Stuckey, W. M.
(2024)
Schrodinger's Cat: Qbit or Cbit?
[Preprint]
Abstract
In 1935, Schrodinger introduced what he considered to be a reductio against the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. His argument was based on a "ridiculous case" that is widely used today to portray the counterintuitive nature of quantum superposition. Schrodinger imagined that a cat was placed out of sight in a box with a mechanism that would kill the cat within an hour with 50% probability. Since the deadly mechanism employed a quantum process for its trigger, he supposed the cat was in a quantum superposition of 50% Live Cat + 50% Dead Cat. In this paper, we point out that if Schrodinger's Cat actually represents a quantum superposition of 50% Live Cat + 50% Dead Cat, as is commonly asserted, then the cat-box system is the physical instantiation of a quantum bit of information (Qbit). This agrees with the Copenhagen interpretation, which says there is no fact of the matter as to whether the cat is dead or alive until a measurement is made. Accordingly, the state 50% Live Cat + 50% Dead Cat must be the outcome with 100% probability for some measurement complementary to the measurement 'open the box' with its two possible measurement outcomes of Live Cat or Dead Cat. If one cannot provide a physically meaningful complementary measurement to 'open the box' with a clear empirical consequence represented by the state 50% Live Cat + 50% Dead Cat as its (certain) measurement outcome, then the state 50% Live Cat + 50% Dead Cat only represents a distribution of outcomes for many trials of that single 'open the box' measurement. That is, the state 50% Live Cat + 50% Dead Cat is not a quantum superposition and Schrodinger's Cat is merely the physical instantiation of a classical bit of information (Cbit) in support of Schrodinger's reductio. The double-slit experiment is provided as an example of a Qbit to illustrate what is meant by complementary measurements (position x and momentum p for the double-slit experiment).
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