Coast Mountain College Chemistry 111
Lab 5 (21st of November 2021)
Student name:
Quantum mechanics II
Aim. To further understand, and practice the concepts related to quantum mechanics using experimental thoughts.
A-The EPR Paradox
1. Please watch the following video about the EPR Paradox:
https:
youtu.be/f72whGQ31Wg
Ask questions
2. Explain
iefly, in your own words, what Einstein meant by “God does not play dice”
3. Explain
iefly, in your own words, why Bell’s inequality is violated in Quantum mechanics.
There are comments in the video talking about nothing being able to be faster than light (superluminal speed).
This is bound to Einstein’s formula for the variation of mass m with its velocity v:
Where m is the mass at a particular speed, mo is the mass of the resting object, v the velocity at a given time, and c is the speed of light.
4. What will happen if an object travels faster than the speed of light? Please explain it
iefly
5. In relation to the last equation, what will it happen to that object that travels at the speed of light? Please explain it
iefly
6. The fastest man made spacecraft are the Helios-A and Helios-B probes that set up a maximum speed record of 70,220 m/s (252,792 Km/h). Knowing than Helios-A had a mass of 370 kilograms. What was its mass when it achieved its record speed?
6. In the comedy cartoon strip Robotman, created by Jim Meddick in 1985, Robotman mentioned to his friend that you can, in fact, travel faster than the speed of light if you are going downhill. Explain
iefly why Robotman’s theory does not make any sense, from a scientific point of view.
B-Schrödinger’s cat
The famous cat paradox first appeared in print in 1935. Einstein saw the Schrödinger’s proposal as “the prettiest way” to show that the wave representation of matter is an incomplete representation of reality. It is still discussed in quantum theory today and it has not been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.
Yet the concept behind this thought experiment is very simple. Schrödinger suggested that we should imagine a box that contains a radioactive source, a detector that records the presence of radioactive particles (like a Geiger counter), a glass bottle containing a poison such as cyanide, and a live cat. The apparatus in the box is a
anged so that the detector is switched on for just long enough so that there is a fifty-fifty chance that one of the atoms in the radioactive material will decay and the detector will record a particle. If the detector does record such an event, then the glass container is crushed and the cat dies; if not, the cat lives. We have no way of knowing the outcome of this experiment until we open the box to look inside; radioactive decay occurs entirely by chance and is unpredictable except in a statistical sense.
In this thought experiment, the equal probabilities for radioactive decay and no radioactive decay should produce a superposition of states.
1. Please watch the following video about Schrödinger’s cat and
iefly explain, in your own words, the concept of superposition of states.
https:
youtu.be/OkVpMAbNOAo
2. Please answer this in your opinion. From all the quantum mechanism theories, theorems and explanations that we have seen in the lectures, which one is more closely related to the concept of superposition of states?
If you are interested, you can watch this video about Schrödinger’s cat memes. There are many more memes in internet.
https:
youtu.be/1BENCggJGnc