Schrödinger's Cat Catches a Mouse

I just finished reading James Rollins's book Black Order, and one of the more interesting theories to spring from the book is quantum evolution.

The theory is fairly straightforward. If you've taken as basic chemistry class this has likely come up. An electron acts as both a particle and a wave. It's all tied in to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that two conjugate variable cannot be know with precise certainty. These variable are typically things like time and place. In relation to the electron, you can know where an electron is in the electron cloud, thus making it a particle, or you can know it's movement, in which case it acts like a wave.

Another example here would be Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment. Schrödinger wrote that One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts. In layman's terms, the cat would be both alive and dead, and would remain as such until observed.

I know, I know, it sounds kinda confusing and downright boring. But the important part of quantum mechanics is a point Rollins raised in the Black Order. The mere act of observing dictates the outcome of what is being observed. For example, if one wanted to know where the electron was, they would view it as a particle and not a wave, because they would unconcerned with it's motion.

I know that a chemist would probably tear me apart, but I'm not shooting for exact science here. But let me get to the crux of my point. In the book, one of the main characters falls ill to a disease that devolves him, returning his cells to the primordial goop. A former Nazi experiment called "The Bell" is discovered to have caused the change, and the Bell is capable of saving the character. But another character points out that, according to quantum mechanics, the best way to save someone in this condition is through prayer, or rather, having someone in the Bell with the sick man, observing him, and thereby affecting the outcome of the experiment.

There's another branch of quantum theory that states that, in the model of the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment, the moment an observes opens the box, reality splits into two separate and decoherent outcomes, a living cat, or a dead cat. Essentially this theory states that every choice we make causes a rift in reality, creating an infinite number of worlds and universes spread across the dimensional plane. Concerning this line of thought, Sir Roger Penrose, an English mathematical physicist stated, "I wish to make it clear that, as it stands this is far from a resolution of the cat paradox. For there is nothing in the formalism of quantum mechanics that demands that a state of consciousness cannot involve the simultaneous perception of a live and a dead cat." This line of thinking is another story for another day.

In 1998, Max Tegmark, a Swedish-American cosmologist, unveiled the "quantum suicide" machine, which examined Schrödinger's experiment from the point of view of the cat. More precisely, the quantum suicide machine involves an experimenter sitting in front of a loaded gun which will or will not be triggered by a decaying atom. Each time the experiment is run, there is a 50% chance of the gun going off. If the gun does go off, then the experimenter dies, right? Well, according to that whole reality splitting thing from earlier, every time the experiment is run, reality splits into two differing lines, one where the experimenter continues to sit in front of a gun that did not go off, and another where the experimenter's lab assistant is toweling brains off his computer. From the perspective of the experimenter, if the gun goes off, so likely does his head, but if the gun does not go off, and in the subsequent runs of the experiment the gun continues to not go off, the experimenter experiences a kind of immortality. That really is another story for another day.

Back to my original train of thought before we became so horribly derailed... If observation truly does change the outcome of situations, at the quantum level at least, then prayer does work. The unbeliever might say that prayer is useless, but if you believe that what you are doing will have some positive outcome, then why not go through with it? In the end, I guess you could view quantum theory, at least as proposed by James Rollins, as the ultimate optimism.

Author's Note:
Special Thanks to ye olde Wikipedia for the links in this entry.
No animals were harmed in the writing of this post.
The experimenter, however, simultaneously lived and died.
Have fun, kids.