I saw some goofy-ass Bluesky blabberer the other day who claimed that discussion of Schrödinger’s Cat in QM was elitist. Ok then. Mainly, Schrödinger’s Cat is useless for thinking about most things most people apply it to and 99.99% of people who use it don’t understand it and its historical context.

That said, QM is both easier and harder than its usual presentation. It’s not difficult to get across the basics, which are these:

1) Particles and waves aren’t the way to think about things in QM. Think about fields instead and that gets you so much further. The whole particle/wave “debate” is mostly junky bunk and bunky junk.

2) There is uncertainty always. Not because we don’t know something or because we haven’t measured it well enough. The uncertainty is inherent to the universe. It simply cannot be known because the universe itself does not know and has not “decided.” (Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and related.)

3) It’s all probabilities. Always. All the way down. Which is related to the above, ineluctably. The universe simply is probabilistic at its heart.

4) Entanglement is real, it’s not faster-than-light communication, and though it’s not “spooky,” it does have some very real implications about non-locality and reality.

5) Superposition is also real (contra dumbasses like Carlo Rovelli) and this also has very easily-measurable real-world implications.

In the same set of Bluesky clownery I also saw someone (same person? can’t recall) claim that if you could not explain what a de Broglie wave was or the significance of the time-independent Schrödinger equation (which they didn’t even spell correctly), you shouldn’t be talking about QM. Ok, LOL, de Broglie wave, big whoop: the wavelength of a particle or matter or whatever. Everything has one, it’s just that yours is really tiny because you’re really large (while an electron’s is large because it’s really fucking small). Damn ya’ll.

And the time independent Schrödinger equation just tells you what are the possible energy states of a static (which is what “time independent” means here) non-perturbed quantum system. Also I think that person put “time independent” in there to make their crap sound more impressive. The time-independent version is super easy to work out, by the way. A clever nine-year-old could do it.

Wake me up when that doof can talk about how gauge symmetry causes the Standard Model to just kind of fall out of it. And explain how that works. That’s about 10,000 times harder and until you understand that, you don’t really understand shit. (It took me about a decade of thinking about it every day and actually, yech, doing math, to understand that.)

Fuck.