edgar-mitchell

Invisible Realities 143
The experimenter’s awareness of the cat’s state when opening the box may
have caused the experimenter’s internal map of the wave equation to collapse
and coincide with the alive or dead state. But the experimenter’s
wave equation is only being updated by external information. Garnering
that information does not, by itself, influence the cat’s health, as the pattern
of energy flows from cat to observer. The experimenter might have
become aware through nonlocal means (intuitively), but that still isn’t
causal. Were the experimenter psychokinetically active, we might possibly
influence the apparatus intentionally. Therefore, simply being aware
couldn’t kill the cat, and knowing couldn’t kill the cat. But intending to
might.
In any of its various forms, scientists usually disdain the Idealist position,
which allows the mind to be causal. Yet Schrodinger’s cat has been in
a box with a vial of poison, waiting 75 years for some experimenter to
decide whether or not looking in the box created the coup de grace—
whether or not the probability wave is the same as physical reality. It has
doubtless died of old age by now, regardless of how we think about it.
Physical death, it seems, is inevitable.
An entire body of interpretation of quantum physics has grown from
the Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox. The conundrums sprouted from the perplexity
of the issue and the lack of understanding as to how mind and body
interact (Newton erroneously assumed they don’t interact). An interpretation
of quantum mechanics exists that is really an attempt to get around
the unsettling indeterminacy of quantum theory and the lack of a “picture”
for the underlying reality. This is the Many Worlds interpretation,
and it proposes that all of the probabilities in the wave equations are real.
By simply choosing to open the box and discovering the cat dead or alive,
the experimenter causes the universe to divide into two universes: one
where everything is the same, except the experimenter discovers a dead
cat, and another in which she finds the cat alive. Here the map is actually
the territory.
In this interpretation, each choice we make branches the universe into
the many probabilities available. The one we find ourselves in corresponds
to the choice we made, but the others are presumably equally real. It’s just
that we can’t be aware of them, because they are orthogonal (at a 90°
angle) to our own. This interpretation by physicists is a permutation of the
extreme position of the Idealist model—though some physicists have trouble
admitting as much.
Many Worlds is a flawed concept that unfortunately has yet to be
falsified since it was proposed in the 1960s. I find it both amusing and
absurd that physicists will believe that even casual choices can create entire
universes we can’t see or verify, and must violate conservation laws.