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

Why does a cat being both alive and dead sound like nonsense? It seems to me to be the most accurate description of nature. The "cat" is some kind of soup of cells and other more primitive life forms engaged in a pitched battle for resources that results in the experience we categorize as "cat". To us at scale, we create the ontological notion 'cat" but reality does seem not care about our ontology. That is all you need to accept in order for the quantum mechanical formalism to lose its mysteriousness.

I have a gold medal in theoretical physics and I find quantum mechanics presents no difficulty or mysticism. There is however significant lament that the reductionist paradigm has failed to produce a deterministic universe from the decidedly probabilistic one we inhabit.

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.