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Articles
Wanted: Schrödinger’s Cat Dead or Alive!
Joy Christian tells the bizarre tale of quantum reality.
What is all this fuss about Schrödinger’s cat? And who cares whether the cat is alive, dead, or in limbo? Well, you do, if you care at all about the reality of the external world.
The concept of external reality, independent of human observers, has always been one of the trickiest in philosophy. Nevertheless, we all think we have a fairly good idea, albeit different from one another, of ‘what is real’. For example, we rarely ever doubt the ‘reality’ of our physical surroundings; let alone the reality of our inner emotions and feelings. Such a ‘Commonsense Realism’, however, leads us into trouble at a moment’s reflection on questions like: Are the physical objects we see ‘out there’ what they appear to be perceptually, or are they what the mathematical physicists tell us they are? Are the tables and chairs what they seem to be, or are they mostly empty space with relatively few constituents like atoms and molecules? We recognise that there may be more (or less!) to the reality of physical objects than meets the eye.
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