Boffins measure 27 quantum states of light One of the key tenets of quantum mechanics, that it's impossible to measure a quantum state without collapsing the wave function, has taken an arrow to the knee, courtesy of a University of Rochester experiment. Building on work carried out in 2011 at the National Research Council of Canada, the UoR researchers say they've …
From the Rochester page:
"It does, however¬, give partial information on the health of the cat, which when repeated many times can lead to near certain information as to whether the cat is alive or dead."
I look it as taking many blood samples and looking, for instance, at the oxygenation of the blood to determine if it's probably alive before opening the box and stabbing it in the brain with a volt meter to measure electrical activity. Sure, with each blood sample the cat's health may change but we'll still be able to measure something else when it comes time to burn the last bridge, or something like that.
Was there ever any salmon of doubt?
Poor Heisenberg; Poor Physics Discipline; Poor Physicists; Poor Physics Students:
now , instead of not knowing which of two states (I know, I know: at the same time) is the correct one, now we don't know which of twenty-seven states, at the same time, is the correct one.
But this is great news for all the "quantum physics pseudoscientists": more fodder for their artificial intelligence.
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"Aachh!"--one can almost hear him exclaim--"This [(quantum physics) paper/hypothesis] is so bad, it's not even wrong."--Wolfgang Pauli
"If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics"--Richard Feynman
42.
Dimension = free variable.
In classical space at time "t", 3 real-valued coordinates suffice to describe the position of a "mass point".
With two particles, you need 6 real-valued coordinates. The space of two particles has 6 dimensions! (Why 3 + 3 instead of 3 x 3? Dunno, lol!)
etc..
Same here: 27 complex values => 27 dimensions.
A weak measurement will never determine whether Schroedinger's cat is alive. It can only determine the average probability of cats in Copenhagen (or at some large cat-containing place of your choice) being black or white. Spoiler alert: the answer is grey, unless you prepared the cats to be spotted, in which case the answer may be white with 17 grey spots.
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