Submission + - Is the World Ready for the "Schrödinger's Physicist" Experiment? (businessinsider.com)
Press2ToContinue writes: Imagine a physicist sitting in a chamber with a gun pointed directly at her head.
Every few seconds, the spin direction of a random particle in the room is measured. If the particle is spinning one direction then the gun goes off and the physicist dies. If the particle is spinning in the opposite direction, there's just a clicking sound and the physicist survives.
She has a 50/50 chance of surviving, right?
It might not be that simple if we live in a multiverse — the idea that multiple universes, apart from the one we call home, exist.
This scenario with the physicist and the gun is the start of a famous thought experiment called "quantum suicide," and it's one way for physicists to consider if we really are living in just one of many (and potentially infinitely many) universes.
This is different from the Schrödinger's cat experiment because this time, the observer is continuously integrated into the experiment, and plays an integral part which contributes to the conclusion.
Her survival is tied to a quantum probability, so she'll be both dead and alive at once — just in different universes. If a new universe splits off every time a particle is measured and the gun either fires or doesn't, then in one of those universes, the physicist will end up surviving, say 50 particle measurements. You can think of this as flipping a coin 50 times in a row. You have an extremely low likelihood of getting heads each of those 50 times — less than a 1 quadrillion chance, but it is possible.
And if it happens, that's enough for the physicist to conclude that the multiverse is real, and effectively she becomes immortal in the universe in which the gun never goes off. But she also becomes the only person who knows that parallel universes exist.
Every few seconds, the spin direction of a random particle in the room is measured. If the particle is spinning one direction then the gun goes off and the physicist dies. If the particle is spinning in the opposite direction, there's just a clicking sound and the physicist survives.
She has a 50/50 chance of surviving, right?
It might not be that simple if we live in a multiverse — the idea that multiple universes, apart from the one we call home, exist.
This scenario with the physicist and the gun is the start of a famous thought experiment called "quantum suicide," and it's one way for physicists to consider if we really are living in just one of many (and potentially infinitely many) universes.
This is different from the Schrödinger's cat experiment because this time, the observer is continuously integrated into the experiment, and plays an integral part which contributes to the conclusion.
Her survival is tied to a quantum probability, so she'll be both dead and alive at once — just in different universes. If a new universe splits off every time a particle is measured and the gun either fires or doesn't, then in one of those universes, the physicist will end up surviving, say 50 particle measurements. You can think of this as flipping a coin 50 times in a row. You have an extremely low likelihood of getting heads each of those 50 times — less than a 1 quadrillion chance, but it is possible.
And if it happens, that's enough for the physicist to conclude that the multiverse is real, and effectively she becomes immortal in the universe in which the gun never goes off. But she also becomes the only person who knows that parallel universes exist.
