![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
htpcl.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
talkpoliticsGreetings, my fellow science laymen curious minds. Here's a quote which is symptomatic for my society for the last couple of decades. "In 2011 the professional self-realization and family reasons have ceased being the number one motive for emigration, which means that people have probably lost their illusions. Half of the polled answered that they simply do not wish to keep living in Bulgaria. Those amount to roughly 200,000 people." - from a research by the Institute of Economic Researches at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
Here's the deal. You put a cat in a box, then close the lid. There's a mechanism inside containing a radioactive nucleus connected to a tank full of poisonous gas. The probability that the nucleus would decay after an hour is exactly 50/50%. If it decays, it triggers the mechanism, the gas is released in the box and the cat dies. If it doesn't, nothing happens and in an hour you take out a perfectly living cat. Simple.
Yeah, that's Schrödinger's famous cat, Mr Wrinkles (I made that up myself 'cos I like the name). In 1933 he got a Nobel for his equations (not Mr Wrinkles, Schrödinger that is; the cat got a yearly subscription for cheezburger delivery). But he'll be remembered forever for his thought experiment demonstrating the concept of "superposition", i.e. the mixing of two possible states of existence.
During this hour while the cat is inside the box, it's equally possible that the trigger nucleus has decayed, and that it hasn't. Only when you open the box you'll know for sure what really happened. Until that moment you should consider the cat live-dead.
"But, but, couldn't the cat just run away!?", a particularly smartass student asked. "Yeah sure, but only before you've closed the lid behind it", Schrödinger countered.
Another physicist, Hugh Everett from Princeton went even further, positing that quantum theory could be applied not just to the tiny world but to the macrocosmos, to us, to our lives. Let alone the possibility of existing multiple parallel universes, where the same story could've gone either way. When you open the box, the universe splits into two separate universes, he said. In one of them you're looking with a sad face at a very dead cat, in the other - at a bewildered and very hungry living cat.
"So we're talking of one and the same box and the same cat, right?", a particularly dumb student asked. "Absolutely!", Everett answered.
More than half a century later, physicists have embarked on a tough mission to search for evidence for parallel universes, so far to no avail. They've created the LHC, they're spending billions of Euros and lots of endless day and night hours working on something so abstract, trying to confirm this theory directly or indirectly without even supposing that it has already been put to practice right under their noses... In the Small Hadron Collider™ that is my country.
So, welcome to the Bulgarian Collider. Is life good there? Let's see now. The current director of the Collider, Super-Boiko "Batman" Borisov, a.k.a. Chuck Norris's Sith instructor, has been ruling this Collider for nearly two years (but time is a relative phenomenon as Einstein would tell you). If you ask Master Boiko (and you'd surely have a chance to hear from him, as he spends 26 hours a day talking on the media about how truly great he is), he'd tell you that us elementary particles are living "just fine" inside the Small Collider. I mean, just look at him. He's the exemplary heavy particle after all (probably the Higgs boson itself, a.k.a. I-Am-God Particle). He walks out of bed, spreads jokes on the morning TV shows, then kicks some ball (I mean literally; he's a better soccer player than Hristo Stoichkov, don't you know), then goes to the gym (where he lifts his own weight, unbelievable), then gives out food to people who are not hungry and cuts some ribbons with scissors (seems like a new highway or hospital is being opened every day, and it's totally, completely thanks to him because he built it himself with these two hands), then he plays some cards with his political opponents in the Parliament, then gives more interviews to reverent journalists, cuts some more ribbons, issues orders, preaches, lectures, flies in a helicopter to extinguish fires (he's a former firefighter). All in all, he's living the perfect, never-ending childhood where he has it all, a moment before he has even decided what he wants. We could therefore conclude that for this man, Mr Wrinkles the cat is most certainly ALIVE.
Now let's look at the rest of them bloody elementary particles. Turns out that the number of particles, eeeh I mean people, who can't wait to emigrate forever from the Collider, has increased three-fold for the last one year alone, i.e. during the term of this cloud-trotting super-director. What's more, they don't wanna leave for economic reasons, not any more. They wanna do it because a heavy sense of impasse, dead-lock, cul-de-sac, meaninglessness, you-name-it, has pressed them and bent them almost to the ground and changed them beyond recognition. For those people, we could argue, Mr Wrinkles is definitely pretty much DEAD.
Both universes are currently co-habiting inside this shared box, just like the two aspects of superposition co-exist in Schrödinger's box, remember? But the cat is only one, and until we remove the lid it's both dead and alive. I repeat: it could've escaped before we had put it there in the first place. But let me add what the physicist himself said: "When you're thinking of this experiment, there's some chance that you could identify yourself with the cat. Please don't do that! Instead, bear in mind what actually you are trying to achieve with this experiment".
Alas, neither Schrödinger nor Everett had known the people/particles inside the Small Hadron Collider, and viceversa. Therefore not only during this particular hour, but for the last 20 years spent in the box, those people have been doing the same mistake: they thought they were the cat. And they were not. They were the particles.
