Schrodinger's Cat as a Lock for a Box

Quantum mechanics claims that there is no definite cat in the box, only a ghost, a superposition of a live cat and a dead cat. That is, until we open it and look. A measurement will collapse the system into one state or the other. So goes Schrödinger’s thought experiment. It is completely wrong, of course. A cat is a macroscopic system, and there is no mysterious intervention by a magical observer needed to make it live or die: just its interaction with the rest of the Universe, a phenomenon called decoherence, provides the collapse into one macrostate. But in the microscopic world – for qubits, quantum-mechanical equivalents of ones and zeroes – the Schrödinger’s cat is real. The Box contains trillions of ghost cats. The live cat states encode information. A mind, even, a living, thinking mind. The Box qubits have been rotated into a limbo state between nothingness and existence. The mind inside would not notice anything – a set of quantum gates can let it continue thinking, feeling, dreaming. If it stays inside, all is well. But if it tries to get out, any interaction with the environment will bring the Universe down on it like a ton of bricks and collapse it into nothingness. Bad kitty, dead kitty.

Notes:

Folksonomies: quantum physics

Taxonomies:
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/society/senior living (0.375183)
/sports/running and jogging (0.356711)

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Entities:
Schrödinger:City (0.770373 (negative:-0.240361))

Concepts:
Quantum mechanics (0.943206): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Schrödinger's cat (0.812313): dbpedia | freebase | yago
Physics (0.711710): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Reality (0.651041): dbpedia | freebase
Thought experiment (0.635560): dbpedia | freebase | yago
Measurement in quantum mechanics (0.599984): dbpedia
Quantum decoherence (0.587675): dbpedia | freebase
Quantum superposition (0.545085): dbpedia | freebase

 The Fractal Prince
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Rajaniemi, Hannu (2014-01-21), The Fractal Prince, Tor Books, Retrieved on 2014-12-01
  • Source Material [books.google.com]
    • Folksonomies: fiction