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The Ethical Record Vol 100 No 10 £1.00 November 1995

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The Ethical Record Vol 100 No 10 £1.00 November 1995 ISSN 0014-1690 The Ethical Record Vol 100 No 10 £1.00 November 1995 Guest Editorial - SEARCHING FOR SCHRODINGER'S KITTENS THINKING ON A FEELING LEVEL John Gribbk; 3 The Naive Rationalist might assume "This House believes religion is incompatible MRS GASKELL, WILLIAM FOX with intelligence" when the debate is AND HIS ARTIST DAUGHTER organised by Mensa (the club for high MRS ELZA BRIDELL FOX IQs). Is that not apparent a priori? The Brenda Co/loins 7 more so when the venue is Simpsons in the Strand, famed for red-blooded dinners - VIEWPOINT the meaty arguments will lead surely to a Donald Langdown 11 successful resolution? DAVID HUME AND THE DEMISE When first she aspired to eat at the OF NATURAL THEOLOGY Empyrean Table, your reporter was wont Daniel OHara 12 to fall prey to such naive rationalism. She knew better by last month when the HG. WELLS' WORLD BRAIN debate was held, in spite of the cogency of Peter Lansdale 22 the arguments in favour. Clive Sinclair, of CS fame, narrowed PIONEERING IN EDUCATION religion to belief in a sentient god and IN BECHUANALAND rebutted three justifications for this belief Patrick van Rensburg and - evidence from history, logical deduction Donald Baker 23 and divine revelation. A Lib-Dem councillor ridiculed the tendency to leap FUTURE EVENTS 24 to a magical conclusion; two examples are when a dying priest recovered after a saint's relic was placed on his forehead and the recent disappearance of milk into Hindu statues. I liked the third speaker's coining of religiophiliac and religiophobic. The main points against the motion were that religion was derived from binding people together and was therefore both a good thing and nothing to do with intelligence, as similarly nor was music; a prison chaplain used the argument from design and a Carthusian monk used the argument from the intelligence of the likes of J. Polkinghorne, eminent Christian physicist. The higher rationality of the arguments adduced for the motion were, however, of no avail in the voting and it was defeated, To Humanists, rationalisation is usually only about reason. However, as defined by Ernest Jones, the biographer of Sigmund Freud, it can also mean a psychological defence mechanism; so that underlying the apparently rational is an essentially emotional rationale. I would argue that this analysis illuminates the steep path from naive to (more) sophisticated rationalism. Jennifer R. Jeynes SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY Conway Hall Humanist Centre 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL. Telephone: 0171 831 7723 Holding Trustees 1995/1996 Louise Booker*, Miriam Elton, Marion Granville, Peter fleales, Don Liversedge*, Barbara Smoker, Dr Harry Stopes-Roe, Prof Gerald Vinten. Appointed Lecturers The SPES AGM on 110.95appointed those Lecturers standing for re-election: Harold Blackham, T.F. Evans, Peter Heales, Richard Scorer, Barbara Smoker, Harry Stopes-Roe. Officers The General Committee elected the following at its meeting on 1110.95: Hon. Representative. Nicolas Walter. General Committee Chairman: Barbara Srnoker*. Vice-Chahman: Terry Mullins*. Hon Measurer Don Liversedge. Hon. Ednor, The Ethibal Record. Norman Bacrac. Hon. Librarian: Jennifer Jeynes. Hon. Registrar Marion Granville Convenors of Sub-Committees 1995-1996 The GC. elected the following Convenors at its meeting on 11.10.95: Executive: Secretary, Finance: Don Liversedge, Hall: Hall Manager, Legal: Barbara Smoker, Library Working Party Jennifer Jeynes, Moral Education: Don Liversedge, Programme & Edhorial: Jennifer Jeynes, Rules & Standing Orders Secretary, South Place Sunday Concerts Chamber Music Library Clements Memorial: Lionel Elton General Committee Apart from the Officers and Convenors, the General Committee comprises Richard Benjamin*, Ian Buxton, Yvonne Bracken*, Margaret Chisman*, Govind Deodhekar, Naomi Lewis, Graham Lyons, Victor Monger, David Morris, Tom Rubens, Barbara Ward*. (*Elected at the SPES AGM on 1.10.95.) SPFSStaff Secretary to the SOCiely: Nina Khare. Tel: 0171831 7723 (The Secretary's office is now on the 2nd Floor, Bradlaugh House, 47 Theobald's Road) Manager Stephen Norley.Tel 0171242 8032 for Hall bookings. Head Caretaker David Wright New Members John Hynes, Dr. Bapu Kulkarni, Amanda Todd. REMINDER SPES SPECIAL GENERAL MEETING, 12.45pm, Sunday 12 Nov. See Oct ER for the Motion (re: Rule change). 