**Ask a monkey a physics question thread**

[OngBonga]

Anti matter is just matter that has identical mass but opposite charge. I think the name antimatter is misleading, like it makes people think it's some mythical stuff that resides in another universe. The only mystery regarding antimatter is why there isn't as much as the stuff as there is matter. Antimatter is matter.

I sense an Ongdentity paradox arising here.

Exactly.

The cat in the box is nonsense, by the way. Schrodinger was never seriously suggesting the cat is both alive and dead at the same time, he was attempting to draw attention to the potential paradox that seemed to emerge from quantum mechanics, or more specifically, the Copenhagen Interpretation. That's about as much as I can get my head around on that matter. When we start talking about wave function collapse, I start looking for my king skins.

[Savy]

When we start talking about wave function collapse, I start looking for my king skins.

|> <|

[Poopadoop]

The cat in the box is nonsense, by the way. Schrodinger was never seriously suggesting the cat is both alive and dead at the same time

I thought the question revolved around whether the cat was still in the box or not during the time you couldn't observe it.

[MadMojoMonkey]

I thought the question revolved around whether the cat was still in the box or not during the time you couldn't observe it.

No. The cat is in a box with a lethal dose of some poison. The container of poison will be broken if a radioactive sample has decayed, triggering the release, killing the cat.

The thought experiment is that once the box is sealed, and no further observations are made, the quantum mechanical description of the radioactive sample is that it exists in a state of both having decayed and not having decayed. But this means that the cat is in a superposition of being alive and dead, which seems absurd.

This was meant to show that superpositions of states is absurd, and that the American description of QM was superior to the European description.

It fails on many levels, and the fundamental premise was flat out wrong.

A) both interpretations of QM are identical, but present themselves against a backdrop of different-looking mathematical frameworks. All predictions made by one group are predicted by the other group, there is nothing one predicts that the other does not. They are the same, though they are presented differently.

B) The superposition of states, absurd though it sounds, is easy to experimentally verify, and is done by undergraduate physicists all over the world.

[MadMojoMonkey]

Anti matter is just matter that has identical mass but opposite charge. I think the name antimatter is misleading, like it makes people think it's some mythical stuff that resides in another universe. The only mystery regarding antimatter is why there isn't as much as the stuff as there is matter. Antimatter is matter.

Well said. There is no reason that one is "anti" other than we're familiar with the abundant one, and the less abundant one we call anti-.

Physics would change one bit if every particle in the universe was exchanged for its anti-particle. The sign conventions we humans use to describe things would be all inverted, but that's merely a contrivance to keep the math orderly. The math would be just as orderly once we replaced the "right hand rule" with the "left hand rule," etc.

Exactly.

It wasn't eloquent, but the Ongdentity was, I think, correct in general.

The cat in the box is nonsense, by the way. Schrodinger was never seriously suggesting the cat is both alive and dead at the same time, he was attempting to draw attention to the potential paradox that seemed to emerge from quantum mechanics, or more specifically, the Copenhagen Interpretation. That's about as much as I can get my head around on that matter.

Yep. It was meant to be an absurd example to illustrate a hard-to-accept fact about QM.

The superposition of states is a real thing. The notion that it can happen with an ensemble of many Avogadro's number of particles is not practical.

When we start talking about wave function collapse, I start looking for my king skins.

Lies. You always know where your king skins are like a sixth sense. Even in the depths of your pondering of wave function collapse, your hand will absent-mindedly and automatically find your king skins on their own.

If you look down, you'll find you're holding them right now.

(It's like I know you or something.)