Atom Cats Quotes

After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin?

In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our experience of the everyday world...all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else.

It isn't just that Bohr's atom with its electron "orbits" is a false picture; all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else.

Sir Arthur Eddington summed up the situation brilliantly in his book The Nature of the Physical World, published in 1929. "No familiar conceptions can be woven around the electron," he said, and our best description of the atom boils down to "something unknown is doing we don't know what".

Tall, dark and handsome was hot. Tall, dark, and handsome with a nestled kitten? Atomic.

and you were sort of hypnotized by your boot or shoe or a finger-nail as it might be,and at the same time you were sort of picked up by the old scruff and shook like you might be a cat.you got shook and shook till there was nothing left.you lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn’t care,and you waited until your boot or finger-nail got yellow,then yellower and yellower all the time.then the lights started cracking like atomics and the boot or finger-nail or,as it might be,a bit of dirt on your trouser-bottom turned into a big big big mesto,bigger than the whole world,and you were just going to get introduced to old Bog or God when it was all over.you came back to here and now whimpering sort of,with your rot all squaring up for a boohoohoo.now that’s very nice but very cowardly.you were not put on this earth just to get in touch with God.that sort of thing could sap all the strength and the goodness out of a chelloveck.

Maybe it's ALWAYS the end of the world. Maybe you're alive for a while, and then you realize you're going to die, and that's such an insane thing to comprehend, you look around for answers and the only answer is that the world must die with you. Sure, the world seems crazy now. But wouldn't it seem just as crazy if you were alive when they sacrificed peasants, when people were born into slavery, when they killed first-born sons, crucified priests, fed people to lions, burned them on stakes, when they intentionally gave people smallpox or syphilis, when they gassed them, burned them, dropped atomic bombs on them, when entire races tried to wipe other races off the planet? Yes, we've ruined the planet and melted the ice caps and depleted the ozone, and we're always finding new ways to kill one another. Yeah, we're getting cancer at an alarming rate and suicides are at an all-time high, and, sure, we've got people so depressed they take a drug that could turn them into pasty-skinned animals who go around all night dancing and having sex and eating stray cats and small dogs and squirrels and mice and very, very rarely- the statistics say you're more likely to be killed by lightning- a person. But this is the Apocalypse? Fuck you! It's always the Apocalypse. The world hasn't gone to shit. The world is shit. All I'd asked was that it be better managed.

In 1967, the second resolution to the cat problem was formulated by Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, whose work was pivotal in laying the foundation of quantum mechanics and also building the atomic bomb. He said that only a conscious person can make an observation that collapses the wave function. But who is to say that this person exists? You cannot separate the observer from the observed, so maybe this person is also dead and alive. In other words, there has to be a new wave function that includes both the cat and the observer. To make sure that the observer is alive, you need a second observer to watch the first observer. This second observer is called “Wigner’s friend,” and is necessary to watch the first observer so that all waves collapse. But how do we know that the second observer is alive? The second observer has to be included in a still-larger wave function to make sure he is alive, but this can be continued indefinitely. Since you need an infinite number of “friends” to collapse the previous wave function to make sure they are alive, you need some form of “cosmic consciousness,” or God. Wigner concluded: “It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.” Toward the end of his life, he even became interested in the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. In this approach, God or some eternal consciousness watches over all of us, collapsing our wave functions so that we can say we are alive. This interpretation yields the same physical results as the Copenhagen interpretation, so this theory cannot be disproven. But the implication is that consciousness is the fundamental entity in the universe, more fundamental than atoms. The material world may come and go, but consciousness remains as the defining element, which means that consciousness, in some sense, creates reality. The very existence of the atoms we see around us is based on our ability to see and touch them.

Maybe the trick is to put fear in its place so it doesn’t take over. He can relegate the vice cops and petty rumors to the same corner of his mind where he puts atom bombs and other lurking evils.

