The Schrödinger Enigma

Начало книги

Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment about quantum physics. It was suggested by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, stating that if you place a cat and something that could kill the cat (a radioactive atom) in a box and sealed it, you would not know if the cat was dead or alive until you opened the box, so that until the box was opened, the cat was (in a sense) in two simultaneous states – both “dead and alive”.

The crew of the F/V Alaskan Mermaid was looking forward to a well-earned rest from the arduous work of trawling in the icy waters of the Bering Sea. The Pollock A season was almost officially over and, like most of the other factory trawlers, the Alaskan Mermaid would normally have returned home before the season’s end, allowing the crew to take a welcome early break and spend quality time with their families. But destiny had played a cruel card and forced the freezer trawler to stay out at sea when it suffered a major failure in the factory freezer equipment, resulting in a partial release of the refrigerant into the engine room. A similar thing had happened to another trawler the previous season, but with far more calamitous consequences – the stricken trawler had developed a list due to an accumulation of seawater on the starboard side. The call to abandon ship had been made and less than half an hour later, the ship had downflooded and slipped beneath the waves, stern first.

Читать дальше →