Schrӧdingers cat

Yesterday, my form had a test about a practical investigation that involved radiation and a geiger-müller counter and this reminded me of the Schrӧdingers cat paradox. Since then i've been reading a book that I conveniently happen to own called "In search of Schrӧdingers cat" by John Gribbin, which of course explains what the thing is all about along with alot of other theories and facts.

According to Gribbin, the paradox first appeared in print in a German text called Naturwissenschaften, volume 23, page 812 in 1935, that same year as a paper about the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) paradox (which is more of a question than a paradox).

The Schrӧdingers cat paradox ponders 'There is a sealed box, containing a radioactive source, a geiger-müller counter to record the presence of radiation, a glass vial containing gaseous poison and a live cat. The apparatus is arranged so that the geiger-müller counter will be switched on for just long enough for there to be a 50% chance that it records any radiation. If it does, it will release the gaseous poison and kill the cat. If it doesn't, no further action occurs and the cat lives.

According to the Copenhagen interpretation, there is an equal chance that the cat will live or die and so, until the outcome is observed, we must assume that the cat is both alive and dead, that the vial is both full and empty and that there wasn't any but there was some radiation recorded by the geiger-müller counter!

Because of this, Einstein agrees with Schrӧdinger that wave representation of matter is an incomplete representation of reality because both of these scenarios cannot be true at the same time; they are inversely proportional to one another.

Maybe they can, however, in alternate realities, where every single possibility for the universal 'storyboard' is lived out. This seems quite a mathematical way to think about space-time and so, personaly, it looks like one of the most likely theories about reality. However, this last paragraph is just me and doesn't have anything to do with Schrӧdingers cat. Good night.

Mr Lambs physics equation triangles

Mr Lamb has been my physics teacher for 2 years and in that time my form's collected a number of 'Mr Lambs physics equation triangles' which help to work out equations in physics, are triangular in shape and although I'm not completely sure he created them, I'd name them after him because hes taught me quite a lot.

To use them, put your finger over the letter that represents whatever you want to find. Now, you are left with an equation and if you have both pieces of information that are represented by the remaining letters you can work out whatever is under your finger.

For example, In the speed, distance, time triangle, to find time you put your finger over T (this represents time) and you can see the D over S so you now calculate Distance divided by Speed and this will equal Time.

Successful STS 133 launch

The discovery shuttle, STS 133 successfuly launched on thursday 24th from pad 39A, Kennedy Space Center, Florida. It will dock on the ISS to resupply it with equipment and crew. If you were reading my other blog, http://sts133.blogspot.com/ then you would know all about the shuttle.

 I waited around 7 months to see it launch and me and my family even flew to Florida from England for 3 weeks primarily to see it launch but it was postponed for... around 7 months. You'd know about that too if you click on the link http://sts133.blogspot.com/. but I did of course watch it live when it finaly flew into space.

Image courtesy of NASA

For more information, see http://spaceflightnow.com/

For the official NASA website, see http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html

On the taking of generic site names without making good use of them

Excuse me while I have a little rant, because astrophysics.blogspot.com was created by an idiot who doesn't know what they're talking about. The site should belong to someone more educated, because 'astrobuff' is wrong and the site isn't even about astrophysics, just normal everday physics.

In the top post, 'astrobuff' says "Can you hear in space? In theory, if there is nothing to receive the sound, there is no sound. Because there are no "air waves" in space to conduct the sound, it would not carry. So, the object would make a noise, but it would not carry to any receiver, and no one would hear it."

WRONG! There will always be a receiver, because the reciever can be any matter and it doesn't have to be a concious being like a human or any other animal. Sound is created due to the vibration of matter and this matter is the 'receiver'.

WRONG AGAIN! There's no theory that says there won't be a sound without a 'receiver'. In theory, if there is nothing concious to receive the sound, there WILL still be a sound, get your facts straight!

