{"product_id":"schrodingers-cat-trilogy-isbn-9780440500704","title":"Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy","description":"The sequel to the cult classic The Illuminatus! Trilogy, this is an epic fantasy that offers a twisted look at our modern-day world--a reality that exists in another dimension of time and space that may be closer than we think.\u003cb\u003eRobert Anton Wilson\u003c\/b\u003e (1932–2007) was the author of some thirty-five books including \u003ci\u003eCosmic Trigger, Prometheus Rising,\u003c\/i\u003e and the Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, and the co-author of the Illuminatus! Trilogy. He was a futurist, author, lecturer, stand-up comic, guerrilla ontologist, psychedelic magician, outer head of the Illuminati, quantum psychologist, Taoist sage, Discordian Pope, Struthian politician . . . maybe. He described his work as an \"attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with different perspectives recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth.\"BOOK ONE\u003cbr\u003e The Universe Next Door\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Not until the male become female and the female becomes male shall ye enter the Kingdom of Heaven.\u003cbr\u003e —Jesus, in\u003cbr\u003e The Gospel of Thomas\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e PART ONE\u003cbr\u003e PURITY OF ESSENCE\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e For the Cherub Cat is a term in the Angel Tiger\u003cbr\u003e —CHRISTOPHER SMART, Jubilate Agno\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e DON’T LOOK BACK\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e History is a nightmare from which none of us can awaken.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e —STEPHEN PROMETHEUS IN CARL JUNG’S Odysseus\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The majority of Terrans were six-legged. They had territorial squabbles and politics and wars and a caste system. They also had sufficient intelligence to survive on that barren boondocks planet for several billions of years.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e We are not concerned here with the majority of Terrans. We are concerned with a tiny minority—the domesticated primates who built cities and wrote symphonies and invented things like tic-tac-toe and integral calculus. At the time of our story, these primates regarded themselves as the Terrans. The six-legged majority and other life-forms on that planet hardly entered into their thinking at all, most of the time.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The domesticated primates of Terra referred to the six-legged majority by an insulting name. They called them “bugs.”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e There was one species on Terra that lived in very close symbiosis with the domesticated primates. This was a variety of domesticated canines called dogs.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The dogs had learned to achieve a rough simulation of guilt and remorse and worry and other domesticated primate characteristics.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The domesticated primates had learned how to achieve simulations of loyalty and dignity and cheerfulness and other canine characteristics.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The primates claimed that they loved the dogs as much as the dogs loved them. Still, the primates kept the best food for themselves. The dogs noticed this, you can be sure, but they loved the primates so much that they forgave them.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e One dog became famous. Actually he and she was a group of dogs, but they became renowned collectively as Pavlov’s Dog.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The thing about Pavlov’s Dog is that he or she or they responded mechanically to mechanically administered stimuli. Pavlov’s Dog caused some of the domesticated primates, especially the scientists, to think that all dog behavior was equally mechanical. This made them wonder about other mammals, including themselves.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Most primates ignored this philosophical challenge. They went about their business assuming that they were not mechanical.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e    The fact that plutonium was missing originally leaked to the press in the mid-1970s. At first there was a minor wave of panic among those given to worrying about such matters, and there was even some churlish grumbling about a government so incompetent that it couldn’t keep track of its own weapons of megadeath.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e But then a year passed, and another, and soon five years had passed, and then nearly a decade; and the missing plutonium was still missing but nothing really drastic had happened.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Terran primates, being a simpleminded, sleepful race, simply stopped worrying about the subject. The triggering mechanism of the most destructive weapon ever devised on that backward planet was in unknown hands, true; but that was really not much more unsettling to contemplate than the fact that many of the known hands which had enjoyed access to plutonium belonged to persons who were not in all respects reasonable men. (See Terran Archives: Reagan, Ronald Wilson, career of.)\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The primate philosophy of that epoch was summed up by one of their popular heroes, Mr. Satchel Paige, in the aphorism, “Don’t look back—something might be gaining on you.” It was a comfortable philosophy for sleep-loving people.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The use of atomic weapons was widely blamed on a primate named Albert Einstein. Even Einstein himself had agreed with this opinion. He was a pacifist and had suffered abominable pangs of conscience over what had been done with his scientific discoveries.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “I should have been a plumber,” Einstein said just before he died.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Actually the discovery of atomic energy was the result of the work of every scientist, craftsman, engineer, technician, philosopher, and gadgeteer who had ever lived on Terra. The use of atomic energy as a weapon was the result of all the political decisions ever made, from the time the vertebrates first started competing for territory.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Most Terran primates did not understand the multiplex nature of causality. They tended to think everything had a single cause. This simple philosophic error was so widespread on that planet that the primates were all in the habit of giving themselves, and other primates, more credit than was deserved when things went well. This made them all inordinately conceited.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e They also gave themselves, and one another, more blame than was deserved when things went badly. This gave them all jumbo-sized guilt complexes.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e It is usually that way on primitive planets, before quantum causality is understood.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Quantum causality was not understood on Terra until physicists solved the Schrödinger’s Cat riddle.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Schrödinger’s Cat never became as famous among the primate masses as Pavlov’s Dog, but that was because the cat was harder to understand than the dog.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Pavlov’s Dog could be understood in simple mechanical metaphors. To understand Schrödinger’s Cat you needed to first understand the equations of quantum probability waves. Only a few primates were smart enough to read the equations, and even they couldn’t understand them.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e That was because the equations seemed to say that the cat was dead and alive at the same time.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e NAH had already put out bumper stickers saying things like:\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e REGISTER CAPITALISTS, NOT GUNS\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e    and:\u003cbr\u003e    HONK IF YOU’RE ARMED\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e    and:\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e EAT THE RICH\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e But they really outdid themselves with the build-your-own atomic weapon sheet, which was titled “Hobbysheet #4” and looked like this:\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e HOBBYSHEET #4 in a series of 30. Collect ’em all!\u003cbr\u003e A SIMPLE ATOMIC BOMB FOR\u003cbr\u003e THE HOME CRAFTSMAN\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The planet as a whole continued to drowse.","brand":"Dell","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300192080101,"sku":"NP9780440500704","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780440500704.jpg?v=1767736194","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/schrodingers-cat-trilogy-isbn-9780440500704","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}