Schrodinger's cat trilogy - By Robert Anton Wilson Page 0,1

of quantum probability waves. Only a few primates were smart enough to read the equations, and even they couldn’t understand them.

That was because the equations seemed to say that the cat was dead and alive at the same time.

Every character in this book looks like Pavlov’s Dog from a certain angle. If you look at him or her a different way, however, you’ll see Schrödinger’s Cat.

As early as 1976, a group of Chicago paranoids known as the Nihilist Anarchist Horde (NAH) printed up a single-page broadside on how to manufacture an atomic weapon. They sent this, in envelopes with no return address, to all the most hostile and embittered individuals and groups in the United States. NAH regarded this mailing as both a joke and a warning, and refused to face the fact that it was also an incitement.

NAH had already put out bumper stickers saying things like:

REGISTER CAPITALISTS, NOT GUNS

and:

HONK IF YOU’RE ARMED

and:

EAT THE RICH

And they even had a rubber stamp which they used to decorate subway advertisements with the Nihilistic message: ARM THE UNEMPLOYED: RIOT IN THE LOOP ON NEW YEAR’S EVE.

But they really outdid themselves with the build-your-own atomic weapon sheet, which was titled “Hobbysheet #4” and looked like this:

HOBBYSHEET #4 in a series of 30. Collect ’em all!

A SIMPLE ATOMIC BOMB FOR

THE HOME CRAFTSMAN

There is nothing complex about an Atomic (or Fission) Bomb. If enough fission material (Uranium 235 or Plutonium 237) is brought together to form a critical mass, it will explode. The trick is to put the pieces together fast enough to get a decent blast before the bomb blows itself apart. This can be done quite simply by means of ordinary explosive as shown below.

It was later estimated that the Nihilist Anarchist Horde, most of whom were living on Welfare, were able to mail out only 200,000 of these over the four-year period (1976-80) before they grew bored with the project.

Nonetheless, many of the equally paranoid and hostile persons who received this mailing had access to Xerox machines and were as desperate as the members of NAH itself. It was later determined that by 1981 there were over 10,000,000 copies of “Hobbysheet #4” in circulation. Eventually one of them reached the POE group, who were ready for an idea like that.

The planet as a whole continued to drowse.

ALTERNATIVE TEXTS

That is precisely what common sense is for, to be jarred into uncommon sense.

—ERIC TEMPLE BELL,

Mathematics: Queen of the Sciences

GALACTIC ARCHIVES:

The original title of the greater part of what we have collected in this book under the title Schrödinger’s Cat was The Universe Next Door. The book of that name was begun as a sequel to Illuminatus!, but after several editors in a row suffered psychotic breakdowns while reading it, publishers defensively ordered that any ms. with that title, from Robert Anton Wilson, should be returned unopened.

“People generally do not want a new form of prose fiction to replace the hackneyed ‘novel,’” Wilson wrote in a letter to his friend Malaclypse the Younger. “There never has been a serious attempt since Odysseus.”

Schrödinger’s Cat Fair Copy #2, according to Wilson scholars, incorporates later and still more bizarre material, the text of which was allegedly dictated to Wilson by a canine intelligence—“vast, cool, and unsympathetic”—from the system of the Dog Star, Sirius. Schrödinger’s Cat Fair Copy #3 appeared much later, in 2031, under mysterious circumstances. Some claimed, at the time, that it had been received by a trance medium to whom Wilson had “broadcast” it after his melodramatic departure from this world in 1993. Skeptics have always insisted that the alleged medium actually found it in an old tampon box in her attic. A legend about the manuscript being recovered from the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco, after the earthquake of 2005, and passed around among adepts of certain occult groups, is probably mythical.

Various alternative texts, generally considered forgeries, have circulated at intervals and many Wilson scholars debate heatedly whether this final ms. is, in fact, totally or even in major part Wilson’s work. That two authors at least are here represented, often at cross-purposes with each other, is the emerging academic consensus at this time.

The present edition incorporates all material that is undoubtedly Wilson’s, together with matter of such a Wilsonian and weird character that the present editor regards it as probably-Wilson’s-within-reasonable-doubt.

It only remains to affirm that Schrödinger’s Cat, contrary to appearances, is not a mere “routine” or “shaggy shoggoth story.” Despite his sinister reputation and his well-known eccentricities, Wilson was one of the last of