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Let’s set up a thought experiment. In a secret bunker, a sealed room contains a computer whose code flips a random bit. If it returns Y, a pager beeps for Admiral Howe (on a submarine). The Howe protocol: upon hearing the beep, he launches warheads that would wipe out half the planet. If it returns N, nothing happens. The room is sound-proofed and lead-lined; so that until we unlock the door, no one in the bunker will know which version of the code was executed. A timer is wired to the system, so by the time we can check, the world may already be committed to one fate.

Before we open the room, we don’t know which outcome has occurred. My ignorance doesn’t change the reality, but I can’t be sure either way. This is similar to Schrödinger’s cat: where a tiny random event gets blown up into a huge consequence. The key difference is how we see it. If the bit comes from a quantum process, then in some views the world is in both states at once—“beep and destruction” and “silence and safety”—until someone checks. If it’s just ordinary randomness, then it’s simply one or the other, and we’re in the dark until we look. Either way, the thought experiment raises the same question: at what point does one clear outcome replace the cloud of possibilities?

From an ontological standpoint {concerning existence and being} we can question whether or not the world being screwed is definite when the box is closed. Is it undecided until it is observed, or is there a clash between realism {things that exist with definite properties} and anti-realism {properties that don’t exist until measured}?

Who Knows?

A theist would say God.

From an epistemological standpoint, the cat is definitely dead or alive, but we have no way of knowing until we check. The only thing quantum mechanics is doing is displaying our ignorance. We can also look at the weight the observer has, if the cat’s state collapses only when the observer looks, does that make the observer special in the universe? Eugene Wigner toys with this idea, but most other philosophers deem it too anthropocentric {which means to regard humans as the centre of existence}.

Personally, I think the epistemological view point makes the most sense, we will never truly know unless we open the door, or look at the cat.

But then quantum mechanics doesn’t work. It’s as Richard Feynman once said, “Nobody understands Quantum Mechanics.”