cosmic rays reaching Earth from a source outside our galaxy will have suffered so many energy-shedding collisions that their maximum possible energy is 5 × 1019 electronvolts. This is known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit.

However, the University of Tokyo's 111 particle detectors spread out over 100 square kilometres have detected several cosmic rays above the GZK limit. In theory, they can only have come from within our galaxy, avoiding an energy-sapping journey across the cosmos. However, astronomers can find no source for these cosmic rays in our galaxy. So what is going on?

One possibility is that there is something wrong with the Akeno results. Another is that Einstein was wrong. His special theory of relativity says that space is the same in all directions, but what if particles found it easier to move in certain directions? Then the cosmic rays could retain more of their energy, allowing them to beat the GZK limit.

Are quarks and leptons actually fundamental, or are they made up of even more fundamental particles?

Presently it is not known whether quarks and leptons are elementary or compound particles. Physicists have become more careful with announcing the fundamentality of particles after having learned that atoms, atom cores, and finally protons and neutrons are divisible. What is more, quarks and leptons are so small that they may be thought of as geometrical points in space with no spatial extension at all. This is perhaps not as miraculous as it first sounds, because after having learned from Rutherford's model that the volume of an atom is mostly made of "empty" space, it would not be too surprising to find out that matter is in fact nothing but empty space.

While the currernt standard model of matter provides a good description of the phenomena observed in experiments, the model is still incomplete. It can explain the behaviour of particles fairly well, but it cannot explain why some particles exist as they do. For example, it has been impossible to predict the mass of the top quark accurately from theoretical inference until it was determined experimentally. As mentioned before, the standard model of matter does not provide any mathematical model that allows us to calculate the observed mass.

Another question concerns the fact that there are three families of quarks and leptons. Of the three families (or generations) of particles, only the first is stable, namely that of up/down quarks, e-neutrinos, and electrons. There seems to be no need for the other two generations in the natural world, yet they exist. Theoretical physics has no explanation for the existence of the two unstable generations.

>>1219597
But then the cat would be dead for BOTH outcomes!

>>1219598
Rays probably move through high concentrations of dark matter.

>>1219668
>dark matter

TAKE our best understanding of gravity, apply it to the way galaxies spin, and you'll quickly see the problem: the galaxies should be falling apart. Galactic matter orbits around a central point because its mutual gravitational attraction creates centripetal forces. But there is not enough mass in the galaxies to produce the observed spin.

Vera Rubin, an astronomer working at the Carnegie Institution's department of terrestrial magnetism in Washington DC, spotted this anomaly in the late 1970s. The best response from physicists was to suggest there is more stuff out there than we can see. The trouble was, nobody could explain what this "dark matter" was.

And they still can't. Although researchers have made many suggestions about what kind of particles might make up dark matter, there is no consensus. It's an embarrassing hole in our understanding. Astronomical observations suggest that dark matter must make up about 90 per cent of the mass in the universe, yet we are astonishingly ignorant what that 90 per cent is.

Maybe we can't work out what dark matter is because it doesn't actually exist. That's certainly the way Rubin would like it to turn out. "If I could have my pick, I would like to learn that Newton's laws must be modified in order to correctly describe gravitational interactions at large distances," she says. "That's more appealing than a universe filled with a new kind of sub-nuclear particle."

>>1219660
Of course. Libertarians always ruin things for everyone else.

>>1219668
and the dark matter cluster is so placed that it deflects with its gravity some of the heavier x-ray particles so that they don't meet as much low energy photons emited by the neighboring galaxy clusters as usual

yeah sounds improbabble and this does not account for the background radiation but it can always have been something else we haven't seen/predicted yet..

>>1219724
me again noticed an error not x-ray particles but cosmic particles**

Dark Matter: "Our mathematical model doesn't fit, let's change the universe!"

What if we waited a couple days and then started to smell the decaying corpse?


quantum mechanics is stupid.

>>1219839
Presumably the box involved here is airtight and neutrino-impenetrable.

>>1219839
The cat experiment is not supposed to be a real experiment, it's a poorly done thought experiment to try to describe quantum behavior to the uneducated masses. It's so often misunderstood even Schroedinger regretted inventing it.

>>1219861
>neutrino-impenetrable.

>>1219861
>>1219902
So long as the neutrinos don't interact with the cat they aren't really an issue.

bump

>>1219930
The neutrinos could try interacting with the cat, but it would just pretend not to notice them.

>>1219861
>neutrino-impenetrable