Schrodinger's Cat Released At Last

Schrodinger's poor cat is placed in a box with a death dealing device which is triggered by the decay of a single radioactive nucleus. The state of the cat is therefore supposed to become as indeterminate as the state of the nucleus, i.e. to share its quantum weirdness. The cat is supposed to be in a superposition of living and dead states, neither one nor the other.

In the pdf below it is shown why this is nonsense. The apparent puzzle of Schrodinger's Cat is merely a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics. Specifically, it is a misunderstanding of how the most general systems are described in quantum mechanics. They are not described by wavefunctions or vectors in Hilbert space. The most general systems, including cats, are described by the density matrix, which is an operator in Hilbert space.

Read the pdf Schrodinger's Cat Released At Last

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Laser Creates Electro-Optic Shocks in Plasma: Shock waves are produced when a laser is fired into a plasma. This 3D image is a simulation of the shock wave that is produced by the interaction between the laser field and the electron sheath surrounding the plasma bubble (electron cavitation region). The light blue circular area (furthest to the right) is the electron sheath that emits the electro-optic shock. The sheath is surrounding the resulting plasma bubble (red). The longer the laser pulses, the larger the bubble grows. [Credit: D.F.Gordon,A.Ting,B.Hafizi,D.Kaganovich, Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 045004 (2008)]