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

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.

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.

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?

> 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.