Physicist Kevin Drum questions if Schrdinger's Cat Is Alive! [View all]

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/09/schrodingers-cat-is-alive-one-twelfth-of-the-time/

Schrödinger’s Cat Is Alive! (One-Twelfth of the Time)

KEVIN DRUMSEPTEMBER 21, 2018

Bear with me for a second while I check to see if there’s any obvious outrageousness this morning that I need to comment on right away. [checks LAT, NYT, WSJ, WaPo] Nah, not really. So let’s talk science.

You all know about Schrödinger’s cat, poor thing, don’t you? The basic idea behind the experiment is that in the quantum world of particles we don’t know if a particle changes state until we observe it. Before that, it’s in an indeterminate state doing nothing in particular. So Erwin Schrödinger proposed that we put a cat in a box along with a particle that has a 50 percent chance of turning radioactive and killing the cat. Eventually we open the box and find out what happened.

But what about the cat before we open the box? It’s one thing to say that the particle is all smushed out and we don’t really know what state it’s in. But a cat? Come on. The cat is either dead or alive. But no: Schrödinger says that the cat too remains in a mysterious smeared out state, neither dead nor alive, until we open the box. At that point “the wave equation collapses” and the cat’s fate is determined.

That sounds weird, but whatever. Not as weird as plenty of other stuff in quantum mechanics. The thing is that no one really, truly believes quantum mechanics. Even physicists. Oh, they’ll do the math and produce answers accurate to ten decimal points. And the math always produces correct answers. But the answers are weird, so there’s long been a cottage industry in trying to “break” quantum mechanics to figure out what’s really going on below all the weirdness. These attempts are often very clever (physicists, right?) but they always fail.
...snip
Meh. Someone made a mistake. Eventually someone else will figure it out. It’s quantum mechanics. It will never make sense to us meat machines.

¹Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. Get it? Physicists are hilarious.