Her head jerked around. "It's so unlikely to be alive, isn't it? The right temperature, and gravity, the right atoms combining at the precise moment, you'd think it would never happen." She stood looking at a painting with a hand to her cheek, then watched the cat making its way across the sofa toward the bird. "Life, it's so unlikely," she said, then turned to me again. "It's so much better than we think, isn't it?

And maybe it's like everything else. Maybe the trick is to put fear in its place so it doesn't take over. He can relegate the vice cops and petty rumors to the same corner of his mind where he puts atom bombs and other lurking evils. What he can do is—God, he keeps thinking of that woman. He can feed the goddamn ducks and he can kiss his boyfriend. He can believe that the future they have is worth more than his fear, and he can do what it takes to make the future as safe and happy as possible.

So graphene makes an extremely strong, tough material. At the same time, because it is only one atomic layer thick, a graphene sheet is light and flexible. In explaining their 2010 award, the Nobel committee mentioned that a one-square meter graphene hammocck could support a cat, while weighing about as much as one of the cat's whiskers.

But in the end, if he were a betting man, he says, he’d put his money on the insects. The insects are older than people, they have more experience at surviving, and there are a lot more of them than there are of us. Anyway, we’ll probably blow ourselves sky-high before the end of the century, given the atom bomb and the way things are going. The future belongs to the insects.

As I will be saying over and over again in this rambling volume, I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries. What is the difference between something and nothing? Why is there something rather than nothing? Should the something of which the universe is fundamentally composed be regarded as like atoms or be regarded as more like a mind? Or is the substratum best thought of as something neutral: material when structured one way, mental when structured another way? I have no desire even to try to answer such questions. I find nothing absurd about the notion that the external world is the mind of God, nor do I find it repulsive to suppose that God can create a world of substance, utterly unlike ideas in God’s mind or anybody’s mind, that can exist whether God thinks about it or not. How can I, a mere mortal slightly above an ape in intelligence, know what it means to say that something is “created” by God, or “thought” by God? One can play endless metaphysical games with such phrases,3 but I can no more grasp what is behind such questions than my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph.

Imagine a cat, a vial of poison, and a radioactive source in a sealed box. If an internal sensor registers radioactivity, like an atom decaying, the vial is broken, releasing a poison that kills the cat. The atom has an equal chance of decaying or not decaying. It’s an ingenious way of linking an outcome in the classical world, our world, to a quantum-level event. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests a crazy thing: before the box is opened, before observation occurs, the atom exists in superposition—an undetermined state of both decaying and not decaying. Which means, in turn, that the cat is both alive and dead. And only when the box is opened, and an observation made, does the wave function collapse into one of two states. In other words, we only see one of the possible outcomes. For instance, a dead cat. And that becomes our reality. But then things get really weird. Is there another world, just as real as the one we know, where we opened the box and found a purring, living cat instead? The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says yes. That when we open the box, there’s a branch. One universe where we discover a dead cat. One where we discover a live one. And it’s the act of our observing the cat that kills it—or lets it live. And then it gets mind-fuckingly weird. Because those kinds of observations happen all the time. So if the world really splits whenever something is observed, that means there’s an unimaginably massive, infinite number of universes—a multiverse—where everything that can happen will happen.

A wave on the configuration space carries a vast amount of information. Recall, for example, the state CONTRARY, which describes correlations between the answers to questions asked simultaneously of two particles, while telling nothing at all about each particle separately. To code quantum states like this, in total generality, we need more than a three-dimensional wave for each atom in the cat. We need a wave flowing on the space of all possible configurations of the cat. Once one accepts the existence of a wave on the space of all the configurations of a cat, the resolutions of the quantum puzzles follow directly. There is

Things reached such a pitch that at one conference Bohr remarked of a new theory that the question was not whether it was crazy, but whether it was crazy enough. To illustrate the non-intuitive nature of the quantum world, Schrödinger offered a famous thought experiment in which a hypothetical cat was placed in a box with one atom of a radioactive substance attached to a vial of hydrocyanic acid. If the particle degraded within an hour, it would trigger a mechanism that would break the vial and poison the cat. If not, the cat would live. But we could not know which was the case, so there was no choice, scientifically, but to regard the cat as 100 per cent alive and 100 per cent dead at the same time.

