Abstract

The Schrodinger's Cat and Wigner's Friend thought experiments, which logically follow from the universality of quantum mechanics at all scales, have been repeatedly characterized as possible in principle, if perhaps difficult or impossible for all practical purposes. I show in this paper why these experiments, and interesting macroscopic superpositions in general, are actually impossible in principle. First, no macroscopic superposition can be created via the slow process of natural quantum packet dispersion because all macroscopic objects are inundated with decohering interactions that constantly localize them. Second, the SC/WF thought experiments depend on von Neumann-style amplification to achieve quickly what quantum dispersion achieves slowly. Finally, I show why such amplification cannot produce a macroscopic quantum superposition of an object relative to an external observer, no matter how well isolated the object from the observer, because: the object and observer are already well correlated to each other; and reducing their correlations to allow the object to achieve a macroscopic superposition relative to the observer is equally impossible, in principle, as creating a macroscopic superposition via the process of natural quantum dispersion.