Solving the Schrdinger Cat Paradox with Time Symmtry

The Cat in the Box

From chapter 6 in Victor J. Stenger. Timeless Reality: Symmetry, Simplicity, and

Multiple Universes. (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2000), pp. 138-143.

Erwin Schrdinger, still a young man in 1935, was undoubtedly gratified by both
the professional and popular attention given to his famous equation and the
wave formulation of quantum mechanics that he had pioneered ten years earlier.
But, like Einstein, he was none too happy with the developing consensus in favor
of the Bohr's positivist interpretation of what quantum mechanics implied about
the nature of reality. So, when EPR came up with their "paradox" in 1935,
Schrdinger was delighted and quick to follow with a paradox of his own:
Schrdinger's cat.

live cat

chamber

observer

dead cat!
or live cat
dead cat

Fig. 6.5. The Schrdinger cat experiment. A live cat is sent into in a chamber
where it has a 50 percent probability of being killed in one hour. When the box is
opened, the cat is observed, in this case, to be dead. The paradox: quantum
mechanics describes the state of the cat prior to its being observed as a limbo in

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which the cat is half dead and half alive. The act of observation puts the cat in the
dead state.
In Schrdinger's thought experiment, a cat is placed in a closed steel
chamber with some radioactive material that has a fifty percent chance of
decaying in one hour, activating a circuit that electrocutes the cat (see figure 6.5).
After an hour has elapsed, the box is opened and the cat is observed to be dead
or alive. Schrdinger was concerned with the quantum description of this event,
which seemed to imply that the cat is neither dead or alive until the chamber is
opened and someone can look in and thereby collapse the cat's wave function.
Prior to this act of observation, if you are to take the conventional quantum
description seriously, the cat exists in some kind of "limbo," half dead and half
alive.
Certainly Schrdinger did not intend his experiment to be taken literally
but rather used as a colorful metaphor for what he viewed as a serious problem
with the then developing standard formalism of quantum mechanics. Although
other metaphors can be invented that would be more tasteful in today's more
sensitive climate, Schrdinger's cat has become such a well known puzzle that I
think I will stick with it. No animals have been harmed in writing this book.
The puzzle Schrdinger highlighted, as Einstein had before him, has come
to be called the "measurement problem." It is being debated to this very day.
Schrdinger himself had originally introduced the wave function to represent the
state of a quantum system. As we have seen, that state can be specified more
elegantly by a vector in abstract Hilbert space in which, by the principle of
superposition, an axiom of quantum mechanics, we have one axis for each
possible result of a measurement.
The state vector representation is more suitable for the discussion of
Schrdinger's cat. We imagine a two-dimensional abstract space with axes
labeled L and R. The state vector of the cat points along L when it is alive and R
when it is dead (see figure 6.6). My reason for use of "L" and "R" will become
clear later.
Before the cat is placed in the chamber, it is in state L. When the chamber
is later opened, the cat is found to be either L or R with equal likelihood. Since
we do not know whether the cat is dead or alive until we open the box and look,

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the quantum state of the cat in the box is neither L nor R, but the state of limbo I
will label H, again for reasons we will see. The state vector H can be viewed as a
superposition of L and R, as in figure 6.6.

L live cat

H
cat in limbo
45o
R dead cat

Fig. 6.6. The state vector of a cat points along L when the cat is alive, R when it is
dead. Inside the chamber the cat is in limbo with its state vector either H or V,
which are different superpositions of L and R in equal amounts. The same
picture describes the relations between the state vectors of circularly and linearly
polarized photons.
According to the Copenhagen interpretation, not until the cat is observed
does its state vector collapse to L or R, rotating instantaneously to either axis in
the figure. Schrdinger thought that this description of quantum states was the
characteristic trait of quantum mechanics that "enforces its entire departure from
classical lines of thought." He regarded it to be of "sinister importance" (Jammer
1973, 212). Many have interpreted this role of observation in
changing the state of a system to mean that reality is controlled by human
consciousness (Wigner 1961; Capra 1975; Jahn 1986, 1987; Chopra 1989, 1993;
Kafatos 1990; Squires 1990; Goswami 1993).
While Schrdinger raised legitimate issues concerning the conventional
description of quantum states that are still unsettled today, the Schrdinger's cat
experiment itself is not so troublesome as much popular literature would lead
you to believe. Most physicists in Schrdinger's day, as today, agreed that the cat
dies when common sense says it dieswhen the electric shock is received. To
believe otherwise is to believe an absurdity, such as a tree not falling in the forest

