hi,

this is my first serious post. i think. although there's no category such as science or physics in this platform (and it's okay, y'all are here just to make friends and not to think about school).

so i decided to mark these from the subject ro differentiate them between physics blog or shifting realities blog (socially known as desired reality but i'll talk about it in another entry).

as you can see from the title, the topic we're going to cover in my first blog is 

schrödinger's cat

no matter how far you live from science, you'll get a few concepts in your life, and i think one of the most famous examples is schrödinger's cat.

in fact, schrödinger's cat is such a famous story that there are countless related memes.

a 9gag gif. there's a one-shot clip like this, which means that it's common to have an accident that leads to a cat + a box = schrödinger's cat.

as a result, there are numerous instances of misused usage, and there are many people who preach incorrect information as if it were true.

and i know i'm not a physics major, but i'd like to inform you of the exact facts in this blog.

first of all, the contents of schrödinger's cat thought experiment are as follows.

(i work so hard every time i explain it to my friends when we talk about it, but none of them really get me. i hope this one is better.)

1. a sealed box contains a cat and a geiger counter (an instrument that measures how much radioactive particles float), a radioactive element, a hammer and poison.

2. radioactive elements can decay with a probability of 1/2.

3. if a radioactive element collapses, the geiger counter detects it.

4. the hammer is connected to the geiger counter, and when the geiger counter is operated, the hammer is supposed to fall off.

5. the fallen hammer breaks the poison.

6. so, what will happen to this cat?

in common sense, the cat will die or live at 1/2 chance.

and i know that's not what's important about schrödinger's cat. and as you know, the whole point of this experiment is, "what's the state of the cat before you open the box?". of course, if you don't open the box, we don't know if it's dead or alive. and that's what schrödinger's cat wants to ask: what's the cat's condition?.

in common sense it would be natural to think: "we don't know, but the cat is either dead or alive anyway."

if you're a common sense person, you think it's either number 1 or number 2 in the box, right?

here comes the interpretation of quantum mechanics and copenhagen. (and then the intense debate of the time when quantum mechanics was being established.)

one of the interpretations of quantum mechanics that we will continue to use until now, and if nothing happens, is the "copenhagen interpretation."

the copenhagen interpretation can be summed up as, "everything exists only as a probability wave, and only when you measure it." 

 In other words, the Copenhagen interpretation is to see that there is no substance before measurement and that it only exists probabilistically.

 Since it exists only probabilistically without substance, it can be interpreted as being in all possible states.

in other words, if in a system, an electron can exist in the states 1 and 2, until you directly check where it is, an electron is both in 1 and in 2. This is called 'quantum superposition'. And the process by which the electron states are determined as one by direct checking is called 'the collapse of the wave function'.

it sounds weird, but that's the universe we actually live in. 

 so what happens if i re-apply this to the schrödinger cat experiment and then answer the question again??

first of all, radioactive materials have a superposition of decayed and non-collapse states. then the poison will be spread and the non-collapse state will be overlapped. so, the cat will be in a state of overlapping dead and alive. in other words, the cat is both alive and dead.

.

if you search for schrödinger's cat, this is the picture that you'll see with high probability, and what this picture means is the conclusion I mentioned above.

 and just to briefly point out one big misconception that people often have, Schrödinger's cat's conclusion is not to say, "we'll know until we don't know." 

 "you'll have to see" is true, but it's not because we don't know, but because reality itself doesn't exist. "you have to believe to see" reality. this is basically what you need to know, but surprisingly, there are many cases where Schrödinger's cat is randomly attached without understanding the content.

anyway, that's all most people know. (if you understand schrödinger's cat properly. and there's a lot of muggles that don't make it to this point..)

and yeah i haven't really started talking about what i really want to say yet. most of the time, i end up saying, "oh," so i think it's causing a lot of misunderstanding and spreading like it's true.

you know what's more dangerous than what you don't know at all. now let's move on to the line that distinguishes such a clumsy person from someone who knows it properly.

 what on earth did schrödinger want to say even as he abused his cat??

to prove a quantum superposition??? We dragged and wrote the contents of the quantum superposition to explain Schrödinger's cat thought experiment. if you were going to 'prove' quantum superposition, you shouldn't drag and write the contents of quantum superposition, right? and to be clear, i could explain the concept of quantum superposition enough without schrödinger's cat, and it had already been explained that way.

to tell you a shocking fact that even half of actual physics majors don't know, schrödinger's cat is not a thought experiment designed to explain quantum superposition, and furthermore, an unusual phenomenon in quantum mechanics. 

erwin schrödinger, the physicist who proposed schrödinger's cat experiment, was a man who opposed the copenhagen school and disapproved of the development of quantum mechanics.

