“When I moved from Los Angeles, I moved into what I thought was Santa Cruz. Then we had something stolen from our car, and we called the police, and it turned out we didn’t live in Santa Cruz; we lived in a town called Capitola. The post office thought we lived in Santa Cruz, but the police thought we lived in Capitola. I started investigating this, and a reporter on the local newspaper told me we didn’t live in either Santa Cruz or Capitola; we lived in an unincorporated area called Live Oak.“Now, quantum mechanics is just like that, except that in the case of Santa Cruz, Capitola, and Live Oak, we don’t get too confused, because we remember: we invented the lines on the map. Quantum physics seems confusing because a lot of people think we didn’t invent the lines, so it seems hard to understand how a particle can be in three places at the same time without being anywhere at all. But when you remember that we invented all the boundaries, borders, and lines, just like the Berlin Wall, then quantum mechanics is no more mysterious than the fact that I live in three places at the same time.”Robert Anton Wilson, when asked to explain quantum physics simply, always gets a smile out of me; both for his answer and for the apprehensive reaction of the translator(?) (as seen in the video) as Wilson prepares to answer.
