Unfortunately the elephant doesn't exist, unless observed. Neither do the blind men. And that is the
preferred interpretation by physicists such as Werner Heisenberg, Eugene Wigner, Amit Goswami, Fred Alan Wolf, William Tiller etc. Please refer to the Heisenberg quote I provided earlier.
There are other interpretations, of course. You may prefer, for instance, Hugh Everitt's
many-worlds theory, which, as of the 1990s, was the most popular interpretation among physicists. According to this theory, the reality in which you and your elephant exists is constantly splitting into more realities, and therefore you and your elephant currently exist in many different realities. It might be consistent with Everitt's theory to say that these are ALL objective realities, but somehow I suspect that you won't be very happy with the idea that there could be an infinite number of Mrs Cogans in an infinite number of different objective realities.
The interpretation which comes closest to your belief in a single objective reality, dear Mrs Cogan, is probably the
Bohm interpretation. This interpretation is formulated by David Bohm, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb. Unfortunately, this interpretation, breaching the principle of locality and coupled with quantum entanglement, means that your elephant, by twitching its nose or thinking a few elephantine thoughts in its brain, can instantaneously affect the behaviour of subatomic particles millions of miles away on the other side of the galaxy.
(Okay I exaggerate - this effect does not take place instantaneously, but at the speed of light - and not any faster. However, the effect is not confined to merely elephantine thoughts. Consistent with Bohm's interpretation, if I think a few thoughts and therefore cause electrical impulses to move in my my brain, then at the speed of light I would be affecting every subatomic particle since the beginning of the universe which had ever collided with those particular moving electrons in my brain. This is not a possible, but a
necessary, consequence following from the principle of
quantum entanglement - famously referred to by Einstein as "spooky action at a distance").
By now, you may begin to realise that there is no objective reality, or that if there is, it is certainly not
quite what you had imagined it to be.
Einstein certainly felt that way. In a letter to Schrodinger in the 1950s (yes, Schrodinger of the notorious Schrodinger's cat), Einstein wrote:
"You are the only contemporary physicist, besides Laue, who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality—if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established."
Let me paraphrase that for you, dear Mrs Cogan. Einstein is saying that if you are an honest scientist, you will not deny that you are merely assuming that an objective reality exists. It is a risky assumption, because there is absolutely no proof, scientifically speaking, that such an objective reality does exist.
Well, maybe by now, dear Mrs Cogan, you will begin to dislike Einstein, Heisenberg, Everitt, Bohm and all the others. To you, they might now even seem remarkably like fairies and demons.
But they're just scientists, Mrs Cogan.
And also remember this, Mrs Cogan, what you don't understand isn't therefore false. Your earlier comment that in physics, like repels like, and opposites attract, is true merely of, say, magnets. Certainly it isn't true of gravity, or resonance, or sympathetic vibration etc. That much should have been covered, even in your high school physics syllabus, Mrs Cogan.