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Comment by JDDunn9 | Hacker News Reader

I think physics is going in that direction too. The paper explains how math went from experimental to formal proofs. Now, for better or worse, science wants to extrapolate to universes from quantum particles.

Schrodinger's cat was originally proposed by Schrodinger to ridicule the many word's extrapolation of quantum mechanics. Now it is often used to support it. Scientists create multiple dimensions, universes, etc. based on very little real world data.

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Schrodinger's cat is just like the old school intuition that is subject to errors. It is also why physics may have a better public image than math, due to the higher availability of intuitive ideas in describing physical phenomena. We wouldn't need a simultaneously alive and dead cat if people were more educated about the idea of a random variable. Heck, five seconds on wikipedia leads to "a random variable conceptually does not have a single, fixed value (even if unknown); rather, it can take on a set of possible different values, each with an associated probability."

The paradox Schrodinger pinpoints in his famous thought experiment cannot be explained by a simple appeal to random variables. Such variables would be the "hidden variables" that Einstein and others attempted to find to explain Quantum entanglement.

Von Neumann thought he proved that hidden variables were impossible, but In the 1970's, John Bell introduced Bell's Inequality, and showed us that hidden variables can only be used to explain Quantum entanglement if one gives up on naive locality.

Things get hairier from there when you try to combine non-local theories (such as Bohm's) with relativity.

It's complicated.

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