Conceptual Mutation

How midwits and morons always modify meanings

I was streaming with Big Bear last night, and was somewhat fascinated to discover that even a curious, open-minded intelligent individual like him was under the mistaken impression that Erwin Schrödinger’s famous cat experiment was not the clever paradox meant to explain quantum mechanics and the effects of the observer on reality that all the self-appointed Smart Boys believe it to be, but rather a hypothesized non-experiment meant to mock the obvious idiocy of the concept.

He was genuinely amused by the fact that the physicist was, in his words, “doing a bit” and not attempting to provide an explanatory analogy for a complex scientific concept.

Which, as is so often the case, demonstrates how the mainstream midwit understanding of pretty much everything is not only incorrect, but both a) downright inverted and b) sub-Wikipedia level:

Schrödinger intended his thought experiment as a discussion of the EPR article—named after its authors Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen—in 1935. The EPR article highlighted the counterintuitive nature of quantum superpositions, in which a quantum system for two particles does not separate even when the particles are detected far from their last point of contact. The EPR paper concludes with a claim that this lack of separability meant that quantum mechanics as a theory of reality was incomplete.

Schrödinger and Einstein exchanged letters about Einstein’s EPR article, in the course of which Einstein pointed out that the state of an unstable keg of gunpowder will, after a while, contain a superposition of both exploded and unexploded states. To further illustrate, Schrödinger described how one could, in principle, create a superposition in a large-scale system by making it dependent on a quantum particle that was in a superposition. He proposed a scenario with a cat in a closed steel chamber, wherein the cat’s life or death depended on the state of a radioactive atom, whether it had decayed and emitted radiation or not. According to Schrödinger, the position taken by Bohr and Heisenberg would be that the cat remains both alive and dead until the state has been observed. Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-live cats as a serious possibility; on the contrary, he intended the example to illustrate the absurdity of the existing view of quantum mechanics, thus employing reductio ad absurdum.

Since Schrödinger’s time, various interpretations of the mathematics of quantum mechanics have been advanced by physicists, some of which regard the “alive and dead” cat superposition as quite real, while others do not. Intended as a critique of ideas prevalent in 1935, the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment remains a touchstone for modern interpretations of quantum mechanics and can be used to illustrate and compare their strengths and weaknesses.

Here is the actual “experiment” as originally proposed by Schrödinger:

Thought experiment

One can contrive even completely burlesque [farcical] cases. A cat is put in a steel chamber along with the following infernal device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny amount of radioactive substance, so tiny that in the course of an hour one of the atoms will perhaps decay, but also, with equal probability, that none of them will; if it does happen, the counter tube will discharge and through a relay release a hammer that will shatter a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would tell oneself that the cat is still alive if no atom has decayed in the meantime. Even a single atomic decay would have poisoned it. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or spread out in equal parts.

It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain turns into a sensually observable [macroscopic] indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. This prevents us from so naïvely accepting a “blurred model” as representative of reality. Per se, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.

Astonishingly, even at the time, the midwits of quantum mechanics failed to understand that his proposed experiment was a reductio ad absurdum meant to point out the obvious falsity of the idea, not an analogical support for it.

Schrödinger developed his famous thought experiment in correspondence with Einstein. He suggested this ‘quite ridiculous case’ to illustrate his conclusion that the wave function cannot represent reality. The wave function description of the complete cat system implies that the reality of the cat mixes the living and dead cat. Einstein was impressed by the ability of the thought experiment to highlight these issues. In a letter to Schrödinger dated 1950, he wrote:

You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality, if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gun powder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits. Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation.

So you can see why it is completely pointless to fear or even waste any time thinking about the ways people are inevitably going to misconstrue your ideas and your intellectual constructions. The midwits are always going to reinterpret, redefine, repurpose, and otherwise manage to completely miss the point. That’s what they do and that’s what they have done to the ideas expressed by literally everyone from Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha to Erwin Schrödinger and myself.

But none of those idiotic inversions matter or change the original idea itself. Which, of course, is why it is always vital to go back to the original source and to never place much confidence in any summary or explanation, no matter how well-intentioned it might be.

And that is why it is always necessary to write the book. So that in the future, when the mainstream’s ideas are entirely inverted, it is still possible for intelligent individuals to discover the intellectual truths underlying the moronic mutations.

Here is the Gamma response, which is, as always, unintentionally informative: