BattleTech - The Board Game of Armored Combat
Off Topic and Technical Support => Off Topic => Topic started by: Weirdo on 05 March 2018, 00:23:18
-
...I just experienced quantum feline attention span. Amulet was staring at Stina, clearly wanting to jump on her lap. On a whim, I started counting when she sat back, to see how long it would take before the cat was on her lap. Instead, he sat there and paid attention to me, apparently wondering what the hell I was up to. By measuring the attention span, I altered it.
-
...I just experienced quantum feline attention span. Amulet was staring at Stina, clearly wanting to jump on her lap. On a whim, I started counting when she sat back, to see how long it would take before the cat was on her lap. Instead, he sat there and paid attention to me, apparently wondering what the hell I was up to. By measuring the attention span, I altered it.
Zug, felines don't fit within the laws of the physical universe, I thought you knew that.
They stand above them on the counter and whack them when they become yappy. :-)
-
Schrodinger knew what he was doing.
-
Schrodinger knew what he was doing.
"Greebo had spent an irritating two minutes in that box. Technically, a cat locked in a box may be alive or it may be dead. You never know until you look. In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious. " Lords and Ladies, Terry Pratchett.
-
"Greebo had spent an irritating two minutes in that box. Technically, a cat locked in a box may be alive or it may be dead. You never know until you look. In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious. " Lords and Ladies, Terry Pratchett.
My favourite:
AND ARE YOU AWARE OF THE THEORY THAT THE STATE OF SOME TINY PARTICLES IS INDETERMINATE UNTIL THE MOMENT THEY ARE OBSERVED? A CAT IN A BOX IS OFTEN MENTIONED.
"Oh, yes," said the philosopher.
GOOD, said Death. He got to his feet as the last of the light died, and smiled.
I SEE YOU...
The chill up your spine when you recall Death's favourite animal :D
-
If memory serves, wasn't Schrodinger actually mocking the idea of quantum uncertainty?
-
Not quite: it was how one shouldn't take into the macroscopic world such things as quantum incertanty, and leave it to atomic scales.
One of the problem faced at the time was bridging the two worlds (with emergence, collapse of wave functions, etc...)
-
As I recall, there's been at least one experiment that was able to bring quantum effects up to a human observable scale. If I can find a link, I'll post it here...
-
It took me long enough, but I found a couple of links that might be interesting to folks around here:
A Nature article from 2010 about a (barely) visible object placed in a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving (http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100317/full/news.2010.130.html).
And here's an Oxford lecture describing quantum mechanics on the human scale (https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/quantum-mechanics-human-scale). It's mostly focused on superconductivity, and the math doesn't really kick in until minute 18 or so. Well worth watching!