Explanatory Strain in Measurement and Collapse

“In essence the Copenhagen Interpretation says that a quantum entity does not have a certain property — any property — until it is measured…Does human intelligence have to be involved?…Or where in between those extremes do you find the boundary between the quantum world and the ‘classical’ world…?…So does the wave function collapse, or not? Is the cat also in a superposition of states…?…Yes, according to the not so wonderful Copenhagen Interpretation.”

— Gribbin, Six Impossible Things, pp. 38–40

If the earlier Copenhagen narratives strained intuition by stretching objects and time, this passage completes the arc by stretching existence itself. Here, explanatory strain reaches its most explicit form.

Measurement as ontological trigger

The Copenhagen Interpretation is introduced in its starkest formulation: a quantum entity has no definite properties at all until it is measured. Measurement is no longer a technical interaction; it becomes an ontological event. Properties do not merely become known — they come into being.

But this immediately raises a problem Copenhagen cannot resolve without contradiction: what counts as measurement?

Gribbin lists the familiar escalation:

• Does human consciousness matter?

• Is intelligence required?

• Does the Universe exist if no one is looking?

• Or does interaction with a detector suffice?

Each question exposes the same strain. If measurement creates properties, then the boundary between quantum and classical must be real — but no principled location for that boundary can be given.

The sliding boundary

Copenhagen requires a cut between:

• a quantum world of superpositions and potentials, and

• a classical world of definite outcomes.

Yet it cannot say where this cut lies. The result is a sliding boundary: sometimes the detector is classical, sometimes it is quantum; sometimes collapse happens at interaction, sometimes at observation. The theory depends on a boundary it cannot define.

This is not a technical gap. It is an ontological one.

Schrödinger’s cat as symptom

The cat thought experiment is often treated as an absurdity designed to shock. But in this context it serves a precise diagnostic role. It reveals what happens when Copenhagen’s commitments are taken seriously and scaled up.

If the electron has no definite spin until measurement, and the detector merely entangles the electron with the cat, then — on Copenhagen’s own terms — the cat must also lack a definite state. The absurdity is not in the example. It is in the ontology that makes the example unavoidable.

Gribbin’s final line — “Yes, according to the not so wonderful Copenhagen Interpretation” — lands as a verdict. The interpretation has backed itself into a corner where existence itself flickers, contingent on ill-defined acts of measurement.

The locus of strain

The explanatory strain here is maximal:

• Measurement is asked to do the work of creation.

• Collapse is treated as a physical event without dynamics.

• The classical–quantum boundary is both essential and undefinable.

The interpretation survives only by oscillation: between interaction and observation, between detector and observer, between pragmatism and metaphysics.

A relational alternative

From a relational ontological perspective, none of this is required. Quantum entities do not lack properties awaiting creation. Rather, properties are phenomenal actualisations — outcomes of perspectival cuts through structured potential.

Measurement does not create reality. It instantiates one phenomenon rather than another. The cat is not suspended between life and death; the superposition belongs to the theoretical description, not to the cat.

Once instantiation is understood as perspectival rather than temporal or causal, collapse ceases to be a mystery — and measurement loses its impossible burden.

What Copenhagen reveals

This passage shows Copenhagen at its most honest. When its commitments are followed through consistently, they produce consequences that even its proponents find laughable. The laughter is not misplaced. It marks the point at which explanatory strain becomes impossible to ignore.

What collapses here is not the wave function, but an ontology that demands too much of measurement and too little of relation.