Epstein Secrets

n to our classical certainty? What is the state of the cat before I - a sentient observer — open the box? Was the result of the decay measured by the Geiger counter, the cat, or are we waiting for someone to open the box and observe the result? The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics — named a

to reach for a gun every time he hears mention of it. The thought experiment works like this. A cat is put in a box with a radioactive substance, a Geiger counter and a vial of poison. If the counter detects a radioactive decay it breaks the bottle and the cat dies, if no decay is detected the cat lives

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016060 Chapter 17 THE FUTURE Be + Omar Khayyam HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016061 “Prediction is very hard, especially about the future.” Niels Bohr “The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash o

But even closer to home, relativistic time dilation has an impact. We on Earth are all bombarded every day by cosmic rays from space. If you had a Geiger counter and stood out in a field, the counter would click at a regular rate every few seconds, as it recorded the impact of high-energy particles c

rns at every step. The story of the development of quan- tum mechanics is full of them. But I want to cut to the chase here, and so I will skip over Niels Bohr, whose ideas laid out the first fundamental atomic rules of the quantum world as well as the basis for much of modern chemis- try. We'll also skip E

en- tored him throughout the rest of his career. Bothe was spectacularly lucky to be mentored by Planck and, shortly thereafter, by Hans Geiger, of Geiger counter fame. Geiger, in my mind, is one of the most talented experimental physicists to have been over- looked for a Nobel Prize. Geiger had begun

York City, where he accepted a position at Columbia. When Fermi learned the news about nuclear fission in 1939 in New York, following a lecture by Niels Bohr at Princeton, Fermi amended his earlier Nobel acceptance speech to clarify his earlier error and in short order re- 2P_Glealer-StoryEverTold_Atindd