2 Ethical Record, November, 1995 SEARCHING FOR SCHRODINGER'S KITTENS John Gribbin * Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex Lecture to the Ethical Society, 8 October1995 A doubly significant quantum anniversary provides an opportunity to re-assess the quantum mysteries and offer a new solution to these puzzles. Two Thought Experiments It is exactly sixty years since the publication of two "thought experiments" designed to demon- strate the absurdity of quantum mechanics, and to make physicists come up with a better view of reality than the standard "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum physics. The two publica- tions could hardly have failed to attract attention. One carried the name of Albert Einstein, the other that of Erwin Sehrodinger - two of the key players in the development of the theory they now urged their colleagues to reject. But in spite of some discomfort caused by having the weirdness of the quantum world highlighted by Einstein, SchrOdinger and a handful of others since, physicists continue to stick by the Copenhagen interpretation. But now, maybe its time is up. Einstein Tries to Show the Absurdity of Quantum Mechanics (QM) It was in May 1935 that Einstein, together with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen (then all working at Princeton) published the description of what has ever since been known as the "EPR paradox", although it is not really a paradox at all (Physical Review, vol.47 p.777). They wanted to highlight two features of the Copenhagen interpretation that they regarded as absurd - the so-called "collapse of the wave function", and the notion that every part of a quantum system responds instantaneously to a stimulus affecting any part of the system. You can see what they were worried about in a slightly modified version of the original thought experiment. Imagine an atom which emits two photons simultaneously in opposite directions. The quantum rules say that the two photons must have opposite polarisations, but that it doesn't matter which one has which polarisation. According to the Copenhagen interpre- tation, until somebody measures the polarisation, each photon exists in a superposition of states, a wave function that is a 50:50 mixture of the two possibilities, sometimes called a probability wave. But as soon as the photon is measured, the wave function collapses into one of the two possible states. Even worse, by measuring one of the photons and forcing it to choose a definite polarisation state, the other photon is instantaneously forced into the other polarisation state, even though by that time the two photons may, in principle, be fight years apart. Einstein and his colleagues never dreamed that the experiment would be carried out. They were happy that it demonstrated the logical absurdity of the situation. Yet as a result of theoretical work by David Bohm, in London, in the 1950s and John Bell, at CERN in the1960s, it became clear that a modified version of the EPR experiment really could be carriedout. And in the 1980s Alain Aspect and his colleagues, working in Paris, actually did the trick. The real experiment is slightly more complicated than I have described, and involves measuring three correlated polarisation states of the two photons. In essence, measuring property A of photon number 1 and property B of photon number 2 gives you information about property C for each photon. But the bottom line is clear and unambiguous - the behaviour of real photons in real experiments agrees with the Copenhagen interpretation and the ridiculous predictions of the EPR paper. What Einstein was most concerned about in all this was the implication, now proved by experiment, that some communication between the two photons propagates faster than light, seemingly in violation of the requirements of his own theory of relativity. He called this * Author of Schrodinger's Kittens, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, (1995) Ethical Record, November, 1995 3 "spooky action at a distance", and abhorred it. The Aspect experiment shows that the spooky action at a distance is real. Schrodinger Shows QM Requires a Cat to be both Dead and Alive Schrodinger, on the other hand, was more worried about the collapse of the wave function. He invented the most famous quantum thought experiment of them all to demonstrate just how absurd that is. Imagine a cat locked in a box with a system like the one I described for the simplified EPR experiment. The atom emits its two photons, which, for the sake of this argument, we can imagine bouncing about between a pair of perfectly reflecting mirrors. The box contains an automated device that will kill the cat if the polarisation of one of the photons, chosen at random, is measured to be in one of the two possible states. If it is found to be in the other state, the cat lives. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, as Schrodinger spelled out in a paper published in three parts in Naturwissenshaften late in 1935 (vol. 23), pages 807, 823 and 844), everything in the box, including the cat itself, remains in a superposition of states until the measurement is observed. Only then does the system collapse into one of the two possibilities, containing either a dead cat or a live cat. How can a cat be in a superposition of states? Does this mean that it is somehow both dead and alive (or neither dead nor alive) until the photon polarisation is observed? If it does, does this imply that an intelligent observer has to make the measurement, or will the wave function collapse as soon as a sophisticated computer measures the polarisation? The cat in the box experiment (which, perhaps I should stress, has never been attempted with a real cat!) has spawned a cottage industry of variations on the basic theme, without ever resolving the issue.
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