Schrödinger's cat and the suppositions of states. Alive and dead at the same time
Has anyone else noticed the similarity between the apparent supposition of states in the famous Schrödinger’s cat ‘thought experiment’ and the supposition of states for some characters being both dead and alive at the same time on the island?
I’m no particle physicist but the Schrödinger’s cat idea goes something like this:
You have some poor moggy locked up in a hermetically sealed box inside of which is a poison contained in a glass phial. There is a hammer that if released will break the phial, releasing the poison, which will then kill the cat. The hammer is connected to a sensing device that is monitoring for the radioactive decay of a single sub-atomic particle in another separate chamber. It is known with finite certainty that the particle will decay but the ability to predict the exact moment of that decay is infinitely impossible. As a result, until we look into the box and determine for certain the outcome at any point in time, to all intents and purposes, the outcomes, i.e. the cat is alive or the cat is dead, are equally probable and thus become ‘smeared’ or overlapped, leading to the paradox that the cat is simultaneously alive and dead, i.e. a supposition of states.
How does this relate to the island? Well there’s been quite a lot of observation as to the resemblance of the Dharma Initiative logo to the core of the new Large Hadron Collider at CERN, so its reasonable to assume that some or all of the island’s properties are associated with the subject of particle physics/quantum mechanics. There are a number of characters that we have been assured are ‘physically, corporeally’ dead and yet appear alive in many instances, the most obvious one being Dr. Christian Sheppard.
Exactly how the writers will weave these ideas into the thread I don’t know, but the idea of wave/particle duality, the effects of observation on the behaviour of matter and the inherent supposition of states associated looks like a contender for explaining the island. It would be particularly topical as the LCH is due to go online in the near future and there has been a lot of speculation as to what will happen as some of the more bizarre experiments are conducted, e.g. the creation of mini-black holes/worm holes. Perhaps the Dharma Initiative was involved in the search for the god particle, perhaps they found it, perhaps the alive and dead states of these characters are the result of matter and anit-matter. This subject has long been debated among scientists and has been used in part to describe theoretical concepts such as the ‘many universe’ theory.
Wikipedia has a lot of useful information on this subject
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat
Theory by Greg Turner
Has anyone else noticed the similarity between the apparent supposition of states in the famous Schrödinger’s cat ‘thought experiment’ and the supposition of states for some characters being both dead and alive at the same time on the island?
I’m no particle physicist but the Schrödinger’s cat idea goes something like this:
You have some poor moggy locked up in a hermetically sealed box inside of which is a poison contained in a glass phial. There is a hammer that if released will break the phial, releasing the poison, which will then kill the cat. The hammer is connected to a sensing device that is monitoring for the radioactive decay of a single sub-atomic particle in another separate chamber. It is known with finite certainty that the particle will decay but the ability to predict the exact moment of that decay is infinitely impossible. As a result, until we look into the box and determine for certain the outcome at any point in time, to all intents and purposes, the outcomes, i.e. the cat is alive or the cat is dead, are equally probable and thus become ‘smeared’ or overlapped, leading to the paradox that the cat is simultaneously alive and dead, i.e. a supposition of states.
How does this relate to the island? Well there’s been quite a lot of observation as to the resemblance of the Dharma Initiative logo to the core of the new Large Hadron Collider at CERN, so its reasonable to assume that some or all of the island’s properties are associated with the subject of particle physics/quantum mechanics. There are a number of characters that we have been assured are ‘physically, corporeally’ dead and yet appear alive in many instances, the most obvious one being Dr. Christian Sheppard.
Exactly how the writers will weave these ideas into the thread I don’t know, but the idea of wave/particle duality, the effects of observation on the behaviour of matter and the inherent supposition of states associated looks like a contender for explaining the island. It would be particularly topical as the LCH is due to go online in the near future and there has been a lot of speculation as to what will happen as some of the more bizarre experiments are conducted, e.g. the creation of mini-black holes/worm holes. Perhaps the Dharma Initiative was involved in the search for the god particle, perhaps they found it, perhaps the alive and dead states of these characters are the result of matter and anit-matter. This subject has long been debated among scientists and has been used in part to describe theoretical concepts such as the ‘many universe’ theory.
Wikipedia has a lot of useful information on this subject
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat
Theory by Greg Turner
