Quantum experiment confirms that reality does not exist until it is measured.

[GliderGuider]

Experiment confirms quantum theory weirdness

The bizarre nature of reality as laid out by quantum theory has survived another test, with scientists performing a famous experiment and proving that reality does not exist until it is measured.

Physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) have conducted John Wheeler's delayed-choice thought experiment, which involves a moving object that is given the choice to act like a particle or a wave. Wheeler's experiment then asks -- at which point does the object decide?

Common sense says the object is either wave-like or particle-like, independent of how we measure it. But quantum physics predicts that whether you observe wave like behavior (interference) or particle behavior (no interference) depends only on how it is actually measured at the end of its journey. This is exactly what the ANU team found.

"It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it," said Associate Professor Andrew Truscott from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering.

If your worldview is materialism or realism, will this shift it towards idealism?

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Just ask Schrödinger's cat...

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

9. Can't ask...Schrodinger's cat is on the lamb...he's wanted dead AND alive.

[JimDandy]

26. The lamb must be on the lam if the cat's on it.

[Thor_MN]

37. Didn't the conservatives warn about cat on lamb relationships being on the slippery slope?

[shenmue]

2. I tried this same experiment with alcohol

It works.

[rurallib]

17. thank you for taking one for the team

[daleanime]

3. May be it's late...

but consider my mind blown.

[pscot]

4. Republicans have an instinctive grasp

of this idea.

[GliderGuider]

5. +1

[Cleita]

6. I consider the word "reality" a word.

It's a human language construct. Now, I have not had a whole lot of formal science training in my life, very little, and actually and I have a tremendous respect for those who are in the field and who try to make the rest of us understand our world.

But, sometimes words need to be destroyed to achieve the actuality (another word).

I just dunno.

[SoLeftIAmRight]

7. Watch out the woo police will be here soon.

ha

[cheapdate]

8. I don't think that "one has to accept that a future measurement...

is affecting the atom's past" -- as Truscott says. Light and matter have a dual particle-wave nature, as they are observed by scientific instruments. I don't see how this experiment's "twist" (adding or not adding the second grating only after the photon had passed through the first grating) is substantially any different from other variations of the double-slit experiment. It seems like the experiment was only another confirmation of what's been done before. I don't see how it justifies any new "ontological" claims about reality.

Our inability to fully understand and explain instrumental results in terms of mathematical models can mean any number of different things. I don't think it means that "reality does not exist if you are not looking at it."

[qazplm]

38. I think reality exists

whether you look at it or not, but I think it does exist in multiple forms when you don't look at it, and then collapses down to one when you do.

[cheapdate]

41. It makes more sense to me to say that it always exists

in multiple forms but we can only see (or measure) it in one form at a time.

[longship]

10. The answer it is neither particle nor wave, and yet both particle and wave.

The fact is that at the quantum level things do not act like they do in the world of baseballs. Since we humans have no experience of things at that level we call it weird. However, that is how the universe operates at the bottom end of scale. In other words, that is how things work everywhere.

Our classical look at the universe is merely the summation of of these quirky and non-intuitive interactions.

So none of these weird things should be surprising. They certainly shouldn't be an excuse to insert any woo in the gaps of our intuition.

The universe is what it is. And as deBroglie theorized, everything has a wavelength.

[F4lconF16]

33. Well said.

The universe is what it is. Our perceptions of it are often very wrong, simply because of our experience in the macro world.

[Binkie The Clown]

11. Exactly like opening a door in a first person computer adventure game.

Before you open the door, the room beyond doesn't exist, and the monster (possibly) awaiting you inside is just a probability function. It's only when you look at it does it manifest as pixels on your screen. Only when you examine the room do the dice get rolled, and does the monster come to be or to not be.

More evidence that this "reality" is a computer simulation.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

14. A lot of games require a trigger to activate an opponent. Like crossing a line.

I don't like games that are too linear.

This cracks me up, starting with the endless logos.

[Unknown Beatle]

12. That could also be said about

the fork in the road. Reality depends upon which road you choose to travel.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

13. "If your worldview is materialism or realism, will this shift it towards idealism?"

No.

It shifts it to, "What you don't know can't hurt you."

[Ichingcarpenter]

15. This opens a can of worms on many fronts

Last edited Sun May 31, 2015, 06:33 AM - Edit history (1)

“We don’t know who first discovered water, but we can be sure that it wasn’t a fish,” -

This raises scientific and philosophically questions like about

time/space.....or the fourth dimension and non locality?

Consciousness and the debate on if its outside of the mind?
Or even Jung's theory of the collective unconsciousness.

Is our universe a hologram debate?


“An attempt at visualizing the Fourth Dimension: Take a point, stretch it into a line, curl it into a circle, twist it into a sphere, and punch through the sphere.”
―Albert Einstein

[dixiegrrrrl]

19. Reality exists only as far as science can prove it.....

is another way to look at things.

