Indeed. Parent was talking about Special (simultaneity).
Re: Mercury's precession, I'm still a believer in Vulcan.
made out of quantum particles!
Everything is made out of quantum particles, so this is rather a moronic reply. That being said, I'm quite satisfied with the "entanglement" arguments made by others (the photon detector needn't decohere/collapse the waveform--it could simply entangle with it, in which case, if you really did have a box with a cat completely isolated from the outside universe, then the paradox would still hold). I probably won't be making this response in the future, or at least not without the caveat of "from a practical perspective" or "I prefer Bohr's resolution to the paradox wherein..."
Except that the math there works out completely differently.
See: double-slit experiment. If photons didn't exist in a superposition of states, then the distribution of light you'd get with the double slit would be the distribution you get from having one slit covered plus the one you'd get from covering the other one. But you don't--the distribution is completely different, which means that a single photon somehow travel though *both* slits and "interferes with itself."
Also the idea that a photon constantly gets absorbed and reemitted in air is an incorrect understand of how electromagnetic waves get delayed, both in the classical electromagnetic sense and quantum sense.
Totally willing to admit that I'm wrong about this, but could you provide a citation? This interpretation of why light is slower in a medium was something I picked up in undergrad, and I never had it explicitly contradicted (my Ph.D was in a sub-field that required only the bare minimum quantum mechanics and solid state courses).
However, one of the main scientists associated with the Copenhagen interpretation, Niels Bohr, never had in mind the observer-induced collapse of the wave function, so that Schrödinger's cat did not pose any riddle to him. The cat would be either dead or alive long before the box is opened by a conscious observer.[6] Analysis of an actual experiment found that measurement alone (for example by a Geiger counter) is sufficient to collapse a quantum wave function before there is any conscious observation of the measurement.[7] The view that the "observation" is taken when a particle from the nucleus hits the detector can be developed into objective collapse theories. The thought experiment requires an "unconscious observation" by the detector in order for magnification to occur. In contrast, the many worlds approach denies that collapse ever occurs.
Life is a healthy respect for mother nature laced with greed.