Quantum Mechanics

[stridentlinear]

Is all audio just white noise until it's either measured or heard?

If you put a cat in a box and set up a mechanism to play either the Beatles or Taylor Swift in the box at random, would the cat be listening to both the Beatles and Taylor Swift until you opened the box?

Or would it be white noise?

 

[AnalogPackrat]

Is all audio just white noise until it's either measured or heard?

Some is noise even when it's heard.

If you put a cat in a box and set up a mechanism to play either the Beatles or Taylor Swift in the box at random, would the cat be listening to both the Beatles and Taylor Swift until you opened the box?

Neither...Simon and Garfunkel. Or perhaps Brian Eno.

 

[user 37518]

Is all audio just white noise until it's either measured or heard?

If you put a cat in a box and set up a mechanism to play either the Beatles or Taylor Swift in the box at random, would the cat be listening to both the Beatles and Taylor Swift until you opened the box?

Or would it be white noise?

A disclaimer: I am not a physicist, but I have taken graduate level courses which involve quantum mechanics. The whole "it can be anything until you look" is BS. All this confusion, in my opinion, is a misunderstanding of Schrödinger's cat analogy when he was explaining the probabilistic nature of the wave function. But lets remember that it is an analogy, it doesn't happen with everything, it happens specifically with subatomic particles. It also doesn't mean that such subatomic particles are everywhere all at once, they are at specific locations, it is only that we don't know exactly where they are until we measure them, and the fact of measuring them affects their trajectory and position. So, we use probabilistic functions to determine where it would be posible to find such particle or where it is not. Again, this doesn't mean that the particles are omnipresent until we look, it just means that we don't know where they are until we look, so, from our perspective, they could be at many different places since we don't know for sure.

The wave function has a probabilistic quality to determine, for example, the position and/or momentum of the electron, but people apply that to everything, and, in my opinion, that is not correct. It applies to particles at the quantum level, it doesn't apply to all reality and to every scenario. So, to answer your question: No, Taylor Swift is always Taylor Swift.

On a side note, some very important physicists (Einstein included), including some modern Nobel laureates, think that the whole probabilistic thing is just a somehow effective theory, but that it doesn't mean reality is exactly like that. Let me give you an example: a colleague of mine was doing a funny experiment, I can't remember exactly what and how he did it, but he used an Excel spreadsheet and he had a circle of diameter 1 drawn into it and he added random noise in and outside the circle, then, he used the points that landed inside the circle and subtracted them from the ones outside, or something like that, I can't remember exactly what he did, but with that he was able to take the average of those random points and the average was pi. So, he essentially found pi from random numbers, which is probabilistic. However, it would be foolish to say that the perimeter of a circle and the diameter have a probabilistic nature, no, the perimeter and the diameter have a deterministic quality perimeter = pi*diameter, yet, the probabilistic test was able to find the same result. That is what I think happens with quantum mechanics, the probabilistic thing is able to determine results, but it doesn't mean that reality is actually probabilistic. Some physicists think this will eventually change.

 

[JohnRoberts]

Does that mean Schrodinger's cat won't smell bad if we never look?

JR

 

[Matador]

If you put a cat in a box and set up a mechanism to play either the Beatles or Taylor Swift in the box at random, would the cat be listening to both the Beatles and Taylor Swift until you opened the box?

If you read (a translation of) Schrödinger's original paper, his meaning is quite clear, as to shown how such abstractions for QM superposition fail outside of the quantum realm.

The other alternative consisted of granting reality only to the momentarily sharp determining parts-or in more general terms to each variable a sort of realization just corresponding to the quantum mechanical statistics of this variable at the relevant moment.

That it is in fact not impossible to express the degree and kind of blurring of all variables in one perfectly clear concept follows at once from the fact that Q.M. as a matter of fact has and uses such an instrument, the so-called wave function or psi-function, also called system vector. Much more is to be said about it further on. That it is an abstract, unintuitive mathematical construct is a scruple that almost always surfaces against new aids to thought and that carries no great message. At all events it is an imagined entity that images the blurring of all variables at every moment just as clearly and faithfully as the classical model does its sharp numerical values. It's equation of motion too, the law of its time variation, so long as the system is left undisturbed, lags not one iota, in clarity and determinacy, behind the equations of motion of the classical model. So the latter could be straight-forwardly replaced by the psi-function, so long as the blurring is confined to atomic scale, not open to direct control. In fact the function has provided quite intuitive and convenient ideas, for instance the "cloud of negative electricity" around the nucleus, etc. But serious misgivings arise if one notices that the uncertainty affects macroscopically tangible and visible things, for which the term"blurring" seems simply wrong. The state of a radioactive nucleus is presumably blurred in such degree and fashion that neither the instant of decay nor the direction, in which the emitted a-particle leaves the nucleus, is well-established. Inside the nucleus, blurring doesn't bother us. The emerging particle is described, if one wants to explain intuitively, as a spherical wave that continuously emanates in all directions from the nucleus and that impinges continuously on a surrounding luminescent screen over its full expanse. The screen however does not show a more or less constant uniform surface glow, but rather lights up at one instant at one spot, or, to honor the truth, it lights up now here, now there, for it is impossible to do the experiment with only a single radioactive atom. If in place of the luminescent screen one uses a spatially extended detector, perhaps a gas that is ionized by the a-particles, one finds the ion pairs arranged along rectilinear columns that project backwards on to the bit of radioactive matter from which the a-radiation comes (C.T.R. Wilson's cloud chamber tracks, made visible by drops of moisture condensed on the ions).

One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following diabolical device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of one hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The first atomic decay would have poisoned it. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and the dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.

It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality. In itself 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.

It's clear he was mocking such comparisons to the macro-state of systems (which can be directly observed) with the probabilistic nature of QM.

 

[boji]

It's like the Streisand effect on science commentary. (^.^)