But still, they too, like that cat, were in a superposition of being both dead and alive. Alive - because they still walk on the streets, go to work, throw a cigarette end or two through the window, park their cars on the sidewalk, cross streets at red light... you know, ordinary stuff that we do here. And dead - because they're now lacking the ability to radiate that sense of perspective and future, which is usually a result from a collective effort and energy, which could somehow urge them to stay in the Collider some more.
Meanwhile, thousands of people from the other, neighboring boxes, go out in the street to protest, wherever they feel the urge to show that they still care about their own lives. They chant and sing and whistle and beat pans with spoons. They raise placards saying that they are here and now, and they demand that "those guys up there" should pay attention and take their presence in consideration.
In contrast, in the Small Hadron Collider nearly 200,000 particles are daydreaming of emigrating from this place, while still drowsing on their couch with a cup of popcorn and watching Music Idol, Big Brother or a soapie. Probably 3*x as many have already emigrated to Facebook, or fled to the bottle (usually rakia), or in some rare cases to the library, or into the Chalga clubs, or right into their depression, and ultimately - to a mental institution.
Everett once told his students in Princeton, "I knew a woman who was looking after a cat named Purr. She yelled at me that this thought experiment was disgusting. 'Why a cat? Why not a hamster?', she asked me". I think this shows very clearly the simultaneous lack of will and the lack of critical thinking and worst of all, of imagination.
"Cat or hamster, possum or squirrel, what does it matter? I know lots of synonyms for the word 'resignation', and none of them are of any concern for the little critters. They all apply to the big creatures - us". Thus concluded Everett, and then listed those synonyms:
Comfort, consolation, relief, oblivion, humility, submission, patience, decay, death.
Ps. The above ravings are in result of the incidental absorption of magic mushrooms. All similarities to real persons and situations from our world are to be considered incidental. It has nothing to do with the constant statements by our prime-minister, our minister of culture, our finance minister, etc etc. It was just my imagination, as if for exactly 1 hour I peeked into a dystopian parallel universe. My bad.
Here's the deal. You put a cat in a box, then close the lid. There's a mechanism inside containing a radioactive nucleus connected to a tank full of poisonous gas. The probability that the nucleus would decay after an hour is exactly 50/50%. If it decays, it triggers the mechanism, the gas is released in the box and the cat dies. If it doesn't, nothing happens and in an hour you take out a perfectly living cat. Simple.
Yeah, that's Schrödinger's famous cat, Mr Wrinkles (I made that up myself 'cos I like the name). In 1933 he got a Nobel for his equations (not Mr Wrinkles, Schrödinger that is; the cat got a yearly subscription for cheezburger delivery). But he'll be remembered forever for his thought experiment demonstrating the concept of "superposition", i.e. the mixing of two possible states of existence.
During this hour while the cat is inside the box, it's equally possible that the trigger nucleus has decayed, and that it hasn't. Only when you open the box you'll know for sure what really happened. Until that moment you should consider the cat live-dead.
"But, but, couldn't the cat just run away!?", a particularly smartass student asked. "Yeah sure, but only before you've closed the lid behind it", Schrödinger countered.
Another physicist, Hugh Everett from Princeton went even further, positing that quantum theory could be applied not just to the tiny world but to the macrocosmos, to us, to our lives. Let alone the possibility of existing multiple parallel universes, where the same story could've gone either way. When you open the box, the universe splits into two separate universes, he said. In one of them you're looking with a sad face at a very dead cat, in the other - at a bewildered and very hungry living cat.
"So we're talking of one and the same box and the same cat, right?", a particularly dumb student asked. "Absolutely!", Everett answered.
More than half a century later, physicists have embarked on a tough mission to search for evidence for parallel universes, so far to no avail. They've created the LHC, they're spending billions of Euros and lots of endless day and night hours working on something so abstract, trying to confirm this theory directly or indirectly without even supposing that it has already been put to practice right under their noses... In the Small Hadron Collider™ that is my country.
So, welcome to the Bulgarian Collider. Is life good there? Let's see now. The current director of the Collider, Super-Boiko "Batman" Borisov, a.k.a. Chuck Norris's Sith instructor, has been ruling this Collider for nearly two years (but time is a relative phenomenon as Einstein would tell you). If you ask Master Boiko (and you'd surely have a chance to hear from him, as he spends 26 hours a day talking on the media about how truly great he is), he'd tell you that us elementary particles are living "just fine" inside the Small Collider. I mean, just look at him. He's the exemplary heavy particle after all (probably the Higgs boson itself, a.k.a. I-Am-God Particle). He walks out of bed, spreads jokes on the morning TV shows, then kicks some ball (I mean literally; he's a better soccer player than Hristo Stoichkov, don't you know), then goes to the gym (where he lifts his own weight, unbelievable), then gives out food to people who are not hungry and cuts some ribbons with scissors (seems like a new highway or hospital is being opened every day, and it's totally, completely thanks to him because he built it himself with these two hands), then he plays some cards with his political opponents in the Parliament, then gives more interviews to reverent journalists, cuts some more ribbons, issues orders, preaches, lectures, flies in a helicopter to extinguish fires (he's a former firefighter). All in all, he's living the perfect, never-ending childhood where he has it all, a moment before he has even decided what he wants. We could therefore conclude that for this man, Mr Wrinkles the cat is most certainly ALIVE.
