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SCHROEDINGER ROULETTE
 
(c) 2005 Henry A. Flynt, Jr.
revised 11/1/05
 
     Given the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, I propose Schroedinger roulette.  Substitute the physicist for the cat.  The physicist is under general anesthesia for the critical hour, then is awakened by a timer on the IV, identically collapsing the wave function in an unpredictable way.  Either he is instantly dead because he observes that he is dead--or he has instantly rescued himself from a twilit existence.
     Let the physicist be kept under anesthesia for one hour after the Geiger counter apparatus is automatically inactivated.  Then let him be awakened by timer.  Now he establishes that he has been dead for at least an hour by observing that he is dead.  Physics won't be able to exclude ghosts from its ontology.
     The "out" that the physicist collapsed the wave function while unconscious at the moment of decay does not deserve a reply.  Worse than that "out" is the advent of the "retrenchment crowd," which denies the live cat/dead cat mixture--and denies that quantum mechanics is "crazy."  That just erases countless pages of commentary on Schroedinger's cat over the last five or more decades (not to mention "Wigner's friend").  Now is a fine time to start wanting physics not to be "crazy."
     There is already a different suicide physics in connection with Schroedinger's cat and the many-worlds interpretation.  See http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/everett/everett23_lynch.html
 
Exposition of Schroedinger's cat:
 
http://www.soc.iastate.edu/sapp/phil_sci_lecture24.html