Darren New wrote:
> In other words, if it takes an "observer" to collapse the wave function, 
> is the cat enough of an "observer" to count? If so, how does the human 
> get involved? According to the math, the cat is still superimposed. But 
> that would imply the cat isn't sufficiently an observer to cause the 
> collapse. *Or* that the math doesn't match reality. And multi-worlds is 
> an attempt to say "no, the math really matches reality."
> 

One tends to suspect that, as a thought experiment, it runs into the 
same problem as Zeno's Paradox. Which is to say, there is some specific 
minimum interaction/time frame/minimal distance, or what ever, in which 
something either does *or* doesn't happen, and you can't have it be both 
at the same time. In Zeno's case, there is literally a very small, but 
provable, distance that you *must* move, if you move at all, and 
crossing that line eliminates the paradox (in this case, probably 
something like the closest you can get to another particle, without it 
nudging the other particle, or something to that effect). They have 
already proven, using QM experiments, that they *is* such a limit with 
time, and that *before* that point you can nudge a particle back into 
what ever state it had prior to measurement, but, anything after that 
you are stuck with what ever the prior interaction gave you. The 
previous assumption was that such events where instantaneous, and no 
such micro-time event was possible.

Thus, the thought experiment is flawed, unless, as I said, you assume 
that the entire box, everything in it, and thus what it does, is all 
*one* object. A classic case of, "Of course a tree makes a sound if it 
falls in an empty forest with no one to see it." The flaw is the 
assumption that *someone* has to look into the box. I am not sure how to 
put it.. Basically, its like astrology. Imagining that just because a 
lot of big stuff is wandering around the universe, the small stuff 
**must** be so drastically influenced by it that a cat can actually *be* 
in such an indeterminate state. Not so. Either *any* interacting causes 
a state change, in which case the cat *must* be in a known state 
already, or nothing is, including the poor deluded fool worrying about 
whether or not he killed the neighbors cat in the experiment, in which 
case we might as well start talking to priest and gurus about 
transcendentalism, and give up on physics.

Yeah, there are some goofy theories that sort of allow for it, but most 
of them are notable in that they have to do things like throwing out 
time, without having any damn math, never mind real theory, about how to 
replace it with something that still *acts* like time from our view. Its 
one thing to propose a thought experiment, its another to invent an 
entire branch of, "this will fill in all the holes, I promise", 
'science', which consists of no concrete data, experiments, theories, or 
plausible mechanisms, and amounts to nothing *but* a long list of 
thought experiments.

People tried that once before. It was called Alchemy, and, within its 
own, flawed and incorrect, framework, everything known at the time 
"worked" by its rules, including the math involved. It would be nice of 
we at least tried to stick with dealing with the universe we can 
observe, instead of wandering off into 50,000 of them we can't, trying 
to find some weird sort of universe that would **look like** ours, if 
stuck inside it. Not even string theory gets that odd, most of the time, 
and it, so far, is about as useful at explaining anything as staring at 
a something like the "accidental isosuface" thread is *actually* an 
accurate method of predicting planet formation.

It might lead some place, maybe. At the moment, even some of the people 
that wanted it to lead some place are looking at those studying the math 
and thinking, "Ok, so... when are we going to get a theory, never mind 
actual useful data, out of this 'science'?" lol

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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