The laws of quantum mechanics are confusing, predicting that particles are also waves and that cats are simultaneously alive and dead.
Okay, so, like, that's punchier writing than the actual truth, but how am I supposed to buy anything else about physics in the article after that? The level of oversimplification of relatively commonly known concepts does not give me confidence that the rest won't be pop sci drivel.
Luckily you can check out the author’s bio right from the article:
Dr. Don Lincoln is a Senior Scientist at Fermilab, America’s leading particle physics laboratory, who has coauthored over 1,500 scientific papers. He was a member of the teams that discovered the top quark in 1995 and the Higgs boson in 2012.
I mean, they're both at least illustrative I guess. In the case of particles and waves I may be quibbling a bit over the distinction that something is a particle or a wave versus exhibiting the properties of one or the other.
In the case of Schrodinger's cat, the thought experiment suggests that if the life or death of the cat is tied to the collapse of the state vector, an eigenstate of the two implies simultaneous life and death. But the varying interpretations of this problem aren't so straightforward as 'both dead and alive', and it's kind of misleading to just leave it at that.
Personally, I find it odd that they'd discount the cat's own awareness of the state vector's collapse. Obviously when the atom decays and kills it, it's going to know before you are regardless of the presence of cardboard.
It just seems like a lot of kind of imprecise throw-away mentions of more complex ideas for one sentence. But again, maybe I'm being cynical.
I don't think he was planning to explain these concepts, just hint at them to the layman reading thr article who probably barely know what Schodinger's cat is.
And the cat observes it but that doesn't mean that the cat is now in a discrete state that is either alive or dead. It is both and will stay both and you'll only see which version of the cat is in your world. At least according to the many worlds theory which makes sense to me
Shrodinger’s cat wasn’t some simplified lesson for the layman. It wasn’t even an explanation. It was a commentary about the quantum model itself and how the current state of the model is laughably incomplete and unable to adequately answer or predict anything of value (yet). It wasn’t until more recently that some Newtonian physics might be explainable as emergent properties of quantum mechanics, but we are still a long ways away from a unified or blurred model.
Actually, cats really are alive and dead at the same time according to the many worlds interpretation. Under classical quantum mechanics, we say that superpositions collapse when observed, and since the cat is an observer of the quantum event (since the cat would die if the atom decayed), then the cat's presence resolves the superposition. Thus, the cat is never in superposition.
However, according to the many worlds interpretation, observation does not collapse superposition. Rather, it simply expands the superposition to include the observer. So the cat, as an observer of the quantum event, really is both alive and dead. And at the moment that you open the box to see whether the cat died, you will also observe the quantum event and become part of the superposition as well. You will both see a dead cat, and see a living cat. But your consciousness only experiences one of these possibilities. Presumably, you have another consciousness in the other possibility observing the cat in the other state. Two separate timelines have been created, which will each progress on their own according to causality. We may also call these timelines worlds or universes, seeing as they're mostly self contained.
In my unscientific opinion that will undoubtedly get shouted down by someone here, people hate people because they hate themselves or aspects about themselves.
The ego is fragile and cannot often handle direct known criticism, so people mirror their self hatred to others. Over time as this is practiced, the brain justifies reasons as to WHY they hate certain people. This helps the brain make sense of why they feel the way they do.
Jain’s team then built artificial-intelligence models that were able to stitch the microscope images together to reconstruct the whole sample in 3D.
The map is so large that most of it has yet to be manually checked, and it could still contain errors created by the process of stitching so many images together. “Hundreds of cells have been ‘proofread’, but that’s obviously a few per cent of the 50,000 cells in there,” says Jain.
Ah so it's not a real model, just an AI approximation.
It still seems like a real model to me. Just because they used a fancy computer to turn a sequence of 2d slices into a 3d representation doesn't mean it's not real.
ML is pretty common when working with a ton of data, from another article:
To make a map this finely detailed, the team had to cut the tissue sample into 5,000 slices and scan them with a high-speed electron microscope. Then they used a machine-learning model to help electronically stitch the slices back together and label the features. The raw data set alone took up 1.4 petabytes. “It’s probably the most computer-intensive work in all of neuroscience,” says Michael Hawrylycz, a computational neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, who was not involved in the research. “There is a Herculean amount of work involved.”
Unfortunately techbros have poisoned the term AI 🥲
I imagined it would be big but that's mad. Is that full 3d model or just connection cos of its just connections it really shows how far our ai is from replacing us.
Upon seeing this model Johan Medici, who had spent the past decade attempting to develop computer simulations that replicate the way a human mind works, yelled,"FUUUUUUUCK!" before throwing himself out a window.
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