Completely Unbelievable

Schroedinger's Cat gets my vote for best thought experiment of the century. It's so simple and stupid and vivid, and the responses to it are so lame. (Ex: "When an observer opens the box, he becomes entangled with the cat, so observer-states corresponding to the cat being alive and dead are formed, and each can have no interaction with the other." One of these is a universe where scandal results, when a congressman is discovered entangled with a dead cat.)

You can read some more of the attempts to explain away the entirely reasonable conclusion, that there never was any superposition, the nucleus either emitted a particle or it didn't, and the cat is definitely either alive or dead. Like absolutely everything else, those explanations are at Wikipedia, and they are far out.

Why are we so afraid of the simple answer? Quantum mechanics is bunk. I know, I know. Superposition is a well-observed phenomenon, double slit experiment, well-oiled theories and all that. But the people who believe in this tenet of quantum mechanics seem to get science completely backwards.

Everyone thinks that you go where the evidence leads you in science, but that is obviously not true. We need to start with some unquestionable beliefs to make any headway at all. For instance, we believe that we exist, our colleagues exist, that the inductive principle is true, and that our experience has something to do with what is going on out there. If Smith performs an experiment, there is no way the experiment can lead Smith to conclude that he doesn't exist. That is a core belief, and Smith has to assume that his instruments were broken, or that thugs broke into his laboratory and rewrote his figures. The conclusion that Smith doesn't exist is completely unbelievable. Note that it might actually be true, in a vague philosophical sense. But it is a conclusion we cannot reach from within science.

There's a pretty good case to be made that superposition is completely unbelievable. Superposition, if you got this far without knowing, is the theory that tiny objects can be X and at the same time not be X. I will leave it up to you to determine just how false this claim whether this claim fits in with the ones above, especially since it is irreconcilable with classical mechanics. Try applying the superposition principle to your own life sometime and see how far you get. "Being self-inconsistent" used to be the very definition of falsity.

Surely you agree that if quantum mechanics weren't a theory about incomprehensibly tiny and unfamiliar things, that nobody would give superposition a moment's thought. If Newton had "proved" that gravity functioned by an inverse square law and an inverse cube law, he would have been laughed off the stage. As above, it may just be "true" that atoms can decay and not decay at the same time. But before we can adopt such a radically inconsistent belief, we have to rule out literally everything else, and that includes "God did it".

So here you have two theories. One postulates a world that is forthrightly and obviously inconsistent, in the full meaning of the term. The other (my theory) is that everybody's measurements are wrong, or the world's scientists are insufficiently creative at explaining away the paradox. One and only one of those theories contradicts itself. Sure, the first theory is simpler, but simplicity is only supposed to be a tie-breaker in science, right? Adherents of the first theory don't even seem to care that it's inconsistent. They think if they are loud and proud enough, everybody will be too scared to bring that up. Maybe they've forgotten, themselves, but they really should think what they're getting into. Consider Schroedinger's Cat a reminder.