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[zubb2]

I have solved the cat in the box problem for scroterger.

If you put a microscopic cat in a microscopic box with microscopic poison then it can be dead and alive at the same time, as long as you dont look at it.

unrelated
(Also this magical mirror will make you pretty so long as you look at it in complete darkness.)

What if you put a necromancer in with the cat?

Or an undead cat with a glass bottle filled with 7/7 magma?

Will it be is it dead or undead.

EDIT:New page:)

[MasterShizzle]

I usually use Schrodinger's Cat to explain random probabilities for people that whine about statistics when I play poker with them.

If the cat is alive or dead, it doesn't matter. Regardless of what this says about quanta, I think we can at least agree that we don't know the cat's state of living until we open the box.

In the same vein, given that the cards in a deck are sufficiently randomized such that no single card's position in the deck is predictable in any way, then the order that you deal the cards makes no difference whatsoever to the likelihood of winning the game. If you get a card out of order, it has just as much chance of being a "good" card as any other card in the deck, because until you view the card it has the potential to be anything. In other words, I'm not going to shuffle the cards seven more bloody times just because someone else got "your" card and you got "his" card. Quit bitching over what order the cards were dealt in and play poker, already.

I can't complain too much, though: I greatly appreciate playing poker with people that have no understanding of statistics. 
</offtopic>

You guys have stated my goal as well; I'm working toward having a pair of artifact weapons with pictures of each other on them.

[GreatWyrmGold]

[snipped]
The general idea is sound. Why should individual atoms work differently than whole scads of atoms?

Issues of scale. For example: I have no issues with individual atoms, or even small compounds, entering my bloodstream. I would not, however, like to find out what happens if an entire cat made it's way in there.

If your bloodstream was big enough, it wouldn't matter. Besides, the analogy is faulty--a better analogy might be comparing what happens if some weird quantum effect happens to an electron and asking why that couldn't happen to or affect a person.

But my bloodstream isn't big enough, that's the point. Quantum effects don't scale up to our everyday, classical-mechanics scale. And we should be thankful for that. 9 out 10 times, the answer to "what would happen if X did scale up like that?" is "the universe as we know it wouldn't exist".

And even if I accept your premise, what about when the effects of quantum thingies affect the macroscopic world, a la the exact thought experiment we were talking about?

They only do so in a statistical sense. That's the big flaw in the quantum-cat scenario.

What about when the quantum-level effects of a handful of atoms affected the macroscopic world, most crudely via computers doing something if sensors they are hooked up to detect something? Which is pretty much what Schrodinger's Cat is...
Take out the cat, and after an hour the flask is half shattered and half unshattered, because no one has observed the atom's decay or any of its effects. Is this essentially correct, and if not where does the flaw in my reasoning lie?

In the assumption that quantum superposition is a phase that lasts until the effects are observed. Variations of the double-slit experiment have shown that simply creating the possibility of observation is enough to collapse superposition. Even if that observation would be after the fact.

It's official: Quantum physics are insane.

I like Feynman's comment about it: Anyone that says they understand quantum physics clearly doesn't.

I can't remember if he said this about QP or quantum mechanics, but I think it fits either way.

I've actually read some quotes postulating that our brains are physically incapable of truly comprehending things like a-causality and discrete time.

That's...really freaky.

[snipped]
The general idea is sound. Why should individual atoms work differently than whole scads of atoms?

Issues of scale. For example: I have no issues with individual atoms, or even small compounds, entering my bloodstream. I would not, however, like to find out what happens if an entire cat made it's way in there.

If your bloodstream was big enough, it wouldn't matter. Besides, the analogy is faulty--a better analogy might be comparing what happens if some weird quantum effect happens to an electron and asking why that couldn't happen to or affect a person.

But my bloodstream isn't big enough, that's the point. Quantum effects don't scale up to our everyday, classical-mechanics scale. And we should be thankful for that. 9 out 10 times, the answer to "what would happen if X did scale up like that?" is "the universe as we know it wouldn't exist".

And even if I accept your premise, what about when the effects of quantum thingies affect the macroscopic world, a la the exact thought experiment we were talking about?

They only do so in a statistical sense. That's the big flaw in the quantum-cat scenario.

What about when the quantum-level effects of a handful of atoms affected the macroscopic world, most crudely via computers doing something if sensors they are hooked up to detect something? Which is pretty much what Schrodinger's Cat is...
Take out the cat, and after an hour the flask is half shattered and half unshattered, because no one has observed the atom's decay or any of its effects. Is this essentially correct, and if not where does the flaw in my reasoning lie?

In the assumption that quantum superposition is a phase that lasts until the effects are observed. Variations of the double-slit experiment have shown that simply creating the possibility of observation is enough to collapse superposition. Even if that observation would be after the fact.

It's official: Quantum physics are insane.

I like Feynman's comment about it: Anyone that says they understand quantum physics clearly doesn't.

I can't remember if he said this about QP or quantum mechanics, but I think it fits either way.

I thought that was Einstein...

Anyway, as for the cat-in-a-box thing, quantum mechanics (as the name implies) is only really usable at the subatomic level, which Schrodinger failed to take into account when creating the thought experiment.

I don't understand it very well. Feynstein was right.

Again, why should quantum-level events have no effect ever on macroscopic ones?

[TruePikachu]

I have updated the title.

And I still want answers to my questions.

[King Mir]

Again, why should quantum-level events have no effect ever on macroscopic ones?

Macroscopic objects are surrounded by too much EM noise and heat. So quantum decoherence occurs.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Again, why should quantum-level events have no effect ever on macroscopic ones?

Macroscopic objects are surrounded by too much EM noise and heat. So quantum decoherence occurs.