All unproven by science stuff is called....magic.
A word that makes most people very uncomfortable.

[Ichingcarpenter]

20. Clarke's Three Laws

Clarke's Three Laws are three "laws" of prediction formulated by the British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. They are:


1 When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2 The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.


3 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

[dixiegrrrrl]

21. Have i told you lately I like you?

[GliderGuider]

22. Have you run into the ideas of Bernardo Kastrup yet?

Speaking of cans of worms...

[Ichingcarpenter]

23. I'm having some problems with scientific materalism of absolutisms

which I find dogmatic.




I"m familiar with him on the net but have been grounding my foundations on the talks and discussions of David Bohm who Einstein considered his worthy successor. His talks, books and especially his discussions with Krishnamurti go in the same direction.

http://www.bizcharts.com/stoa_del_sol/plenum/plenum_3.html

[GliderGuider]

25. Yes, Bohm goes in much the same direction with his concepts of implicate and explicate order.

I've recently been struck by the struggle of materialists to explain the implications of recent quantum experiments without abandoning their primary metaphysics. How do you "bridge the logic gap" from the quantum to the macro worlds without abandoning (or at least severely questioning) the worldview of materialism?

It reminds me a bit of a "god of the gaps" situation in reverse, where materialism has ever fewer places to hide as we learn more about the universe we seem to live in.

[Ichingcarpenter]

29. "Just give us one small miracle and we will explain the rest''

That's a great quote of Terence's McKenna.

Yes, that's it. Science requests, "Give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest." And the one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it from nothing at a single instant.

That's just a small miracle.

Take matter and energy, that the total amount is always the same, except at the moment of the Big Bang, when it all appeared from nowhere — that's the usual assumption.

Well, it turns out that physicists have discovered that there is a huge amount of so-called dark matter and dark energy. We don't have a clue what they are, but they now make up 96 percent of reality, and they've been added over the last 30 years. Now if the total amount of matter and energy is always the same, is the total amount of dark matter and dark energy always the same? No one has a clue. Actually, the total amount of dark energy seems to be increasing as the universe expands.

Its mind boggling.



Dark energy increasing and is real

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2201997/Dark-energy-mystery-solved-Researchers-claim-99-996-sure-real.html

[GliderGuider]

30. That's a great quote, reminiscent of this old classic:

[GliderGuider]

32. I just looked through your link on Bohm. It's a great introduction to his views.

One of the things I noticed is what happens when you apply Kastrup's view that consciousness is the fundamental ontological primitive of the universe. when you do that, then Bohm's multiplicity of "Ground of All Existence", "The Cosmic Apex" and "Consciousness" collapses into a single entity - just consciousness or "mid-at-large" as Kastrup puts it. And as he is fond of saying, parsimony has much to recommend it in such pursuits.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

16. Socrates - 'The unexamined life is not worth living'. nt

[deutsey]

18. It's like Lennon said, "Nothing is real. And nothing to get hung about."

[snagglepuss]

24. Baffling but an interesting read.

k and r

[GliderGuider]

28. It's starting to look like that, isn't it? nt

[qazplm]

39. except

some reality is more than others. I drop you, any other human, a dog, a cat, any animal really from a plane, and you are all going to perceive something really hard eventually stopping your fall.

None will perceive a soft landing, or passing through the Earth, or any of that. (ignoring animals that fly and would stop their fall on their own).

[darkangel218]

40. Some cats survived pretty high falls.

You never know. Maybe what makes them survive those falls is because they perceive reality differently than us.

I know what you're saying though.

[libdem4life]

31. Another version: If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there, does it make a sound?

[caraher]

34. I love atom optics

Using an optical grating is really helpful - you can switch the grating on and off very quickly!

The quantum optics versions of these experiments are probably more stringent tests, but it's cool to show the same results with massive particles.

[hunter]

35. I blame the "mystery" on our rigid interpretation of time...

... in which the past is somehow fixed and immutable, and our "feeling" that we have some agency over the future.

It's the "time as a fourth dimension" fallacy.

If you look at both past and future as shifty probabalistic things arising from the local "now" then all those things that bother us about quantum phyisics, the wave/particle dualities and the like, all the "mystery" of it goes away.

In my own simplistic and largely naive model of the universe, we only need three identical dimensions, each 2/3 space-like and 1/3 time-like. In such a universe faster-than-light or time "travel" is impossible because there isn't any "there" to get to. But from my perspective, we conscious beings (whatever consciousness is) have more agency in this model than we would in the conventional three dimensions of space and this funny ratcheted dimension of time model.

Western notions that some God is recording our lives in some giant book, that all accounts will be setteled, and we will be judged, have fucked up our physics, our economic theories, and our society in general.

[kickysnana]

36. American health care is based on this pricipal...no positive test?...you are not sick.n/t