John Archibald Wheeler on Does the Universe Exist if We're Not Looking

Put a cat in a closed box, along with a vial of poison gas, a piece of uranium, and a Geiger counter hooked up to a hammer suspended above the gas vial. During the course of the experiment, the radioactive uranium may or may not emit a particle. If the particle is released, the Geigercounter will detect it and send a signal to a mechanism controlling the hammer, which will strike the vial and release the gas, killing the cat. If the particle is not released, the cat will live. Schrödinger asked, What could be known about the cat before opening the box?

If there were no such thing as quantum mechanics, the answer would be simple: The cat is either alive or dead, depending on whether a particle hit the Geiger counter. But in the quantum world, things are not so straightforward. The particle and the cat now form a quantum system consisting of all possible outcomes of the experiment. One outcome includes a dead cat; another, a live one. Neither becomes real until someone opens the box and looks inside. With that observation, an entire consistent sequence of events— the particle jettisoned from the uranium, the release of the poison gas, the cat's death— at once becomes real, giving the appearance of something that has taken weeks to transpire. Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde believes this quantum paradox gets to the heart of Wheeler's idea about the nature of the universe: The principles of quantum mechanics dictate severe limits on the certainty of our knowledge.

I guess this is a good place to start then. Am I the only one who's not mystified by this cat? It's a 50% dead cat. Fine - a mathematical concept - no more mysterious than the third of a child who lives in an average family with 2.3 children. It's just statistics. Why are people gaga about it?

/r/philosophy Thread Link - discovermagazine.com