Physicists have a saying : anyone who isn't confused by quantum theory doesn't understand it. And in 1935, the Austrian physicists Erwin Schrodinger devised a thought experiment to show just how weird it is........!!
Common sense says that atoms have clear-cut properties, but according to quantum theory,they exist in all their possible states at the same time...
Physicists initially hoped these bizarre mixed states were only relevant to subatomic world, but schrodinger showed it wasn't so simple. He imagined a cat being put in a box along with device that releases poison if it detects atoms undergoing radioactive decay.
According to quantum theory, these atoms will exits in two states-decayed and undecayed at the same time. But because the poison mechanism respons to the atoms, their bizarre mix of states won't just be relevant to quantum world; it also affect the cat,which will thus also be a mixture of poisoned and not poisoned. So why don't we ever see 'undead' cats?
Physicits wrestled with this for years and now think they have the answer,says Professor Jim Al-khalili of Surrey University .... " It's called ' Decoherence" , and it's kind of leaking away of the quantum weirdness as soon as a quantum object,like an atom, interacts with outside world.
''Schrodinger's cat is thus always either alive or dead because the radioactive atom takes one definite states when ir inteacts with detector in the box.
This isn't just an idea, though; in 1996, scientists in France measured decoherence taking place with atoms in mixed states in a real-life experiment.
No comments:
Post a Comment