▲ 503 ▼ Schrodinger's Precious (media.piefed.social) submitted 7 months ago by PugJesus@piefed.social to c/science_memes@mander.xyz 40 comments fedilink hide all child comments
[–] ThatGuy46475@lemmy.world 11 points 7 months ago (4 children) Shouldn’t they both be right permalink fedilink source hideshow 4 child comments replies: [–] PugJesus@piefed.social [S] 43 points 7 months ago Luckily, Bilbo remembered to add "Answer fully" permalink fedilink source parent [–] WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 10 points 7 months ago Alive and death at the same time. It's more like asking if the coin is heads or tails when the coin is still spinning. permalink fedilink source parent [–] remotelove@lemmy.ca 4 points 7 months ago Not if they are both wrong. permalink fedilink source parent [–] Bunitonito@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago No, the cat is one or the other. Radioactive half-life is the point at which there is a 50/50 chance that any single isotope had decayed, and we usually work around that in classical systems by using large sample sizes (a pile of isotopes, it's easy to see that half of it would have decayed). But for one single isotope we aren't observing (or the cat), we need to look at it in terms of probabilities until we observe it permalink fedilink source parent
[–] PugJesus@piefed.social [S] 43 points 7 months ago Luckily, Bilbo remembered to add "Answer fully" permalink fedilink source parent
[–] WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 10 points 7 months ago Alive and death at the same time. It's more like asking if the coin is heads or tails when the coin is still spinning. permalink fedilink source parent
[–] remotelove@lemmy.ca 4 points 7 months ago Not if they are both wrong. permalink fedilink source parent
[–] Bunitonito@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago No, the cat is one or the other. Radioactive half-life is the point at which there is a 50/50 chance that any single isotope had decayed, and we usually work around that in classical systems by using large sample sizes (a pile of isotopes, it's easy to see that half of it would have decayed). But for one single isotope we aren't observing (or the cat), we need to look at it in terms of probabilities until we observe it permalink fedilink source parent