Related papers: Schr\"odinger's Cat -- Amended
Schr\"odinger's cat appears to have been harassed in a chamber during the past eighty years or so by interpreting the role of the observer as a person, who sets an experiment and then observes results, may be after some time. The realist…
It is hypothesised, following Conrad et al. (1988) (http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/papers/urbino.html) that quantum physics is not the ultimate theory of nature, but merely a theoretical account of the phenomena manifested in nature…
In order to know if the Schrodinger's cat is alive or dead without opening the box, observers have to play a game with nature. The observers have to "guess" (with degrees of belief) the state of the cat due to incomplete information; in…
The superposition principle is one of the most fundamental principles of quantum mechanics. According to the Schr\"odinger equation, a physical system can be in any linear combination of its possible states. While the validity of this…
The most discussed of ``live'' metaphors in physical sciences is that of the Schr\"odinger cat. Introduced in the early, but mature days of the new quantum theory, in 1935, the parable of the cat has provoked and enlivened debates on the…
Quantum mechanics is an extremely successful theory that agrees with every experiment. However, the principle of linear superposition, a central tenet of the theory, apparently contradicts a commonplace observation: macroscopic objects are…
There are four reasons why our present knowledge and understanding of quantum mechanics could be regarded as incomplete. Firstly, the principle of linear superposition has not been experimentally tested for position eigenstates of objects…
Physicians define death as the "irreversible" breakdown of all brain-functions including brain-stem. By "irreversible" they mean a damage that is beyond the human capacity to restore the patient's healthy state. In the same line I propose…
When is decoherence "effectively irreversible"? Here we examine this central question of quantum foundations using the tools of quantum computational complexity. We prove that, if one had a quantum circuit to determine if a system was in an…
We introduce the concept of a "classical observable" as an operator with vanishingly small quantum fluctuations on a set of density matrices. It is shown how to construct them for a time evolved pure state. The study of classical…
We show that long standing debates on the collapse and the role of the observer in quantum mechanics can be resolved experimentally via a nondistructive continuous monitoring of a single quantum system. An example of such a system, coupled…
It is shown that the classical book by von Neumann proposing dynamics of measured systems with "reduction (or collapse) of system's wave packet" contains also hints how to avoid this discontinuity in time evolution of the measured system…
I present a simple variant of the Schr\"odinger cat meets Wigner's friend thought experiment. If you are shocked by it, you have not understood quantum physics (no words are missing from this sentence).
We give a general proof showing that once irreversible processes are involved, a class of projective measurements is impossible. Applying this no-go result to the Schroedinger's cat paradox implies that if something is claimed to be a real…
Schr\"odinger's cat is one of the most striking paradoxes of quantum mechanics that reveals the counterintuitive aspects of the microscopic world. Here, I discuss the paradox in the framework of quantum information. Using a quantum networks…
The entangled Schrodinger cat state obtained immediately upon measurement of a superposed two-state quantum system is often considered paradoxical because it appears to predict two macroscopically different outcomes, such as an alive and…
Quantum mechanics predicts that unobserved systems may exist in a superposition of states, yet measurement produces definite outcomes, a tension at the heart of the quantum-to-classical boundary. How the transformation between these…
Quantum effects and, in particular, entanglement are by now widely recognized in all areas of physics and related fields. However, we feel that the precise notion of entanglement---though mathematically well-defined---still generates…
Left on its own, a quantum state evolves deterministically under the Schr\"odinger Equation, forming superpositions. Upon measurement, however, a stochastic process governed by the Born rule collapses it to a single outcome. This dual…
In his book `Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics', von Neumann asserted the following: the Compton-Simon experiment showed that the state vector must collapse upon measurement of any self-adjoint operator. Comparing von Neumann's…