Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy

THE COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION

There is a sharp disagreement among competent men as to what can be proved and what cannot be proved, as well as an irreconcilable divergence of opinion as to what is sense and what is nonsense.

–eric temple bell. Debunking Science

There was nothing really weird about Blake Williams, except that he was passionately in love with a dead man. This great, if somewhat bizarre, passion was entirely platonic, of course-nothing queer about good old Doc Williams, except his head. With his six-foot frame, his neatly trimmed gray beard, and his heavy black-rimmed spectacles, Williams was the very model of a modern major generalist. Due to the incident of the Gansevoort Street incinerator, he had learned to keep his mouth shut about his more outlandish ideas and obsessions.

The man Blake Williams loved was Niels Bohr, the physicist who had chosen the Taoist yin-yang as his Coat of Arms when knighted by the Danish court-which was rather far out back in the 1930s (before Taoism became faddish with physicists). Bohr also added nearly as much to quantum theory as Planck, Einstein, or Schrodinger, and his model of the atom-the Bohr model, it's called- had been believed literally by a generation of physicians before Hiroshima. Bohr himself, however, had never believed it; nor had he believed any of his other theories. Bohr invented what is called the Copenhagen Interpretation, which holds in effect that a physicist shouldn't believe anything but his measurements in the laboratory. Everything else-the whole body of mathematics and theory relating one measurement to another-Bohr regarded as a model of how the human mind works, not of how the universe works. Blake Williams loved Bohr for the Copenhagen Interpretation, which had made it possible for him to study physics seriously, even devoutly, without believing a word of it. That was convenient, since Williams's own training as an anthropologist had schooled him to study all human symbol systems without believing any of them.

On a deeper level-there is always a deeper level- Williams was a scientist who didn't believe in science because he had been cured of polio by witchcraft.

But Blake Williams didn't believe in witchcraft, either. He didn't believe in anything. He regarded all belief systems as illustrative data in domesticated primate psychology.

"The study of human beliefs is an ethologist's heaven and a logician's hell," he liked to say.

Actually, Blake Williams hadn't been cured of polio by witchcraft, exactly. He had been cured by the Sister Kenny method.

But he grew up thinking it was witchcraft. That was because all the experts in Unistat at the time-the members of the American Medical Association, who would not admit there were any other experts on health-claimed the Sister Kenny method was witchcraft. They also said it didn't work.

Since the Sister Kenny method obviously had worked in his case, Blake grew up with the gnawing suspicion that the experts didn't know what the hell they were talking about. He was also intensely curious about all forms of witchcraft, which eventually led him to become an anthropologist.

Young Williams soon enough discovered-on his very first field trip, among the Hopi Indians-that witchcraft does by God and by golly work, after all. He began, tentatively and secretly, sharing his knowledge with carefully selected colleagues. Most of them were pretty evasive about the whole subject, but Marilyn Chambers, the author of the epoch-making Neuroanthropology, was star-tlingly blunt.

"Everybody who's been in the field knows that," she said with a kind of weary patience.

"But why doesn't anyone say so?" Williams asked, still young, still naive.

"Freud and Charcot once had virtually this same conversation," Dr. Chambers said, "but the topic then was the sexual origin of the hysterical neuroses of Victorian women. Charcot invited Freud to be the goat and talk about it in public…"

"I see," Blake Williams said slowly. He did see.