Wheeler wasn’t the first to point out that quantum mechanics slips into paradox the minute you introduce a second observer. The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Eugene Wigner, for one, had emphasized it with a Schrödinger’s-cat-style thought experiment that became known as “Wigner’s friend.” It went something like this: Inside a lab, Wigner’s friend sets up an experiment in which an atom will randomly emit a photon, producing a flash of light that leaves a spot on a photographic plate. Before Wigner’s friend checks the plate for signs of a flash, quantum mechanics shows that the atom is in a superposition of having emitted a photon and not having emitted a photon. Once the friend looks at the plate, however, he sees a single outcome—the atom flashed or it didn’t. Somehow his looking collapses the atom’s wavefunction, transforming two possibilities into a single reality. Wigner, meanwhile, is standing outside the lab. From his point of view, quantum mechanics shows that until his friend tells him the outcome of the experiment, the atom remains in a superposition of having emitted a photon and not having emitted a photon. What’s more, his friend is now in a superposition of having seen a spot of light on the plate and not having seen a spot of light on the plate. Only Wigner, quantum theory says, can collapse the wavefunction by asking his friend what happened in there. The two stories are contradictory. According to Wigner’s friend, the atom’s wavefunction collapsed when he looked at the plate. According to Wigner, it didn’t. Instead, his friend entered a superposition correlated with the superposition of the atom, and it wasn’t until Wigner spoke to his friend that both superpositions collapsed. Which story is right? Who is the true creator of reality, Wigner or his friend?

Schrödinger’s Cat Schrödinger devised a simple thought experiment that exposed the essence of the problem. Place a cat in a sealed box. Put a piece of uranium in the box. When the uranium fires a subatomic particle, it triggers a Geiger counter that sets off a gun that fires a bullet at the cat. The question is: Is the cat dead or alive? Since the firing of a uranium atom is a purely quantum event, it means that you have to describe the cat in terms of quantum mechanics. To Heisenberg, before you open the box, the cat exists as a mixture of different quantum states—that is, the cat is the sum of two waves. One wave describes a dead cat. The other wave describes a live cat. The cat is neither dead nor alive but a mixture of both. The only way to tell if the cat is dead or alive is to open the box and make an observation; then the wave function collapses into a dead or live cat. In other words, observation (which requires consciousness) determines existence.

Motion in space can proceed in any direction and back again. Motion in time only proceeds in one direction in the everyday world, whatever seems to be going on at the particle level. It’s hard to visualize the four dimensions of spacetime, each at right angles to the other, but we can leave out one dimension and imagine what this strict rule would mean if it applied to one of the three dimensions we are used to. It’s as if we were allowed to move either up or down, either forward or back, but that sideways motion was restricted to shuffling to the left, say. Movement to the right is forbidden. If we made this the central rule in a children’s game, and then told a child to find a way of reaching a prize off to the right-hand side (“backward in time”) it wouldn’t take too long for the child to find a way out of the trap. Simply turn around to face the other way, swapping left for right, and then reach the prize by moving to the left. Alternatively, lie down on the floor so that the prize is in the “up” direction with reference to your head. Now you can move both “up” to grasp the prize and “down” to your original position, before standing up again and returning your personal space orientation to that of the bystanders.* The technique for time travel allowed by relativity theory is very similar. It involves distorting the fabric of space-time so that in a local region of space-time the time axis points in a direction equivalent to one of the three space directions in the undistorted region of space-time. One of the other space directions takes on the role of time, and by swapping space for time such a device would make true time travel, there and back again, possible. American mathematician Frank Tipler has made the calculations that prove such a trick is theoretically possible. Space-time can be distorted by strong gravitational fields,and Tipler’s imaginary time machine is a very massive cylinder, containing as much matter as our sun packed into a volume 100 km long and 10 km in radius, as dense as the nucleus of an atom, rotating twice every millisecond and dragging the fabric of space-time around with it. The surface of the cylinder would be moving at half the speed of light. This isn’t the sort of thing even the maddest of mad inventors is likely to build in his backyard, but the point is that it is allowed by all the laws of physics that we know. There is even an object in the universe that has the mass of our sun, the density of an atomic nucleus, and spins once every 1.5 milliseconds, only three times slower than Tipler’s time machine. This is the so-called “millisecond pulsar,” discovered in 1982. It is highly unlikely that this object is cylindrical—such extreme rotation has surely flattened it into a pancake shape. Even so, there must be some very peculiar distortions of space-time in its vicinity. “Real” time travel may not be impossible, just extremely difficult and very, very unlikely. That thin end of what might be a very large wedge may, however, make the normality of time travel at the quantum level seem a little more acceptable. Both quantum theory and relativity theory permit time travel, of one kind or another. And anything that is acceptable to both those theories, no matter how paradoxical that something may seem, has to be taken seriously. Time travel, indeed, is an integral part of some of the stranger features of the particle world, where you can even get something for nothing, if you are quick about it.

