Spooky Cousins at a Distance
Join Rob and guestblogger, Thomas Kennedy, on AFM*Radio’s Event Horizon this Friday night, July 16, at 9pm EDT (that’s Saturday, 0100 UT) for a special Quantum Leap feature. Rob and Thomas, formally co-hosts of Slooh Radio’s Quantum Leap series, will discuss the latest in cosmology and astrophysics, offer tips on understanding entanglement and envisioning Higg’s Boson and Higg’s Field, and will even answer questions from the AFM chatroom and Twitter.
Guest author, Thomas Kennedy, features a twice-monthly series, Quantum Leap, wherein he guides readers through the fascinating world of quantum mechanics. This is issue 016.
Of all of the interesting paradoxes in quantum mechanics, perhaps the most publicly discussed is the notion of multiple states of reality, all possible outcomes, all at the same time, until the event is observed. Such is the nature of the discussion regarding the world’s most famous feline, “Schrodinger’s cat.”
I’ll start with a basic discussion of the Copenhagen Interpretation as defined by Wiki. “In the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, a system stops being a superposition of states and becomes either one or the other when an observation takes place. This experiment makes apparent the fact that the nature of measurement, or observation, is not well-defined in this interpretation. The experiment can be interpreted to mean that while the box is closed, the system simultaneously exists in a superposition of the states “decayed nucleus/dead cat” and “undecayed nucleus/living cat”, and that only when the box is opened and an observation performed does the wave function collapse into one of the two states. An alternate view is that the “observation” is taken when a particle from the nucleus hits the detector. This line of thinking can be developed into objective collapse theories. In contrast, the many worlds approach denies that collapse ever occurs.”
The nature of the thought experiment is relatively well known. According to Schrodinger, “One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of the hour, one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges, and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives, if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.”
So where does this leave the cat? Tune in next time…
Watch for Issue 017 of Thomas’ “Quantum Leap”, on July 23, 2010.
You can access all previous issues of “Quantum Leap”, here.
Guest author, Thomas Kennedy, features a twice-monthly series, Quantum Leap, wherein he guides readers through the fascinating world of quantum mechanics. This is issue 015.
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As many of my readers know, I’ve repeatedly challenged the notion of both Dark Matter and Dark Energy as variables in the discussion regarding both the issue of angular momentum in galaxies for DM and the expansion of the Universe under DE.
Well, though the two concepts are seemingly unrelated, although I tend to find both arguments vacuous, the first nail in the DM coffin was reported on May 5th in Scientific America. I’ll excerpt the following from writer John Matson …
“An experiment looking for the signal of dark matter deep in an underground lab in Italy turned up no candidate signals in 11 days of early operation, the experimental collaboration reported in a paper posted online Monday. The underground detector, called XENON100, only recently began taking data but is already challenging prior claims and hints of dark matter signals, according to the team, which published its findings on the physics preprint repository arXiv.org.
Guest author, Thomas Kennedy, features a twice-monthly series, Quantum Leap, wherein he guides readers through the fascinating world of quantum mechanics. This is issue 014.
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*This issue is continued from Issue 013, “Chemistry“
In 1928, Paul Dirac produced equations which predicted an unthinkable thing at the time – a positive charged electron. He did not accept his own theory at the time. In 1932, in experiments with cosmic rays, Carl Anderson discovered the anti-electron, which proved Dirac’s equations. Physicists call it the positron.
For each variety of matter, there should exist a corresponding ‘opposite’ or antimatter. Physicists now know that antimatter exists. However, because matter and antimatter annihilate whenever they come in contact, antimatter does not stay around for very long. (By the way, an unsolved problem remains as to why the universe consists of mostly regular matter and not an equal amount of antimatter. Physicists call this “symmetry breaking”.)
There exists not only anti-electrons, but in 1955, physicists found the anti-proton, and later, the anti-neutron. This allows the existence for anti-atoms, a true form of antimatter.
Guest author, Thomas Kennedy, features a twice-monthly series, Quantum Leap, wherein he guides readers through the fascinating world of quantum mechanics. This is issue 013.
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*This issue is continued from Issue 012, “Uncertainty“
Note: Just as no map can equal a territory, no concept of an atom can possibly equal its nature. These models of the atom simply served as a way of thinking about them, albeit they contained limitations, as all models do.
Although the mathematical concept of the atom got better, the visual concept of the atom got worse. Regardless, even simplistic visual models can still prove useful. Chemists usually describe the atom as a simple solar system model similar to Bohr’s model, but without the different orbit shapes. The important emphasis for chemistry medium attempts to show the groupings of electrons in orbital shells. (The example above shows the first eleven elements.)
Guest author, Thomas Kennedy, features a twice-monthly series, Quantum Leap, wherein he guides readers through the fascinating world of quantum mechanics. This is issue 011.
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(Continued from issue 010 – Charge!)
But there appeared something terribly wrong with Rutherford’s model of the atom. The theory of electricity and magnetism predicted that opposite charges attract each other and the electrons should gradually lose energy and spiral inward. Moreover, physicists reasoned that the atoms should give off a rainbow of colors as they do so. But no experiment could verify this rainbow.
In 1912 a Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, came up with a theory that said the electrons do not spiral into the nucleus and came up with some rules for what does happen. (This began a new approach to science because, for the first time, rules had to fit the observation regardless of how they conflicted with the theories of the time.)
Date: 11/01/2009 Views: 90