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when no one is looking. Quantum mechanics may be strange, but it is not
preposterous.
A real cat in a box would be a macroscopic object, no different generically
from the human eye that looks in when the box is opened, or a Geiger counter
inside the box that triggers when a particle is emitted from the radioactive source.
Such objects are not pure quantum states but incoherent mixtures of many
quantum states. Thus, the cat experiment must be understood to be a metaphor
for the representation of pure quantum objects, such as the photons in a coherent,
polarized beam of light.
Let us look at the case of polarized light in more detail, because its strange
behavior is probably closer to what Schrdinger had in mind. Suppose we have a
beam of left circularly polarized light, which can be generated by simply sending
light through a polarizing filter. Classically, this is described as an
electromagnetic wave in which the electric and magnetic field vectors rotate
counterclockwise, as seen when you are looking toward an oncoming beam.
Either field vector can be represented as a linear combination of horizontal and
vertical field vectors corresponding to waves that are linearly polarized in the
horizontal and vertical directions respectively.
Quantum mechanically, an electromagnetic wave is described as a beam
of photons. We can picture a left circularly polarized photon as a particle
spinning along its axis like an American football thrown by a right-handed
quarterback, turning in the direction at which a right-handed screw turns as it is
screwed into a piece of wood. The confusion of left and right here results from an
unfortunate definition of terms that were not originally known to be related. In
any case, the state vector of the right-handed single photon in a left circularly
polarized beam can be written as a superposition of horizontally and vertically
polarized single photon states.
A linearly polarized photon can be represented as a superposition of right
and left circularly polarized photon states, as the vectors H, for horizontal, and V,
for vertical, in figure 6.6. Thus, a horizontally or vertically polarized photon is, in
some sense, simultaneously circularly polarized in both the left and right
directions. In the quantum mechanical formalism, the states H and V represent
single photons, and indeed an experiment will measure individual photons

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passing through linear polarizers. Yet we cannot picture them as particles with
spins aligned along some axis. If we try to measure the spin component of an H
or V photon along its direction of motion, we will obtain a value +1 (L) half the
time and -1 (R) the other half. Furthermore, we will convert the photon to
circularly polarization in the process of measurement. (Massless unit spin
particles like photons can only spin along or opposite their directions of motion.)
Thus, we have an indisputably quantum analogue for Schrdinger's cat. A
live or dead cat corresponds to a left or right circularly polarized photon, while
the cat in limbo is likened to a linearly polarized photon. (There are actually two
states of limbo, H and V).

left circularly
polarized
photon

L=H+V

polarizer
H=L+R
polarizer
R
right circularly
polarized
observer
photon
Fig. 6.7. The Schrdinger cat experiment viewed in terms of polarized photons. A
left circularly polarized photon, state L, is sent into in a polarizer where its
horizontally polarized component, state H, is selected out. It is then passed
through another polarizer that selects out the right circularly polarized
component R. The state L corresponds to a live cat, R to a dead one, and H to the
state of limbo. If only one photon is involved, how can it be half L and half R
when it is in the state H? Note: the notation L = H + V is not meant to refer to the
mathematical sum of state vectors but just the fact that L is an superposition of H
and V.

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Let us look at the photon analogue of the Schrdinger cat experiment, as
depicted in figure 6.7. A left circularly polarized photon in a state L enters a
linear polarizer, for example, the simple lens in a pair of sunglasses. The state
vector L is a superposition of linearly polarized states H and V. Say the polarizer
selects out the horizontal component H, which is a superposition of L and R. The
light is then passed through a circular polarizer that selects out the R component
and passes that on to the observer.
In both the photon example and the original cat experiment, we are
describing an experiment on a single objectalthough the experiment could be
repeated many times to measure probabilities. The puzzle again is: How
can the intermediate state H of this object be both L and R and the same time?
Recall that an L photon can be viewed as a particle spinning along its direction of
motion, like a right-handed screw. An R photon spins like a left-handed screw.
Somehow, H and V photons are half of the time left handed and half of the time
right handed.
One answer to this seeming paradox is to regard the state vector itself as
the "true reality." Recall, however, that the state vector does not reside in familiar
physical space like a position or momentum vector, but rather in abstract Hilbert
space. And so we have a Platonic ontology in which the true Form of the photon,
and the true Form of the cat, exist in another realm, a space not at all like the
space in which we locate our observations. In this view, the Platonic realm is the
true reality, while the world of our observations is a distorted or veiled image of
reality. I will talk more about Platonic ontologies in chapter 10.
The remainder of this chapter discusses various common interpretations. The following,
from chapter 8, pp. 192-194, presents my interpretation in terms of time reversal.
Time Symmetry and Schrdinger's Cat
As we have seen in chapter 6, Schrdinger's cat exemplifies the problem of how a
single object in quantum mechanics can exist simultaneously in a mysterious
mixture of two states. Unobserved, the cat in the box is somehow a superposition
of dead and alive, which I have called "limbo." However, note that no cat is ever

