On 9/17/2011 10:13 AM, Warp wrote:
> Patrick Elliott<sel### [at] npgcablecom>  wrote:
>> Schrodinger's cat is just
>> a goofy anthropomorphizing of the process, which a lot of people,
>> including apparently people on here, get wrong, because people see
>> "observer" and assume that has to be "person", or something that
>> otherwise thinks. That is just plain wrong.
>
>    Clearly the cat is a good measurement device for whether the poison was
> released or not. That's not the point. The point is whether the cat is
> dead or alive from outside of the box.
>
Sigh. Outside doesn't matter. The cat is a hypothetical. Just because 
"you" don't know the state, until you open the box, doesn't mean it 
hasn't collapsed, if you are dealing with a literal cat. But that isn't 
what is intended here. The cat is the state itself, in the thought 
experiment, so whether it is one or the other *requires* an outside 
influence. A real cat would already invalidate the experiment, as would 
anything else you might use, like a sheet of radiation sensitive 
material, where you want to "observe" if the material decayed yet, or 
not. It happens, in such cases, whether you open the box now, or 4 
million years from now. That you don't know what happened isn't relevant.

But, if you are talking about the cat as a "state", and the observation 
as checking to see if the state changed, the situation is, in principle, 
valid. But, you have to make everything hypothetical to have it mean 
anything. Did the laser fire (the poison release)? Did it emit a 
particle in the right direction (no leaks in the box)? Did that particle 
split as intended (the cat breathed it, maybe it was a really short 
lived poison)? When it did, what happened to the pair you are testing 
(was the cat effected)? The cat is just one of the cogs in the system. 
Assuming event #1 happened, as planned, something happens in the rest of 
the system, whether you did anything yourself or not. The *real* trick 
is the fact that you can create conditions where you "know" what the 
outcome will be, instead of just looking into the box to find out. 
Normally, you can't, because all the stuff going on happens "in the box".

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