Schrödinger’s Lump Viewed Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Penrose (2004: 846, 847):

Let us return to the kind of situation referred to as ‘Schrödinger’s cat’. I illustrated how one might set up a quantum superposition of a live cat and a dead cat by using a beam splitter to put a photon’s state into a superposition, where the transmitted part of the photon’s state triggers a device to kill the cat, while the reflected part leaves the cat alive. Use of an actual cat would, of course, be not only inhumane, but taking an unnecessarily complicated physical system. So let us, instead, consider that the transmitted photon state simply activates a device which moves a lump of material horizontally by a small amount, whereas the reflected part leaves the lump alone; see Fig. 30.20. 

The superposed lump now plays the role of the Schrödinger’s cat — though not so dramatically as before! The question that I now want to raise is the following: is the quantum superposition of the two lump locations a stationary state? In conventional quantum mechanics, this would certainly be the case if we consider that each lump location separately represents a stationary state and that the energy in each case is the same (so the resting place of the displaced lump is neither raised nor lowered in relation to its original location). …

Now let us start to bring in the lessons that Einstein has taught us with his superb and now excellently confirmed general theory of relativity. In the first place, we might consider it important to bring in the gravitational field expressed in the background spacetime geometry. We can imagine that the experiment is being performed on the Earth, with the two instances of the lump sitting on a horizontal platform.

 

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the superposition of the two lumps is the superposition of two potential construals of experience of meaning, not two instances of potential. Observation will instantiate the potential as one of the two lumps in one location, but not both lumps in both locations.