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seen in limboonly dead or alive, so no paradox concerning actual observations
ever occurs.
Similarly, a photon passed through a left circular polarizer1 is always
found in a single polarized state L. You can verify this by passing the photon
through a second left circular polarizer, taking care before doing so not to
interact with the photon in any way and possibly change its state.
Let us recall figure 6.7, which shows how the intermediate state of a
horizontally polarized photon H (analogous to the cat in limbo) is a
superposition of circularly polarized photons L (live) and R (dead). Now,
suppose we bring time symmetry into the picture. Consider figure 8.4. There I
have turned the arrow of the R photon at the bottom around so that it goes into
the polarizer instead of out. The L photon at the top is unchanged, still going into
the polarizer. The experiment can now be viewed as one in which we have two
incoming photons, one spinning along its direction of motion (L) and the other
(R) spinning opposite. They combine to form a composite two-photon state H.
left circularly
polarized
photon

polarizer
H=L+R
polarizer
right circularly
polarized
photon

Fig. 8.4. The time-reversible Schrdinger cat experiment as done with photons.
The R photon at the bottom is viewed as going into the polarizer rather than
coming out. The state in between the two polarizers is then composed of two
1

Two kinds of circular polarizers exist. The usual circular polarizer is a quarterwave plate with an incident linear polarization at 45 from the principal axes, the
output will give you either a right circular polarization R or a left circular
polarization L, but not both; it essentially depends on the direction of the
incident linear polarization with respect to the principal axes. On the other hand,
circular polarizing beam splitters give two components, R and L, propagating at
right angles.

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photons, one coming in and one going out. In the cat experiment, a live cat goes
forward in time and a dead one backward in time.
Alternatively, I could have drawn the two arrows as pointing away from
the polarizer. This would be equivalent to the situation where an object
disintegrates into two photons. In fact, we know of several such objects, for
example, the o meson.
As I mentioned in chapter 6, the quantum formalism contains single
photon state vectors for H and V photons, even though these cannot be simply
pictured as a single, spinning particle in the same way L and R photons can.
Recall that an L photon can be viewed as a particle spinning along its direction of
motion while an R photon spins opposite. Because of this easy visualization, I
suggested that we might regard circularly polarized photons as the "real," objects
and linearly polarized photons as superpositions of two "real" L and R photons.
Now bringing time symmetry into the picture, when you send a photon through
a linear polarizer that is horizontally oriented, the H photon that comes out is
ontologically two photons, an L from the past and an R from the future. That is, it
is a "timeless photon."
The point is that at least some of the quantum states that occur in nature
can be understood in terms of a superposition of forward and backward time
states. This contrasts with the many worlds view in which the superposition is
two forward time states in two different worlds. I am suggesting that, with time
symmetry, we can get at least these two different worlds into one.
As with the EPR experiment, time symmetry can be utilized to recast our
observations into a more familiar form. Based on other observations we have
made that exhibit precisely the same phenomenon, nothing is logically
inconsistent. The only difference is in the placing of the arrows that specify the
time direction. When we are thinking ontologically, we can leave the arrows off.
When we must think operationally, as when we consider the results of
experiment, we must place an arrow in the direction that is specified by the
entropy-generating, or entropy-absorbing, process of our many body
experimental setup. This is determined by the boundary conditions of that
experiment.

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__________. 1993. Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing
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Material World. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.
Jahn, Robert G., and Brenda J. Dunne. 1986. On the Quantum Mechanics of
Consciousness, with Application to Anomalous Phenomena. Foundations of
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Jammer, Max. 1974. The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics: The Interpretations of
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