Friday, February 24, 2012

Schrodinger's cat....An Experiment, An Analogy


I read about this yesterday and I found it very interesting. Lets start with what exactly it is. 


Erwin Schrödinger, A Physicist, in 1935 conducted a Quantum Physics experiment, here is what he did.


This is a Hypothetical experiment that he conducted. We place a living cat into a steel chamber, along with a device containing a vial of hydrocyanic acid. There is, in the chamber, a very small amount of hydrocyanic acid, a radioactive substance. If even a single atom of the substance decays during the given test period, a relay mechanism will trip a hammer, which will, in turn, break the vial and kill the cat. Now comes the interesting part. The person sitting outside (The Observer) will never know, until he opens the box as to what is the fate of the cat. He would never know if the atom substance has decayed, and hence cannot know whether the vial has been broken, the hydrocyanic acid released, and the cat killed.


Since we cannot know the fate of the cat, as per Quantum Law, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time and this is called the superposition of states. If only we open the steal chamber, and peep inside, we would know whether the atom decayed, the acid leaked, the hammer smashed and the cat died or not. Which would make it clear and then we would have a clear fate of the cat.

So in other words, the observation or the measurement itself will affect the outcome and the outcome itself, on its own will not exist, and there will be no single outcome until the observation is made.

Now this is all Physics and might sound a little boring, and you might be thinking.. WTF happened to him, and why did he start discussing Quantum Physics out of the blue. Well I heard about the analogy and I found it to be directly impacting our lives, here is my take on the cat experiment.

In our lives, when we start thinking about the hypothetical situations, and start dreaming and imagining them on multiple levels and usually in our minds begin our sentences with “What If” and then just leave the thought there in the open and move on to something else, at that stage, how will we even know the fate of that thought, of that “Non-Action” of ours if we do not go right ahead and jump right in. 

Let’s say, we love someone, and we talk to the other party involved and there is no decision in place as to whether the relationship should continue or not. How will the fate of that relationship ever be known if the relationship has never begun? It’s like the cat; it’s both dead and alive at that stage. You would never be able to determine the fate without opening the box. Similarly you would never be able to determine the fate of a relationship without jumping in it.

This is just one analogy from this experiment, I am sure you can find thousands other, Just wanted to share the thought and put it out there. Interesting right ? 

1 comment:

  1. good one!...if only insaan could be that courageous :|

    ReplyDelete