And this somehow stops the weirdness happening at the quantum level from being detected and transformed into a macroscopic event?

[Helgoland]

When it comes to physics, and especially quantum physics, I side with David Mermin:

Shut up and calculate!

[King Mir]

Again, why should quantum-level events have no effect ever on macroscopic ones?

Macroscopic objects are surrounded by too much EM noise and heat. So quantum decoherence occurs.

And this somehow stops the weirdness happening at the quantum level from being detected and transformed into a macroscopic event?

It stops the weirdness from happening to large things, and stops the weirdness from compounding. Thermodynamically irreversible processes lock in the state of a quantum particle much like observation does. 

[GreatWyrmGold]

Again, why should quantum-level events have no effect ever on macroscopic ones?

Macroscopic objects are surrounded by too much EM noise and heat. So quantum decoherence occurs.

And this somehow stops the weirdness happening at the quantum level from being detected and transformed into a macroscopic event?

It stops the weirdness from happening to large things, and stops the weirdness from compounding. Thermodynamically irreversible processes lock in the state of a quantum particle much like observation does.

And this is why I like the many-universes interpretation--it doesn't try to hide itself with weird phenomena just to hide itself.

[Hurkyl]

Again, why should quantum-level events have no effect ever on macroscopic ones?

Macroscopic objects are surrounded by too much EM noise and heat. So quantum decoherence occurs.

And this somehow stops the weirdness happening at the quantum level from being detected and transformed into a macroscopic event?

It spreads it out.

One of the classic experiments is that you have a big batch of entangled pairs, and from each you give one half to  Alice and one half to Bob. As far as Alice can tell, her batch looks "normal", and the same goes for Bob. But only when you look at both batches together can you see the correlations (e.g. if both Alice and Bob measured their spins in the Z direction, they are guaranteed to have opposite results).


Decoherence spreads this out across trillions (vast underestimate) of particles -- including some particles that have "escaped" as light radiating away from the Earth. The only way to see "weirdness" is with a carefully designed measurement involving all trillion particles. This really isn't feasible for humans to do... nor, really, is it feasible for nature to do either.

Also, if you've become part of the weirdness, I don't think you are able to see it anyways.

[muzzz]

Again, why should quantum-level events have no effect ever on macroscopic ones?

Macroscopic objects are surrounded by too much EM noise and heat. So quantum decoherence occurs.

And this somehow stops the weirdness happening at the quantum level from being detected and transformed into a macroscopic event?

It stops the weirdness from happening to large things, and stops the weirdness from compounding. Thermodynamically irreversible processes lock in the state of a quantum particle much like observation does.

And this is why I like the many-universes interpretation--it doesn't try to hide itself with weird phenomena just to hide itself.

The thing I don't like about many-universes is that I feel it doesn't really explain anything. It seems to me like saying "Yeah, there's weirdness. But don't worry about it; it's another universe's problem."

It also leads to annoyingly cliche sci-fi...

[GreatWyrmGold]

Again, why should quantum-level events have no effect ever on macroscopic ones?

Macroscopic objects are surrounded by too much EM noise and heat. So quantum decoherence occurs.

And this somehow stops the weirdness happening at the quantum level from being detected and transformed into a macroscopic event?

It stops the weirdness from happening to large things, and stops the weirdness from compounding. Thermodynamically irreversible processes lock in the state of a quantum particle much like observation does.

And this is why I like the many-universes interpretation--it doesn't try to hide itself with weird phenomena just to hide itself.

The thing I don't like about many-universes is that I feel it doesn't really explain anything. It seems to me like saying "Yeah, there's weirdness. But don't worry about it; it's another universe's problem."

It also leads to annoyingly cliche sci-fi...

The way I see it, it also helps explain why our universe's laws allow life to exist: There were a bunch at first, but the laws settled down, differently in different universes. Oh, and it doesn't seem to be trying to hide itself as much.

[muzzz]

That's actually not a question of "why". Being able to support life is implied by our universe being ours.

A teacher walks in on four kids making a huge mess of her classroom. She asks the kids to explain themselves. The first kid begins rambling incoherently. He seems to be saying the mess is real but he isn't, although it's hard to be sure. The second kid starts a monologue about the role of consciousness in observation, but the teacher cuts him off mid-sentence. Meanwhile, the third kid has closed its eyes, cupped its ears, and starting chanting "I can't hear you." Desperate, the teacher turns to the last kid. "I can't explain anything," he admits, "but I did come up with a mathematical model to describe it all".

This is paraphrased from a story told to me by a physics professor espousing the virtues of the "shut up and calculate!" approach. My own takeaway was that there's no interpretation of quantum mechanics that explains the relationship with classical mechanics. The only real difference is how they avoid actually explaining it.

[TruePikachu]

Please answer the questions that I asked or I will be forced to lock the thread since it is very derailed.

I'm actually surprised nobody answered the questions >_>

[Mr Frog]

Did you ever look at the first artifact before the second was created? It's possible that the game doesn't actually generate the description until you look at it for the first time, and forgets to compare dates to check if a given descriptor is temporally-possible. So, if you don't look at the first artifact until after the second is created, the second may be included in the first's description, despite the fact that it didn't exist at the time of the first's creation.

But who knows? Perhaps there's just an artifact DeLorean lying around somewhere :p

Also: SERIOUSLY, PEOPLE? This guy had a question that he presumably wanted answered in some form. Yes, I get that we're Bay 12 and we're totally insane and don't give a shit lolololol, but... maybe y'all should respect the purpose of the thread all the same?

E: -_-; Rereading the thread, I honestly have no clue what's being discussed anymore. So, uh... nevermind.