The newspaper called them “Atomic Cows” and they traveled like a sideshow from Alamogordo to El Paso and back again. In December, Paramount Pictures came to town and “secured some good pictures of the cattle and also of two cats which have changed coloring.” This stretch of fame did not last long. The military took note and started rounding up the mutated cattle that hadn’t already been slaughtered, about three hundred head, and sent some as far away as Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they were poked and prodded and bred until they were raw. Only twice in the 1950s would the atomic cows at Oak Ridge hit the headlines, both times to say they were fine or dying of natural causes or didn’t seem to be passing on any mutations to their offspring.

Once upon a time, a long, long, long time ago, atoms begat chemical reactions begat molecules begat life. Life responds to stimuli, but it took another 3 billion years before living beings begat the concept of cause and effect. After another 300 million years, cause begat blame. Blame dissociated consequences from action, relieving believers of personal responsibility, and thus blamers begat blamees. Gods.

Like a needle jabbed into your arm, reality stings you, hurting you more than your skin and flesh. You realize that you're nobody. The electricity's gone out, the darkness is your sudden enemy...you have to protect yourself from the dark. Otherwise the world goes out, along with the artificial lights from the power plant. The night once again disintegrates into atoms, changes from cultivated to wild, fitting itself afterward into its original black hues, its cat skin.

But,” he said, “but how the hell innocent is a man who helps make a thing like an atomic bomb? And how can you say a man had a good mind when he couldn’t even bother to do anything when the best-hearted, most beautiful woman in the world, his own wife, was dying for lack of love and understanding…” He shuddered, “Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.

Right about here every discussion of quantum epistemology invokes Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment that Schrödinger proposed in 1935 to illustrate the bewilderments of quantum superpositions. Put a pellet inside a box, he said, along with a radioactive atom. Arrange things so that the pellet releases poison gas if and only if the atom decays. Radioactive decay is a quantum phenomenon, and hence probabilistic: a radioactive atom has a finite probability of decaying in a certain window of time. In thirty minutes, an atom may have a 50 percent chance of decaying—not 70 percent, not 20 percent, but precisely 50 percent. Now put a cat in the box, and seal it in what Schrödinger called a “diabolical device.” Wait a while. Wait, in fact, a length of time equal to when the atom has a fifty-fifty chance of decaying. Is the cat alive or dead? Quantum mechanics says that the creature is both alive and dead, since the probability of radioactive decay and hence release of poison gas is 50 percent, and the possibility of no decay and a safe atmosphere is also 50 percent. Yet it seems absurd to say that the cat is part alive and part dead. Surely a physical entity must have a real physical property (such as life or death) ? If we peek inside the box, we find that the cat is alive or dead, not some crazy superposition of the two states. Yet surely the act of peeking should not be enough to turn probability into actuality? According to Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation, however, this is precisely the case. The wave function of the whole system, consisting of kitty and all the rest, collapses when an observer looks inside. Until then, we have a superposition of states, a mixture of atomic decay and atomic intactness, death and life. Observations, to put it mildly, seem to have a special status in quantum physics. So long as the cat remains unobserved, its wave function encodes equal probabilities of life and death. But then an observation comes along, and bam—the cat’s wave function jumps from a superposition of states to a single observed state. Observation lops off part of the wave function. The part corresponding to living or deceased, but not the other, survives.

