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Letter: Space, time and sleeping non-quantum cats (1)

Published 12 November 2025

From Robin Asby, Porthmadog, Gwynedd, UK

The problem for me with Vlatko Vedral’s beautiful new vision of reality is that all theories about the world in which we find ourselves are created by observers proposing ideas. Examination of those ideas by other observers (i.e. the use of the scientific method) winnows them to those that pass the tests (1 November, p 30).

The trouble with quantum mechanics is that Western scientists are trained to think in terms of objects and their categorisation, so that, somehow, there is a divide between the world of the very small and our everyday world. But let us consider the cat. When I return home, my cat could be sleeping in a number of different places, to which I can assign probabilities. These, of course, “collapse” as soon as I arrive and observe my cat in just one of them. This is a collapse of probabilities, just as in the quantum case. Is that a problem?

Issue no. 3569 published 15 November 2025

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