There is a good reason we are all fascinated with the walkers experiment. For any student of Quantum Mechanics (QM), the interpretation of the QM formalism is at first a puzzling proposal. There is a large suspension of disbelief that needs to take place. Simply put it is ‘counter intuitive’ and most people “shut up and calculate” essentially bowing to the myth that “QM is just very weird”.
How can things be in ‘several states’ at the same time. QM matter must be of a different, slightly magical, nature. It is perhaps best exemplified by paradox of the Schrodinger cat that is both dead and alive, supposedly at the same.
In this post we will apply the formalism of walkers, an emergent model of QM dynamics that comes about from the association of a particle and a wave and show how it sheds a new light on the fundamental interpretation of QM and show that in this interpretation, the cat is simply always dead.
We will also use this formalism to shed light on the typically QM notion of coherence and decoherence.