As in Schrödinger’s cat, the famous thought experiment. Imagine a cat, a vial of poison, and a radioactive source in a sealed box. If an internal sensor registers radioactivity, like an atom decaying, the vial is broken, releasing a poison that kills the cat. The atom has an equal chance of decaying or not decaying. It’s an ingenious way of linking an outcome in the classical world, our world, to a quantum-level event. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests a crazy thing: before the box is opened, before observation occurs, the atom exists in superposition—an undetermined state of both decaying and not decaying. Which means, in turn, that the cat is both alive and dead. And only when the box is opened, and an observation made, does the wave function collapse into one of two states. In other words, we only see one of the possible outcomes. For instance, a dead cat. And that becomes our reality. But then things get really weird. Is there another world, just as real as the one we know, where we opened the box and found a purring, living cat instead? The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says yes. That when we open the box, there’s a branch. One universe where we discover a dead cat. One where we discover a live one. And it’s the act of our observing the cat that kills it—or lets it live. And then it gets mind-fuckingly weird. Because those kinds of observations happen all the time.

What do we mean by collapsing the quantum state of the brain? Like the atom threatening Schrodinger's cat, the entire brain of an observer can be described by a quantum state that represents all of the various possibilities of all of its material constituents. That brain state evolves deterministically until a conscious observation occurs. Just before an observation, both the observed quantum system (let's stick with the radioactive atom) and the brain that observes it exists as a profusion of possible states. Think of each possible state as a branch on a tree. Each branch corresponds to some possible state of knowledge, or course of action. But when an observation registers in the mind of the observer, the branches are brutally pruned: only the branches compatible with the observer's experience remain. If, say, the observation is that the sun is shining, then the associated physical event is the updating of the brain's representation of the weather. Branches corresponding to "the sky is overcast" are chopped off. An increase in knowledge is accompanied by an associated reduction of the quantum state of the brain. And with that, the quantum brain changes too.

You might argue that even if cats do not have a permanent identity, their atoms do. But this presupposes that atoms are like billiard balls with distinguishing marks and permanent identities. They aren't. Two atoms of the same kind are indistinguishable. One cannot 'put labels on them' and recognize them individually later. Moreover, at the deeper, subatomic level the atoms themselves are in a perpetual state of flux. We think things persist in time because structures persist, and we mistake the structure for substance. But looking for enduring substance is like looking for time. It slips through your fingers. One cannot step into the same river twice.

If, as I think they must be, things are properly considered in Platonia, Lucy never did leap to catch the swifts. The fact is, there never was one cat Lucy - there were (or rather are, since Lucy is in Platonia for eternity, as we all are) billions upon billions upon billions of Lucys. This is already true for the Lucys in one leap and descent. Microscopically, her 10^26 atoms were rearranged to such an extent that only the stability of her gross features enables us to call her one cat. What is more, compared with her haemogoblin molecules the features by which we identified her - the sharp eyes, the sleek coat, the wicked claws - were gross. Because we do not and cannot look closely at these Lucys, we think they are one. And all these Lucys are themselves embedded in the vast individual Nows of the universe. Uncountable Nows in Platonia contain something we should call Lucy, all in perfect Platonic stillness. It is because we abstract and 'detach' one Lucy from her Nows that we think a cat leapt. Cats don't leap in Platonia. They just are.

