Still with "Schrödinger's cat".. and the thought experiment he made, which is considered one of the most important experiments of the "quantum mechanics" we are talking about...
The pharaonic cat goddess "Bast" was sacred, as we said.. the ancient Egyptians held cats sacred.. but they did not worship them.. because the ancient Egyptians were a monotheistic people.. with them, "lord" meant "shepherd".. like "the lord of the house".. and in a translation of one of the papyri, "Ra" himself, the greatest of lords, says "the water is not mine".. meaning that there is a god above "Ra" who owns the universe and the water in it.. and Ra used to grow old and fall ill and sleep and sometimes make mistakes.. and he does not know what is in the hearts.. and many things were hidden from him...
The cat that died in pharaonic Egypt was mummified exactly like humans.. we have about a million and more mummified cats.. and cats used to enter homes and fields and shops as they wished and whenever they wished, and they would find a welcome from their people.. and killing any cat in pharaonic Egypt had only one punishment..
Death...
That beautiful black colour is one of the three basic colours of cats that we can call "pure" colours..
When you see a black cat crossing in front of you on any day.. be careful and remember well.. it is just a cat, not a bogeyman.. an animal out to earn its living...
The myth of the black cat as "evil and bad luck" spread because of a certain period in the history of Europe.. it was considered evil incarnate and whoever kept one was a sorcerer or a witch.. and they would kill the cat and burn its owner or torture him and drown him..
Before we talked about "Schrödinger's cat", we had to know what this "quantum mechanics" actually is.. but that was not possible and the definition would have been terribly boring.. so there had to be a simple entry point that grabs attention..
Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics.. concerned with studying tiny particles.. and studying their energy.. like atoms.. and "subatomic" particles.. which are smaller than the atom.. like protons, neutrons and electrons..
So what is its use and its importance? No, it has a great many applications.. from the transistor and the microprocessor.. to supercomputers and lasers.. and chemical applications.. and countless medical applications..
Gravity is the force that God created for us in the universe and it holds up the whole architecture of the universe.. it holds bodies, and binds the planets and stars and moons to one another.. this gravity is an awesome, limitless energy.. and the unit of it that scientists are trying to reach is called the "graviton"...
This hypothetical graviton that they cannot lay their hands on is a "massless particle"..
What does massless mean? You have mass.. and I have mass.. and a football has mass.. and a pen has mass..
Mass is the amount of matter a body contains...
Therefore the mass of a cube of iron.. is different from the mass of a cube of biscuits...
A body's energy is linked to its mass.. they call it "Mass–energy equivalence"..
You want to calculate a body's energy?.. Multiply the mass by the square of the speed of light and you get its energy.. this is Einstein's famous equation on which the atomic bomb was built...
E = m × c²
So what happens when the mass is zero? Then the product in the complete equation
E2 = (mc2)2 + (pc)2
gives you an infinite result..
Infinite energy.. without limit.. and "free"...
Whoever lays his hands on this energy and harnesses it, for him nuclear bombs and jet planes and engines that run on fuel and intercontinental missiles become mere idiocy and backwardness.. and the difference between you becomes the same technical difference between your army with its navy and missiles and tanks and artillery.. and an army of men who lived in a cave before Christ, lighting fire with two stones..
So how do we reach this graviton and lay our hands on it? There is a big gap between Einstein's relativity.. and quantum mechanics.. a gap between the harmony and the forces that bind the planets and stars to one another.. and the forces that bind these tiny particles, including electrons, and move them along their path..
Some scientists believe that the theory that will close this gap.. between relativity and quantum mechanics.. will lay its hands on the "graviton"...
The awesome energy that all the countries of the world are chasing...
Let us go back to Schrödinger and the poor cat we put in the box yesterday at 1 p.m... locked in a box with a radioactive body that might decay at any moment and kill it...
Is she alive? Or did the radioactive body decay and the radiation kill her?
The experiment originally said that this cat is locked up with a radioactive body connected to a Geiger counter (that is a counter that measures radiation).. the Geiger counter is connected to a hammer.. if the body decays and radiation is emitted, the "Geiger counter" works, so the hammer moves and strikes a flask.. this flask contains poison.. it spills into the box and kills the cat..
But Einstein was simpler than that.. and it is said that he was the one who made this modification.. and told them "no hammer, no nonsense.. a cat and a body that decays and the radiation kills it and we're done.."
He was extremely simple and believed that genius lies in simplicity.. and he had a famous saying: "If you cannot explain a thing to the ordinary, non-specialist man and have him understand it easily.. then you yourself do not understand that thing well".. and he used to be annoyed by false pretension and priestcraft, and always said that science is not the monopoly of specialists..
He saw that monopolising science leads to its isolation, to the spiritual poverty of people, and to killing their innovation and creativity..
We agreed that "Schrödinger" considered this cat a "particle"..
Well, all particles move.. atomic or subatomic.. they spin around each other and move from their place.. and when radiation or energy beams strike them they jump from place to place..
Here our brother Schrödinger.. when he made his thought experiment with the cat.. said: let us consider this cat a particle..
And we are not seeing this particle..
So before we open the box.. this cat, "the particle".. could be in any state.. more precisely.. it is in all the states together.. until we observe it.. then it settles for us on the state in which we observed it..
Meaning this cat inside the box.. as long as we are not seeing it.. is alive and dead at the same time...!!
How is that? And how is Schrödinger's cat inside the box "alive and dead at the same time"?
We will continue talking about that later, and there will be more of this talk...
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References
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1 - Previous posts: https://goo.gl/2GfWC2
2 - Rovelli, C. (2001). "Notes for a brief history of quantum gravity"...
3 - Feynman, R. P.; Morinigo, F. B.; Wagner, W. G.; Hatfield, B. (1995). Feynman Lectures on Gravitation. Addison-Wesley...
4 - Zee, A. (2003). Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell...
5 - Castelvecchi, Davide; Witze, Witze (February 11, 2016). "Einstein's gravitational waves found at last". Nature News...
6 - Colosi, D.; et al. (2005). "Background independence in a nutshell: The dynamics of a tetrahedron". Classical and Quantum Gravity. 22 (14): 2971–2989...
7 - Pauling, Linus; Wilson, Edgar Bright (1985-03-01). Introduction to Quantum Mechanics with Applications to Chemistry...
#كوانتم#Quantum