Schroedinger's Cat
by Art Enrico
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Price
$2,160
Dimensions
28.000 x 36.000 inches
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Title
Schroedinger's Cat
Artist
Art Enrico
Medium
Painting - Acrylic On Canvas
Description
Schroedinger's cat is a famous thought experiment in quantum physics. Entering the world of quantum physics is the scientific equivalent of falling down the rabbit hole. Explaining the thought experiment simply is nearly impossible, making it comprehensible even worse, and getting most people to accept the reality of its implications, completely impossible. So why paint something most people would not understand, let alone care about? I care about it, even though I find it difficult to wrap my mind around, too.
Quantum physics deals with the world at the sub-atomic level. Down there, things are really weird. Reality is not an objective experience, it is a series of probabilities. When you observe something at the quantum level, it may be here, it may be there, or it may be somewhere else. You cannot know where it is until you observe it, in fact it is the act observation that causes it to be where you find it. Huh? Yes, I am serious, it is necessary, at the quantum level, to observe something before it can enter objective reality, until then it is just a series of probabilities. That fact alone is hard to accept, the implications even more so. There is a small publishing industry built on those implications.
One of the persons involved in the early development of quantum physics was Erwin Schroedinger. He later came to question some of the conclusions of the discipline and devised his famous thought experiment to highlight its absurdities. The ironic thing is that his thought experiment is now often used to illustrate the very facts he questioned.
His thought experiment goes as follows: Imagine two boxes, one is empty, the other contains a cat. Hooked up to the box with the cat is a machine which can detect atoms. If the machine detects an atom inside the box with the cat, it releases a poison gas that instantly kills the cat. Outside the boxes is a partially reflecting-partially transmitting mirror that sends an atom towards openings in both boxes. Now, remember, the position of the atom is only a probability until someone observes it, the atom is in what is called a superpositioned state. Since there is an equal chance of the atom being realized in either of the boxes, the atom is in and not in both boxes simultaneously, the death machine is triggered and not triggered and the cat is both dead and alive. The entire system is now in a superpositioned until someone opens the box to check on the cat collapsing all waves and discovering a corpse or a hungry and probably very angry kitty. Schroedinger thought it absurd that the atoms existed only as a probabilities until observed and that the cat in his thought experiment could be both dead and alive until observed. Logic dictates this cannot be, quantum physics says, yeah, it can. All laboratory experiments, so far, support the alive/dead cat hypothesis, even if our minds cannot accept it. Like I said, it gets really weird down there. (No cats were harmed in this thought experiment.)
Realism did not seemed the way to go to illustrate this thought experiment. Schroedinger's cat is a stylized cat with the cosmos as a face since the implications are cosmic in nature. Rather than showing the cat as being literally dead and alive, I have used the colors of yellow and green respectively to stand in for those states, the state of demise being further enhanced by the images of crows and dead trees. Around the cat are circling cat toys which may also be elements of atoms or atoms themselves. Behind the cat is the fabric of space through which are traveling stylized representations of "strings". Strings are some quantum physicists' alternate explanations for point particle physics. There is no need and no space (no pun intended) to explain them here, just know that some people believe they may be able to repair tears in space, hence the Excalibur image, a tool uniquely designed to do perform just such a function. That is the solar system behind the cat's head.
Uploaded
April 2nd, 2012
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