Dead and alive at the same time

In 1935, the Austrian physic Erwin Schrödinger, who received the Nobel prize in 1933 with Paul Dirac, made a thought experiment to show one of the less instinctive consequences of quantum mechanics.

 THE EXPERIMENT

The experiment is called “Schrödinger’s cat” and sometimes is described as a paradox. It consists in an opaque closed box where there is a cat, a bottle with poisonous gas and a device with a radioactive particle which have a 50% probability of activating the device, liberating the gas and killing the cat and a 50% probability of not killing the cat within a specific time.

At this point and based on quantum mechanics, the cat is alive and dead at the same time (superposition). But, when we open the box to check the state of the cat, the cat will be dead or alive, we will have broken the superposition. 

 

 

QUANTUM SUPERPOSITION

It is a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics that holds that, for example, an electron, exists in all possible states simultaneously until it is observed or measured because in that moment the result is one of the possible states. For that reason, we aren’t able to predict the result, we can only calculate the probabilities.

CLEANSPACE

Have you ever thought about what happens to the wastes of spaceships that stay around our atmosphere? At the moment, there is a project to clean them that started the first of June 2011 and will last three years.

 

 This project was created in order to protect satellites from debris which can collision with them. Screws, a piece of an antenna broken off from an old satellite or a glove are the most common wastes that we can find over the atmosphere. Recently, the number of this debris is exponentially increasing and they are trapped because of Earth’s gravity.

The project is based on an innovative ground-based laser which can remove dangerous medium debris (from 1 cm to 10 cm).

Actually, there is not a definitive solution to clean up the space but what the project pretends to identify and track the debris, modify its speed and as a result, its orbit course to a lower one with ground-based laser stations. Finally debris will re-entry to the atmosphere where they will burn and “disappear”.

Rovira i Virgili University (Tarragona, Catalonia) is cooperating with other business and research groups from countries like Germany, France and Poland. This project has been created by the European Commission to promote innovation and research between European Union countries. 

The tsunami of Japan was the result of two waves

The tsunami generated by the earthquake of Tohoku-Oki, during the march of 2011, which destroyed the north coast of Japan, was as a result of the fusion of two giant waves which increased the intensity of the tsunami. Two scientists analysed the information taken by three satellites (in Europe and in the USA) and they confirmed the same conclusion. Theirs hypothesis was that two waves were added to the principal tsunami. This phenomena had a very difficult precision of the projections of this giant waves.

 

(Tsunami in Japanese)

Y.Tony Song (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California) and C.K.Shum (The Ohio State University) base their investigation on the information obtained by the Radar Altimetry “Jason I”, “Jason II” and “Envisat” satellites, that measure the highest of the sea by a pressure of a few centimetres. They overestimate the region of the earthquake and the tsunami, followed by lightly different trajectories and separated by a little hours, but they measure the different points of great waves. The facts, indicate that two of those points of great waves, were formed the same day that the earthquake was generated. Those two points were fused to form an only tsunami, which was double higher. This tsunami took long distances without losing its power.

The results of the investigation, help to explain how the tsunamis can go through the ocean an provoke grave damages in specific zones without suffering in other zones. In addition, this investigation can help to improve the prediction of the tsunamis and the emergency systems to avoid them.