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ad interim
Aug. 10th, 2010 10:52 amI haven't yet taken a few posts out of friends-only status that deal with the topic that is developed further in my "How Things Work, part six," so perhaps it is for the best that (for reasons having to do with balky and antiquated equipment, the present writer included in that category) I can't transfer that post to my office computer from the storage media I brought with me.
I've been meaning, at some point, to grumble that I wish that people would learn that Einstein's "spooky action at a distance" was meant to condemn the hypothesis he was talking about, not to praise it, just as Schrödinger's cat was a parable invented to condemn the logical incoherence of the hypothesis he was resisting.
I happen to think that the data go against Einstein's common sense and against Schrödinger's, but the point of both regarding the phenomenon that Schrödinger termed "entanglement" was that the data suggested such incredibly strange conclusions that it was necessary to proceed very carefully with the interpretation, in order to avoid spouting complete nonsense.
This is the case with much of the data in other fields of inquiry, as well. The more so in that the data in question can't be reduced to mathematical equations or made susceptible to unequivocal experimentation.
Incidentally, I had never before noticed that Schrödinger's cat first appeared in his essay "The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics" in Naturwissenschaften in November 1935, a moment in history when a good many other present situations were taking precedence in the world at large.
Schrödinger, who according to Wikipedia retained throughout his life his early interest "in color theory, philosophy, perception, and eastern religion, especially Hindu Vedanta," was involved in troublesome tenure issues at the time and was floating between the worlds in several possible meanings of that metaphor. I had never really tried to explore Schrödinger's state of mind at the time when he devised, more or less as what seems to be an offhand illustration, his famous thought experiment that has had both such productive and such deleterious consequences for contemporary inquiry.
I am delighted to discover, because no one ever quotes the original or its translation when they tell the story, that Schrödinger further uses a photographic analogy to clarify what he means by his cat in a box: "It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a 'blurred model' for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks." Color theory, perception....
Curiouser and curiouser. This was originally going to be a two-sentence note, and I am going to stop.
I've been meaning, at some point, to grumble that I wish that people would learn that Einstein's "spooky action at a distance" was meant to condemn the hypothesis he was talking about, not to praise it, just as Schrödinger's cat was a parable invented to condemn the logical incoherence of the hypothesis he was resisting.
I happen to think that the data go against Einstein's common sense and against Schrödinger's, but the point of both regarding the phenomenon that Schrödinger termed "entanglement" was that the data suggested such incredibly strange conclusions that it was necessary to proceed very carefully with the interpretation, in order to avoid spouting complete nonsense.
This is the case with much of the data in other fields of inquiry, as well. The more so in that the data in question can't be reduced to mathematical equations or made susceptible to unequivocal experimentation.
Incidentally, I had never before noticed that Schrödinger's cat first appeared in his essay "The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics" in Naturwissenschaften in November 1935, a moment in history when a good many other present situations were taking precedence in the world at large.
Schrödinger, who according to Wikipedia retained throughout his life his early interest "in color theory, philosophy, perception, and eastern religion, especially Hindu Vedanta," was involved in troublesome tenure issues at the time and was floating between the worlds in several possible meanings of that metaphor. I had never really tried to explore Schrödinger's state of mind at the time when he devised, more or less as what seems to be an offhand illustration, his famous thought experiment that has had both such productive and such deleterious consequences for contemporary inquiry.
I am delighted to discover, because no one ever quotes the original or its translation when they tell the story, that Schrödinger further uses a photographic analogy to clarify what he means by his cat in a box: "It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a 'blurred model' for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks." Color theory, perception....
Curiouser and curiouser. This was originally going to be a two-sentence note, and I am going to stop.