erwin schrödinger proposed the schrödinger cat. although he made a significant contribution to the development of quantum mechanics by creating the schrödinger equation, he himself did not accept the copenhagen interpretation. (oh, schrödinger when i get you...)

so what schrödinger really wanted to say through his cat thought experiment is, "look, you think it makes sense that the cat should be dead and alive at the same time as you say it", and it's about attacking the copenhagen school.

and it also presents the question, "how far in the world do we have to look at the microscopic world?"

niels bohr, who led the copenhagen school, created bohr's hydrogen model and proposed the principle of complementarity. we cannot leave out niels bohr when talking about the history of quantum mechanics!!!

in defending their interpretation at the time, the copenhagen school defended it in such a way that "quantum mechanics works only in the microscopic world, in the macroscopic world, the physics we know of." at first glance, this may seem plausible, but it's not a scientific sentence. there is no explanation for how far to see the microscopic world. schrödinger's cat flies a dagger exactly where it hurts. "can you just define how far you can see the microscopic world. what you're saying is this bad."

do you understand now??

comments such as "the quantum superposition is explained by schrödinger's cat" are meaningless statements. if you see someone explaining it in this way, you can listen to it with one ear and spill it with one ear, saying, 'oh, that person is not a person who studied quantum mechanics properly.'

here's a two-line summary of what we've done so far:

1. the reason why schrödinger's cat overlaps with life and death is not simply because we do not know, but because there is no substance if we do not measure it.

2. schrödinger's cat was not made to explain quantum mechanics. rather, it was made to reveal quantum mechanics.

it's a shame to finish the first post... so let's go a little further. 

apart from this, we know that the macroscopic world certainly doesn't work like quantum mechanics. i can't exist in both places at the same time and i can't penetrate the walls. at first glance, it seems like only children living in the real electron-like micro world. 

so the question remains, how far do we go to see the microscopic world? about 24 years ago, a study was published that could be a clue to this question. (yes, we're using quantum mechanics like we're eating, and it's only been 24 years since it was revealed.)

to summarize the research, a double-slit experiment with a C60 molecule called fullerene (a structure with 60 carbons) showed wave properties in fullerene. 

you might think, "what's wrong with this?" C60 is a very large and heavy molecule, and in common sense, you can't even dream of quantum tunneling. now that we have quantum mechanical content from this material, it makes us think, "does it really apply only to the microscopic world?"

in fact, no matter how large a system is, quantum mechanical phenomena can occur without information leakage that will cause quantum collapse. 

we previously said, 'if you don't observe, there is no physical reality'. there's a trap here, and the subject of the observation does not necessarily have to be human. in other words, quantum collapse can occur just by hitting the passing air molecule. it's a separate story from what we know.

einstein's question, "is the moon not there if we don't see it?" is solved by this sentence. even if we don't look at it, the moon can't maintain a quantum superposition because it's already leaking a lot of information.

 don't you feel something weird after coming this far?

in the schrödinger cat experiment earlier, the hammer was operated by a geiger counter, which said that what the geiger counter does is observe whether radioactive decay has occurred or not. and just now, we've said that it doesn't have to be human to know that information to collapse.

yes, schrödinger's cat experiment was faulty in the first place. the fact that the geiger counter already detects radioactive decay does not allow the box to remain quantum superimposed. in other words, the cat in that box from the beginning is either dead or alive before we open it, not life and death overlap. (it's not that quantum mechanics is wrong, it's that you misinterpreted the example.)

the schrödinger cat is certainly an example that frequently appears in actual quantum mechanics textbooks. this is because it dramatically demonstrates the strange characteristics of quantum mechanics and at the same time makes it easy to explain the phenomenon of quantum superposition.

griffith quantum mechanics, a widely used undergraduate quantum mechanics textbook, depicts a cat symbolizing schrödinger's cat from the cover. (front - alive. back - ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh)

for that reason, you may not know the above, but it's not right to preach false knowledge because you don't know.

if you were mistaken, can you correct it from now on so that you don't contaminate the surroundings?

i'll give an n-line summary again and end the post really.

schrödinger cat 2 lines summary (again)

1. the reason why schrödinger's cat overlaps with life and death is not simply because we do not know, but because there's no substance if we don't measure it.

2. schrödinger's cat was not made to explain quantum mechanics. rather, it was made to reveal quantum mechanics.

next, three lines of content summary

1. quantum mechanical phenomena have also been shown for massive (relatively) matter.

2. the subject causing the wave function collapse does not necessarily have to be 'human'.

3. there's an error in schrödinger's cat thought experiment by no. 2.

P.S: this blog itself may cause another misunderstanding because i only explained it in words without any modifications. please don't be mistaken that you maybe understood a little bit about quantum mechanics after reading this. i just picked up my writing. :)