Who Killed Schrödinger's Cat? Gravity, Quantum Gravity, Something Else -or Is She Still Alive?

Jörg Wrachtrup

Motoko Inoue

Lars Jaeger

Joy Christian

Demetris Nicolaides

Abstract Anaxagoras proposed “in everything there is a portion of everything,” a notion as bizarre as the most popular interpretation of quantum theory, the Copenhagen. A piece of gold, say, contains gold as well as everything else—copper, wheat—but appears as a distinct golden object because its gold portion is the greatest. But no part of the object is pure. Every part of the golden object is also simultaneously watery, milky (and all other materials), and black and white (and all opposite qualities). In the Copenhagen interpretation, before an observation, something (an electron, Schrödinger’s cat) is all opposite qualities simultaneously, too, with each quality described by a unique probability (“portion”) to actually occur. The cat is both dead and alive; the electron spins simultaneously both clockwise and counterclockwise. Only after the observation, the cat is found either dead or alive, and the object, as Anaxagoras would say, definitely golden, yellow, and dry.

Shantena Augusto Sabbadini

But quantum mechanics has nothing to say about the individual result of a measurement.It does not tell us whether in any given instance we will find Schrödinger's cat alive or dead.The outcome in a specific instance is intrinsically unpredictable: it is what Wolfgang Pauli called "an act of creation."This chapter proposes that such acts of creation happen in consciousness.The world unfolds through continuous acts of creation.While the wave function of the universe evolves in a perfectly deterministic way, compatible with all pos si ble experiences, the experienced world is constantly generating new unpredictable events, new "acts of creation."Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms.For consciousness is absolutely fundamental.It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.