AND AGAIN! I like how they've put "air waves" in speech marks like that, because they aren't sure whether to write this. Air 'waves' dont exist, air is made of trillions of trillions of microscopic pieces of matter- atoms and molecules (which are made of even smaller things). so air should not be treated as a wave, but as gaseous matter.

AND AGAIN! Finally, they contradict themselves when they say that "the object would make a noise, but it would not carry to any receiver". In space, where there is practicaly zero air between planets (there is some, but it's very very scarce, so it's generaly treated as a vacuum) you can't make a sound, because there is no air to carry the vibrations. So if you hit the outside of a shuttle, the astronauts inside would hear it because there's air inside but you wouldn't because you're outside in a spacesuit and there is no matter between you and the shuttle to carry the vibration.

Apart from all this rubbish, astrophysics.blogspot.com is about their black cat called miu which has no relation to astrophysics AT ALL and this is why astrophysics.blogspot.com should be repossessed by blogger and reserved for an actual astrophysicist.

According to the bible heaven is hotter than hell

First of all, if you have a bible, read Isaiah 30:26. This says that 'moreover, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun and the llight of the sun shall be seveonfold as the light of seven days'. From this you can draw that heaven would receive as much radiation from the moon as the earth does from the sun and the seven times seven (49) mentioned in the passage, so 50 relative units of radiation in all.

Using the Stefan-Boltzmann fourth-power law for radiation, there is mathematical proof that Heaven would therefore be an insufferable 525˚C.

Now read Revelations 21:8, which describes the damned condemned to 'a lake which burneth with fire and brimstone' which means the sulphur in the brimstone must be a liquid and therefore below the boiling point of 444.6˚C because above that, the lake would be vapour and not a lake.

Therefore, Hell would be below 444.6˚C, so according to the bible, Heaven is over 80.4˚C hotter than Hell.

Of course this was all written a long, long time ago before they realised that it would all be proved wrong, because they unsurpringly didn't have the technology or methodolgy to test any of this.
And then to make it all look even worse, in 1998 Eugenio Ramiro Pose (the Auxiliary Bishop of Madrid and Titular Bishop of Turuda) decided that you should actualy ignore one of the sevens in the bible, admitting it to be wrong (although this is stupid because you can't change facts to suit your purpose!).

The funny part is, many people chose to believe his ridiculous interjection which shows how easily the church can move the goal posts away from science, which particularly frustrates me.
And may I just point out that even with his desperate statement, Heaven would still be 231.5˚C and is still doesn't sound like a plausible temperature for 'paradise'.

A theory on why and how the universe expands at an increasing rate

I've been reading 'the never ending days of being dead' by Marcus Chown and he's compiled a few interesting ideas. It's lead me to think that the expansion of the universe is recorded by the universe, which causes it to expand more and record this and expand even more... in short that the universes expansion causes the universe to expand in itself.
This probably sounds confusing and or strange, but it's really not.

1. During the first few yoctoseconds, all the matter and energy began to escape from the impossibly super-dense singularity of creation. The big bang. For this to happen, time must be existent or nothing would move (infact if time never existed then nothing at all would have ever existed!) and therefore the dimension of space-time was born.
2. As something moves, it leaves a record in the relative past of it's movement.
3. As things are 'recorded' on the cosmic storyboard of the 4th dimension, space-time expands.
4. As space-time expands, things are 'recorded' on the cosmic storyboard of the 4th dimension.
5. Therefore spacetime exists for its own cause because space-time needs more space-time.
6. Therefore it expands because it expands.
7. Therefore its a reason WITHIN ITSELF.

This is exiting because one of the eternal philosophical questions is 'how can something have come from apparent nothing?', surely if nothing existed then existance would have to have a purpose within itself. It would need a REASON WITHIN ITSELF.

STS 133

The STS-133 crew members, from the left, are NASA astronauts Alvin Drew and Nicole Stott, both mission specialists; Eric Boe, pilot; Steve Lindsey, commander; Michael Barratt and Tim Kopra, both mission specialists. Image credit: NASA

Keep updated with the STS 133 launch on my sideline blog, http://sts133.blogspot.com/