>>11620539Part II:
"Unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world. On certain topics, cool rational judgment is hard to find, and quantum mechanics is one of those topics. For reasons rooted in the tortuous history of the theory, clear and straightforward physical theories that can account for the phenomena treated by quantum mechanics are viewed with suspicion, if not downright hostility. These phenomena, it is said, admit of no clear or “classical” explanation, and anyone who thinks that they do has not appreciated the revolutionary character of the quantum world. In order to “understand” quantum phenomena, it is said, we must renounce classical logic, or amend classical probability theory, or admit a plethora of invisible universes, or recognize the central role that conscious observers play in production of the physical world. Lest the reader think I am exaggerating, there are many clear examples of each of these. The Many Worlds interpretation posits that whenever quantum theory seems to present a probability, there is in fact a multiplicity: Schrödinger’s cat splits into a myriad
of cats in each experiment, some of which are alive and some dead. Defenders of the “consistent histories” approach insist that classical logic must be abandoned: in some cases, the claim P can be true and the claim Q can be true but the conjunction “P and Q” be not only not true, but meaningless. David Mermin, in a famous article on Bell’s theorem, asserts that “[w]e now know that the moon is demonstrably not there when nobody looks.”
