On Various Realisms in Quantum Theory

Abstract

Over the years, a rich chocolate cake in a wooden box has become Vienna’s preferred birthday present to people abroad. So, I decided to bring with me a ‘Sachertorte’ as a birthday present for Wesley Salmon. Unfortunately, however, strange things are presently happening at Vienna. In a way unknown so far, a strange race of small cats descending from Schrödinger’s infamous cat manage to enter closed boxes. In order to avoid at best the spread of these cats, the city of Vienna has decided to hurt them at their only vulnerable spot and to perform the well-known Schrödinger cat experiment to all closed boxes leaving Vienna. In this way, the City is sure that on an average only half of this obnoxious animals leave Vienna alive. At the ‘Südbahnhofthe same procedure was applied to my box containing Wes’s ‘Sachertorte’. On the train to Florence, I thought about the possible states within the cake box lying in my compartment. Either Schrödinger’s cat was killed in the experiment, then it had already begun to putrefy. Or, the cat survived, then it must have become terribly hungry and had already started to eat up the cake. From this I concluded that despite the notorious cat paradox I obtained a definite result and, accordingly, a solution to the measurement problem: The box containing either a decaying cat or one smudged with chocolate was with absolute certainty an awful birthday present.