Quantum Physics Is on the Wrong Track, Says Breakthrough Prize Winner

It's weird you would invoke actual cats made of cells to try to say something about reality, when the issue is macroscopic superpositions are never observed. You never see (1/sqrt(2))(alive+dead) cats.

Neither do we observe (left-path + right-path) electrons. QM being a computation tool and not a description of underlying reality is a coherent idea.

So you interpret QM as just math, with no physical meaning or interpretation, that's fine. "Shut up and calculate", is old hat.

My point is similar but not quite so prohibitive. It isn't about cats, rather it is about shedding your large scale ontologies when you work at much smaller scale. At these scales we have observation and evolution according wave equations, that is the ontology. In between there is nothing to conceive of or there are superpositions and non-locality. There is no comforting continuous existence across time and you need to accept that just as in classical physics you accepted the opposite, perhaps unknowingly. Do you not think your intuition about ontology may fail you when scales change 9 orders of magnitude?

Reality obviously reduces to QM in certain regimes. I'm quibbling with

> Why does a cat being both alive and dead sound like nonsense?

Alive and dead are coarse grained macrostates and these are never observed in superposition. Just like we don't observe asteroids in superpositions either. You could make some argument around decoherence to explain the absence while maintaining the possibility I guess. The absence of observation is why it sounds like nonsense. Cats aren't things that are alive and dead (sounds like category error to me), even though electrons (excitations of electron field, something something strings or loop or whatever) might be things that exist in superpositions over position space or momentum space and you can calculate observables from wavefunctions.

That doesn't say anything about what is "happening" IMO. I'm not saying macroscopic observations rule out microscopic ontologies.

I don't think there is anything interesting that we disagree on. I'm just not finding the ontology that I must accept/adopt to do quantum mechanics objectionable despite that it shows little respect for my scale-laden experiences. I find that superpositions, non-local couplings, etc. Do not mix well with coarse grained macrostates, or any sort of experience I have had at scale. This is probably because the entirety of my experience is rationalization after the fact of reality, constructed in my brain for the purpose of maximizing gene replication. But I am trained to deal with paradigm change -- incomensurability, ontology, and epistemology are part and parcel of that endeavour.

In QM, I don't even get the comfort of assuming there is an objective reality filled with entities that enjoy continuous existence in time.