Bromide has also been linked to a variety of neurological problems. Studies have shown that males ingesting four milligrams of sodium bromide daily have decreased attention spans and more frequent feelings of fatigue. This numbing effect could be due to bromide causing oxidation or the loss of electrons in the atoms making up the central nervous system. “In cats, this organic bromine induced REM sleep. Therefore, bromine has a zombifying potential. Why iodine was replaced with a goitrogen possessing carcinogenic and zombifying potentials in a population already very iodine deficient, even by the very low RDA Standard, remains a mystery,

Imagine a cat, a vial of poison, and a radioactive source in a sealed box. If an internal sensor registers radioactivity, like an atom decaying, the vial is broken, releasing a poison that kills the cat. The atom has an equal chance of decaying or not decaying. It's an ingenious way of linking an outcome in the classical world, our world, to a quantum-level event. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests a crazy thing: before the box is opened, before observation occurs, the atom exists in superposition—an undetermined state of both decaying and not decaying. Which means, in turn, that the cat is both alive and dead. And only when the box is opened, and an observation made, does the wave function collapse into one of two states. In other words, we only see one of the possible outcomes. For instance, a dead cat. And that becomes our reality. But then things get really weird. Is there another world, just as real as the one we know, where we opened the box and found a purring, living cat instead? The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says yes. That when we open the box, there’s a branch. One universe where we discover a dead cat. One where we discover a live one. And it’s the act of our observing the cat that kills it—or lets it live. And then it gets mind-fuckingly weird. Because those kinds of observations happen all the time. So if the world really splits whenever something is observed, that means there’s an unimaginably massive, infinite number of universes—a multiverse—where everything that can happen will happen.

I am sorry, Andrew. In the end, you will help yourself. You will not find, you will be found, for that is the way it has always been. That which you will some day experience is not so much a faith or a belief in a myth or series of myths, as a deep-seated feeling, a conviction that fills every corner of one’s being until there is no longer so much as an atom’s area of room for doubt. And to this conviction you can only help yourself. No one as yet has been able to explain a revelation or foresee the moment thereof.

The 3D printer is cranking up. It hisses slightly, dissipating heat from the hard vacuum chamber in its supercooled workspace. Deep in its guts it creates coherent atom beams, from a bunch of Bose-Einstein condensates hovering on the edge of absolute zero. By superimposing interference patterns on them, it generates an atomic hologram, building a perfect replica of some original artifact, right down to the atomic level—there are no clunky moving nanotechnology parts to break or overheat or mutate. Something is going to come out of the printer in half an hour, something cloned off its original right down to the individual quantum states of its component atomic nuclei. The cat, seemingly oblivious, shuffles closer to the warm air exhaust ducts.

Hunting is an integral part of Africa's conservation history and its approach to wildlife management. To disentangle hunting from modern African conservation will require a realignment of conservation policy, entrenched since colonial times and embraced and supported by African elites and political interests. But as civilization that has the ingenuity to put people and machines into space, split the atom, and routinely send unimaginable amounts of information through the ether, surely we can think of a better way to save the wild animals we love besides killing them.

One of the motifs of the cat paradox is the clash between what goes on at the microscopic and macroscopic levels. As Schrödinger described in his paper, uncertainty on an atomic scale becomes linked with fuzziness on a human scale. Because such macroscopic murkiness is never observed, microscopic indeterminacy similarly mustn't exist.

We have seen quite a few cats being let out of the bag- the mathematical mind, which is supposed to have such a dry, logical, rational texture. As a last example in this chapter I shall quote the dramatic case of Friedrich August von Kekule', Professor of Chemistry in Ghent, who, one afternoon in 1865, fell asleep and dreamt what was probably the most important dream in history since Joseph's seven fat and seven lean cows: I turned my chair to the fire and dozed, he relates. Again the atoms were gambolling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures, of manifold conformation; long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in snakelike motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke...Let us learn to dream, gentlemen. The serpent biting its own tail gave Kekule' the clue to a discovery which has been called 'the most brilliant piece of prediction to be found in the whole range of organic chemistry' and which, in fact, is one of the cornerstones of modern science. Put in a somewhat simplified manner, it consisted in the revolutionary proposal that the molecules of certain important organic compounds are not open structures but closed chains or 'rings'-like the snake swallowing its tail.

After I die,” my daughter said, “I hope some of my atoms can find their way into a cat.