Oh, I know something of quantum physics. I will discuss and theorize anything with you in a bar after a minimum four beers. Please, for the love of Ant-Man, though, don’t do the Schrödinger’s cat thing. We all know it, the one about the cat in a box that is both alive and dead until you look at it (according to math). It’s the “Free Bird” of barstool physicists and YouTube scientists. It’s overplayed as a meme, misused as a sci-fi trope, and somehow still shows up at every party. As far as philosophical and scientific arguments go, it’s like “Arena“ … you know … that one Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk wrestles a guy in a rubber lizard suit … or so I’ve heard … I’m no nerd. People keep treating that episode like high art, but it was actually ripped off from a better, unrelated short story and rewritten as a bad chemistry experiment in Red Rocks park that was later debunked on Mythbusters.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but the cat isn’t in some weird state of limbo existence because you don’t understand science and math. You don’t get to decide that Schrödinger was absolutely correct in explaining reality (or Jonas Salk was completely wrong) until you show your work and submit it for peer review. The fact is, Schrödinger was just trolling the guys who made him read a long, boring paper about the “Copenhagen interpretation” by making an extreme example of what their math meant if you applied it to reality. You know, the way I like to troll the average “content creator” who makes long, boring, cleavage-laden YouTube and TickTak videos from their opinions.

The problem is, much the same as today, the public didn’t get the joke and absolutely jumped on it, making a few bucks off coffee mugs, stoner philosophy, and “science explainer” YouTube videos that insist reality is some mysterious thing making faces at you when we’re not looking at it. Well, if you know about physics, that’s “Gorn guano”TM. Modern physics doesn’t need your eyeballs. Unlike Internet content creators, it’s not powered by “likes and subscribes.” All this happens through decoherence. Pretty much the cat’s fate was etched in the space/time continuum before you gave an uninformed theory of how (because you don’t understand physics) reality must therefore be subjective and, therefore, whatever you ramble on about for 20 minutes can’t be proven wrong. The idea that the universe has been patiently holding its breath for 13.8 billion years waiting for your “hot take” is pretty much your own narcissistic thought experiment.

Of course, physicists are physicists, and sci-fi doesn’t take kindly to being overridden by science. So yes, there are competing “interpretations” of what’s happening, with each one looking more like a rejected Star Trek script than the last:

  • Many-Worlds Interpretation: It’s the multiverse! Yes, one stray photon’s dual nature spawns an entirely different, parallel timeline where the only difference is whether you saw it as a wave or a particle. Thanks a lot, reckless observer! There are probably now infinite variants of me out there, nearly identical, just with slightly different YouTube recommendations.
  • Relational Quantum Mechanics: This one actually remembers the cat is an observer and already knows whether collapse happened. You, on the other hand, are going on about how profound you are because reality isn’t true for you yet. For everyone else, truth depends on how many likes the video gets later.
  • The Shut Up and Calculate School: Just do the math. If you can’t do the math, trust the weird Vulcan-like scientists who smugly told you what happened and quit coming up with your own explanation like a toddler with object permanence issues.

The point (one of them at least) I’m trying to make is, we’re still talking about Schrödinger’s cat for the same reason Larks’ Tongues in Aspic keeps getting remastered and reissued. We think we’re cool for pretending to understand it, while many people think it actually is a recording of a half-alive/half-dead cat in a box.  Still, the “simultaneously alive and dead” cat works better as a TED Talk than “Wavefunction Decoherance and Environmental Entanglement: iħ∂Ψ/∂t = ĤΨ.”

So, much like Star Trek, decades later, some people take it as gospel, others see it as entertainment. Like a collapsed wave function, I suppose it can be both as long as you don’t actually look at it. After all, according to Star Trek canon, we should have been conquered by Khan and his genetic supermen back around 1992. (Unless you remember something differently from me, which is possible, I was 23 and drinking heavily back in ’92). Earth history didn’t “collapse” into Trek canon just because we watched Space Seed. We just believe whatever we want to believe, and like Star Trek, make up excuses and retcon stuff to make ourselves feel important again when reality doesn’t jibe.

There’s a point I’m circling, and I’ll find it after another coffee and 400 rambling words. I think it’s that, if you’re one of those Gen-Z types who film themselves listening to an album that came out 50 years ago because the world needs your “hot take” on whether Yes or Pink Floyd are any good, then, news flash: your phony “surprise face” didn’t rewrite history. Close to the Edge was seminal in 1972, whether or not you hit record on your webcam in 2026.

  • You might see beauty in autumn leaves. The guy next to you sees a mess to rake up.
  • You might laugh at a joke. The other half of the internet is offended and cancels you.
  • You might find transcendence in the music of John Coltrane. The passengers in your car are begging you to switch back to Ozzy’s Boneyard.
  • You might think “Spock’s Brain” (the link intended as irony, don’t @me) is the worst Trek episode ever. I might suggest rewatching Season 2 of Next Generation for a real self-flagellation.
  • I can hit my flow state on Halferne Deception at 5 AM, convinced I’ve produced an atypically exciting, dramatic scene. I may also reread it later and realize it’s not even up to Spock’s Brain standards.

Beauty collapses only for the reader, and sometimes there’s just no love connection. However, local opinion collapse doesn’t alter the underlying fact. The leaves fell. The joke was told. Spock’s Brain exists. The Halferne Deception exists. Either the cat lived or died. Khan never ruled the world. Your explanation is cute, but it is completely irrelevant to reality. The universe doesn’t care what you think or believe. It doesn’t pause to see if you’re watching. It doesn’t assign beauty points based on Rotten Tomatoes scores. It doesn’t withhold collapse and kill the cat until after you’ve finished your latte. By the way, has anybody fed this cat while we’re sitting around talking it?

Okay, fine, your opinion is probably valid to somebody. In my world, it may only be amusingly tragic. Does it matter? People like to give opinions. It makes them feel special, like the cosmos is waiting for their reaction. I’m sorry, though. Reality isn’t your stage. Reality is a mess of particles and probabilities that couldn’t care less if you clap at that guitar solo.

In the end, Schrödinger’s cat is just a pwn that got out of hand and made into subjective truth by people who couldn’t accept something going over their heads. It was never serious science. Ironically, it was about showing you how absurd it is to put yourself at the center of the universe, because, whether you open the box or not, the cat has already observed and found his fate. So, when I wrote this post at 5AM and might have accidentally grabbed my evening/decaf coffee instead of my morning brew, the same rule applied: my opinion doesn’t change whether it actually makes sense or makes its point. This post exists with its waveform collapsed onto the page, waiting for some poor reader or “content creator” to react to it 50 years from now.