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Well, I just finished taking the February 2014 Texas Bar Exam. I'm in a strange quantum state between lawyer and non-lawyer; I feel a bit like Schrödinger's cat. The Board of Law Examiners (BLE) has my completed exam; it's sufficient to determine if I'm eligible for admission to the State Bar of Texas. The BLE will collapse that wave function when they open, grade, and scale/curve the exam. The function won't collapse for me or anyone else until May 1, 2014, when the results are announced.
There was a really interesting article in Scientific American about the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics; unfortunately, this article is now behind a paywall. What makes this interpretation so compelling to me was the confirmation that the cat knows the outcome before the box opens. Each potential observer has their own wave function; an observation event by that observer collapses the potential states of the system into an observed state for that observer. Much as the special theory of relativity describes how different observers in different accelerating frames may perceive sequences of events differently, this theory of quantum mechanics eschews a single, canonical wave function and "collapse". To me, discovering the relational theory was so freeing; the "objective" theories, including even the quite compelling "many worlds interpretation" with its infinite alternate universes (based on what quanta??), seemed to require too much compromise.
3 comments:
How does the cat know if it is dead?
And congrats on being done with the exam! I'm sure things will collapse in your favor.
odd that it accepted my comment but didn't post by whom; the previous comment (as well as this one) are from the Cap'n
Hi Cap'n! Your first question goes way beyond my expertise in philosophy. :-)
And I'll look into my template; it's probably why your ID isn't showing up correctly. I guess things have changed a bit in the past ... three years since my last post.
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