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Brown Bag Talk at 2012 by Valia Allori
Valia Allori
Assistant Professor
Department of Philosophy
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL 60115
Pandora's cat: the story of the cat that was neither dead nor alive
When: Wednesday, January 30th, 2013, Reception @ 12:00 m
Where: Illinois Room (Holmes Student Center)
This is the tale, maybe a bit romanticized, of the most quoted (and surely the most abused) cat in the history of physics and philosophy- the Schrödinger cat. In 1935 Erwin Schrödinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, developed a thought experiment (involving a cat) devised to show that there had to be something wrong with quantum theory: if quantum mechanics is correct, then we would end up observing, for instance, cats who are dead and alive at the same time, which is absurd. A lot of ink has been spent to discuss this experiment, commonly called the Schrödinger's cat experiment, and the problem that it underlies, the measurement problem. Nonetheless, there is still something to be said after all these years, and this is what will be discussed in this lecture, after having summarized what has happened in this regard in the last 80 years.
Valia Allori has studied physics and philosophy first in Italy, her home country, and then in the United States. She has worked in the foundations of quantum mechanics, in particular in the framework of Bohmian mechanics, a quantum theory without observers. Her main concern has always been to understand what the world is really like, and how we can use our best physical theory to answer such general metaphysical questions. In her physics doctoral dissertation (Genova, Italy, 2002), she discussed the classical limit of quantum mechanics, to analyze the connections between the quantum and the classical theories. What does it mean that a theory, in a certain approximation, reduces to another? Is the classical explanation of macroscopic phenomena essentially different from the one provided by quantum mechanics? In her philosophy doctoral dissertation (Rutgers, 2007) she turned to more general questions that involve the structure of fundamental physical theories, the metaphysical status and the epistemological role of the theoretical entities used in these theories. Do all fundamental physical theories have the very same structure, contrarily to what one might think? If so, what is this telling us about the nature of explanation?Return to Brown Bag
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