1. When my alarm rings in the morning, I can collapse into one of two possible equilibria: Either I stand up, or I hit snooze and continue to lie in bed for another couple of minutes.
2. In Schrödinger’s cat example, either the atom will decay or not, so the cat will either be dead or not, and it doesn’t make sense to describe it to be in a superposition. (Schrödinger’s cat is terribly often totally misinterpreted by the media and others.) (Admittedly the cat already is in one equilibrium and needs a kick to get into the more stable equilibrium of being dead, so this example is bad.)
3. For a particular type of tech startups, those startups will either become relatively big successes or fail eventually (at least most often).
Bonus:
Actually I need to stand up anyway to put my alarm off, but sometimes I just hit snooze anyway and go back to bed. A kick that get’s me out of bed may be sth like me thinking “oh I have a meeting” or “fuck it, let’s stand up although I hit snooze” or so. A kick that makes me go back to bed after having stood up might be that I feel pretty tiered and decide it is best / most productive to go back and sleep a bit more.
alive->dead: The atom decays. Or you take a big axe and slam it into the box with the cat. dead->alive: Technology that doesn’t exist yet.
big success → fail: not adopting to technology changes (e.g. Kodak), not being innovative, … fail → big success: not really possible for the same startup I would say, though the people of the startup might find sth else and become a big success later.
Disagree about the cat, the decay is a quantum process, the probabilistic decays of the single atom happen because you are observing a superposition; the same happens with electrons going from higher to lower orbitals—these are usually calculated with Fermi’s golden rule, which explicitly deals with superpositions caused by the perturbation. Even if you believe Copenhagen, the atom is in superposition before collapse. Even if the details on the Fermi’s golden rule page are not easily checkable—the fact that the result is a transition probability despite being about a single state that’s being affected deterministically should show you that it’s a quantum thing.
However: once you observe, indeed whatever’s left remains. And both parts of the superposition will fall into their respective stability wells. In general, you could thus imagine bistable equilibria on the parts of the states + the coefficients combining them. And then you could contrast with equilibria on the entire state? I can’t think of any good examples of the latter, though.
1. When my alarm rings in the morning, I can collapse into one of two possible equilibria: Either I stand up, or I hit snooze and continue to lie in bed for another couple of minutes.
2. In Schrödinger’s cat example, either the atom will decay or not, so the cat will either be dead or not, and it doesn’t make sense to describe it to be in a superposition. (Schrödinger’s cat is terribly often totally misinterpreted by the media and others.) (Admittedly the cat already is in one equilibrium and needs a kick to get into the more stable equilibrium of being dead, so this example is bad.)
3. For a particular type of tech startups, those startups will either become relatively big successes or fail eventually (at least most often).
Bonus:
Actually I need to stand up anyway to put my alarm off, but sometimes I just hit snooze anyway and go back to bed. A kick that get’s me out of bed may be sth like me thinking “oh I have a meeting” or “fuck it, let’s stand up although I hit snooze” or so. A kick that makes me go back to bed after having stood up might be that I feel pretty tiered and decide it is best / most productive to go back and sleep a bit more.
alive->dead: The atom decays. Or you take a big axe and slam it into the box with the cat.
dead->alive: Technology that doesn’t exist yet.
big success → fail: not adopting to technology changes (e.g. Kodak), not being innovative, …
fail → big success: not really possible for the same startup I would say, though the people of the startup might find sth else and become a big success later.
Disagree about the cat, the decay is a quantum process, the probabilistic decays of the single atom happen because you are observing a superposition; the same happens with electrons going from higher to lower orbitals—these are usually calculated with Fermi’s golden rule, which explicitly deals with superpositions caused by the perturbation. Even if you believe Copenhagen, the atom is in superposition before collapse. Even if the details on the Fermi’s golden rule page are not easily checkable—the fact that the result is a transition probability despite being about a single state that’s being affected deterministically should show you that it’s a quantum thing.
However: once you observe, indeed whatever’s left remains. And both parts of the superposition will fall into their respective stability wells. In general, you could thus imagine bistable equilibria on the parts of the states + the coefficients combining them. And then you could contrast with equilibria on the entire state? I can’t think of any good examples of the latter, though.