Now let's look at the rest of them bloody elementary particles. Turns out that the number of particles, eeeh I mean people, who can't wait to emigrate forever from the Collider, has increased three-fold for the last one year alone, i.e. during the term of this cloud-trotting super-director. What's more, they don't wanna leave for economic reasons, not any more. They wanna do it because a heavy sense of impasse, dead-lock, cul-de-sac, meaninglessness, you-name-it, has pressed them and bent them almost to the ground and changed them beyond recognition. For those people, we could argue, Mr Wrinkles is definitely pretty much DEAD.
Both universes are currently co-habiting inside this shared box, just like the two aspects of superposition co-exist in Schrödinger's box, remember? But the cat is only one, and until we remove the lid it's both dead and alive. I repeat: it could've escaped before we had put it there in the first place. But let me add what the physicist himself said: "When you're thinking of this experiment, there's some chance that you could identify yourself with the cat. Please don't do that! Instead, bear in mind what actually you are trying to achieve with this experiment".
Alas, neither Schrödinger nor Everett had known the people/particles inside the Small Hadron Collider, and viceversa. Therefore not only during this particular hour, but for the last 20 years spent in the box, those people have been doing the same mistake: they thought they were the cat. And they were not. They were the particles.
But still, they too, like that cat, were in a superposition of being both dead and alive. Alive - because they still walk on the streets, go to work, throw a cigarette end or two through the window, park their cars on the sidewalk, cross streets at red light... you know, ordinary stuff that we do here. And dead - because they're now lacking the ability to radiate that sense of perspective and future, which is usually a result from a collective effort and energy, which could somehow urge them to stay in the Collider some more.
Meanwhile, thousands of people from the other, neighboring boxes, go out in the street to protest, wherever they feel the urge to show that they still care about their own lives. They chant and sing and whistle and beat pans with spoons. They raise placards saying that they are here and now, and they demand that "those guys up there" should pay attention and take their presence in consideration.
In contrast, in the Small Hadron Collider nearly 200,000 particles are daydreaming of emigrating from this place, while still drowsing on their couch with a cup of popcorn and watching Music Idol, Big Brother or a soapie. Probably 3*x as many have already emigrated to Facebook, or fled to the bottle (usually rakia), or in some rare cases to the library, or into the Chalga clubs, or right into their depression, and ultimately - to a mental institution.
Everett once told his students in Princeton, "I knew a woman who was looking after a cat named Purr. She yelled at me that this thought experiment was disgusting. 'Why a cat? Why not a hamster?', she asked me". I think this shows very clearly the simultaneous lack of will and the lack of critical thinking and worst of all, of imagination.
"Cat or hamster, possum or squirrel, what does it matter? I know lots of synonyms for the word 'resignation', and none of them are of any concern for the little critters. They all apply to the big creatures - us". Thus concluded Everett, and then listed those synonyms:
Comfort, consolation, relief, oblivion, humility, submission, patience, decay, death.
Ps. The above ravings are in result of the incidental absorption of magic mushrooms. All similarities to real persons and situations from our world are to be considered incidental. It has nothing to do with the constant statements by our prime-minister, our minister of culture, our finance minister, etc etc. It was just my imagination, as if for exactly 1 hour I peeked into a dystopian parallel universe. My bad.
(no subject)
Date: 19/5/11 13:36 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/5/11 13:45 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/5/11 14:23 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/5/11 14:29 (UTC)"The world looks much clearer when seen through the bottom of an empty bottle". -- from a very wise co-drinker.
(no subject)
Date: 19/5/11 23:09 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 20/5/11 06:54 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 20/5/11 15:05 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/5/11 14:51 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/5/11 14:52 (UTC)(
Also I like to run naked in the forest at full moon)(no subject)
Date: 19/5/11 17:02 (UTC)Under L sez:
Date: 19/5/11 15:04 (UTC)Re: Under L sez:
Date: 19/5/11 16:56 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/5/11 15:13 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/5/11 16:55 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/5/11 18:37 (UTC)It was originally conceived as a thought experiment to show the ridiculousness of the implications of quantum mechanics. It was more of a reductio ad absurdum.
However in the process he managed to create a method of examining the differing interpretations of quantum mechanics and so his experiment lives on in a much more serious way.
(no subject)
Date: 19/5/11 22:12 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/5/11 20:09 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/5/11 20:13 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/5/11 20:14 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/5/11 20:21 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/5/11 20:23 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/5/11 20:28 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 19/5/11 23:59 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 20/5/11 09:54 (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 20/5/11 11:01 (UTC)