“Red Dwarf” is *supposed* to be lame. (Maybe you have to be a Brit to appreciate how important lameness is to a lot of “our” comedy.)

Put me in a chamber that cold and hit me with photons and I guarantee I’d display some unusual properties.

The ‘Schrodinger Cat’ work I did in grad school was based on a similar priniciple. Some researchers in Germany (collaborating with my then-advisor) had created a facility in which you could shoot an atom through a very very very cold chamber and hit it with a small number of photons that could cause a transition. Then you’d measure the atom’s state as it exited the chamber. So do this to a bunch of atoms one at a time and plot the distribution. It falls into a strange function that’s doesn’t match newtonian physics–purely a quantum based probability wave function. It really is a “cat” in the sense that the probability function is a mixture of “did interact” and “didn’t interact.”

The thing that made it interesting was–you could shoot 10 atoms into the chamber at the same time and get the same quantum based probability function. So the question-that-matters-only-to-theoretical-physicists was–how big of an ensemble of atoms could you force to stay in a purely quantum state?

Basically, I walked away convinced that a mesoscale “Schrodinger Cat” (that displayed properties of both photon-atom interaction and non-interaction simultaneously) was indeed possible. However, we’re talking very very unusual controlled circumstances. Much like B-E. Not something you or I are ever likely to encounter in our daily lives.

I’ll wait till Steven goes back to New Age myths about enlightenment, like, aren’t we supposed to be All Happy All the Time?

*ducking*

I tried watching “Red Dwarf” last night, which is using some kind of traveling at the speed of light does this and does that kinda thing, but it was lame. Any *good* science fiction TV series I missed that I would enjoy?

~ Stacy

Anyway, a very interesting post. Thanks.

Glad I was able to help.

People don’t get the collapse of a wave function. And the metaphors demonstrate that they don’t get the effect of combining multiple wave functions, either.

Who cares if the probability wave suggests that, mathematically, an electron *could* be anywhere in the universe? That doesn’t mean “everything is one” or “we’re all connected.” And it especially doesn’t mean that *this* electron will suddenly be on the other side of the universe. That electron is most likely pretty close to where we think it is. And once you add in more electrons (and protons and neutrons and the like), the odds of some macro-sized object being anywhere other than exactly where it is becomes infinitely small (small at a quantum scale? ).

Or, “scientific” New Agers use “strange/spooky action at a distance” to say “we’re all connected,” even though that effect takes place in a highly unusual artificial environment… and if the particles interact with ANYTHING prior to measurement, the magic trick is ruined… and, it sure seems particles interact in the macro world. So there goes that.

And thanks for bringing up Shrodinger’s Mysterious Felines… another QP concept that’s taken WAY out of context in New Agistan.

What floors me is how really smart people can make these massive logical leaps. I’ll save for another post how giddy the New Age has become over some of the things coming from John Wheeler which sounds like he’s agreeing with The Secret. Ah, but I’ll save “Smart People are Idiots” for another post

BTW, I’m in Boulder, where they’ve done lots of cool B-E experiments — pun intended (for those who don’t know, some of this research takes place at near-absolute zero).

Well, I think the real mystery/complication of quantum mechanics is the change in probability functions. Of course, I did spend a year as a quantum optical physicist studying quantum states that, like Bose-Einstein condensate, are ways of making groups of atoms demonstrate quantum properties. We called them Schrodinger Cats.

But again, Schrodinger Cats are a mystery that new age folks often misunderstand. The question/mystery is *when* does a probability convert to a definite event? When the dice are tossed at the craps table, because at that point, the imparted forces, air resistance, and table friction will determine the final number? When the dice stop rolling? When the people around the table see them? When the guy at the next table hears the cheers?

When, exactly, is *now*? Because probability is a ‘guess at the future’ and at some point that ‘future’ stops becoming a probability and becomes a definitive event. And that moment is damn hard to pin down in the quantum world.