Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds • Hacker News Board

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#31

Post by epitomix » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 2:04 AM UTC

westoncb wrote: post #5

This is of course extremely interesting and probably important for understanding our universe—but how is it helping anyone to say something like, "...with scientists performing a famous experiment and proving that reality does not exist until it is measured." The statement is like a distraction at a magic show, drawing the reader to the glittery 'reality' and 'exist,' which are totally undefined so the reader's imagi…

"Maybe this is really just a fundamental challenge to our assumptions about motion of particles or information transfer in the universe."

Check out this TED talk on just that subject. http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as...

Here's the punch line, space, time and matter are components of a user interface produced through evolution. We don't take the desktop and icons of our computer UI literally and we shouldn't take our evolved UI literally either.

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#32

Post by themgt » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 2:06 AM UTC

z5h wrote: post #3

What does it mean to exist? A thing exists specifically when it affects something else. What is measurement? It's a reciprocal affecting. So does a thing which is not affecting anything else and not being measured exist? No! QED

Right. This way of describing it is much closer to "zero-worlds" or relational quantum mechanics, and to my mind is a far simpler, deeper way of understanding what's really going on - reality is simply all entanglement.

What really still gets me is the way it's not simply that the atom wasn't interacted with, but that if the information about the interaction never leaks to the outside world - if it's "erased" after the interaction takes place - then the system still behaves as if the interaction never took place.

It undermines not just the concept that matter really exists, but time as well.

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#33

Post by photonic29 » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 2:06 AM UTC

deciplex wrote: post #21

Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #16

Or, maybe, Everett was right.

Most physicists or, depending on who you talk to, nearly half of physicists, would appear to agree with you. I'm convinced that the Copenhagen interpretation remains popular because by making observation itself an integral part of the theory, you allow us to postulate that there is something special about human brains. But 'mysterious observation' is the luminiferous aether of quantum mechanics. photonic29: I would l…

Is that really the case though? An observation collapses a wave function. The Copenhagen interpretation suggests that the collapsed state arises from a probability distribution, but it does not address the "fundamental" origin of that distribution. MW attempts to address it by suggesting that the rest of the reality just went elsewhere, rather than disappearing or never having existed at all, but it still does not explain why "we" get "this" reality. Both rely on observations to collapse the wave function, and neither specifically calls out a conscious agent as necessary for an observation to occur. Observation is a measurement, whether intended and registered by a brain or not.

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#34

Post by A_COMPUTER » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 2:07 AM UTC

If I'm standing here, all the stuff that the atoms in my body could conceivably interact with have to be backfilled for me to interact with them according to this experiment, but since I'm not special to the universe, atoms three billion light years over, they are still interacting with each other, just not with me. So am I decohered to them? Is this like a divergent timelines theory such that coherence is defined as when different possibilities converge while following possibilities, reducing them and then so must necessarily collapse as other possibilities drop off? So what's the difference between cohered and decohered reality then? It sounds then like it would just be one of those paths, the one that we happen to be on that we only notice because we're conscious so that's our arbitrary (to the universe) observation point. That's the only way I can make sense out of this without attaching significance to human observation.

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#35

Post by westoncb » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 2:08 AM UTC

epitomix wrote: post #31

westoncb wrote: post #5

This is of course extremely interesting and probably important for understanding our universe—but how is it helping anyone to say something like, "...with scientists performing a famous experiment and proving that reality does not exist until it is measured." The statement is like a distraction at a magic show, drawing the reader to the glittery 'reality' and 'exist,' which are totally undefined so the reader's imagi…

"Maybe this is really just a fundamental challenge to our assumptions about motion of particles or information transfer in the universe." Check out this TED talk on just that subject. http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as... Here's the punch line, space, time and matter are components of a user interface produced through evolution. We don't take the desktop and icons of our computer UI literall…

Cool. I'll check it out!

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#36

Post by wtbob » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 2:08 AM UTC

z5h wrote: post #3

What does it mean to exist? A thing exists specifically when it affects something else. What is measurement? It's a reciprocal affecting. So does a thing which is not affecting anything else and not being measured exist? No! QED

> What does it mean to exist? A thing exists specifically when it affects something else. What is measurement? It's a reciprocal affecting.

All that's starting to sound an awful lot like Orthodox Christian theology about the essence of God…

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#37

Post by CamperBob2 » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 2:09 AM UTC

davidrusu wrote: post #15

Clever optimization by our simulators, Big up

Once you read Teller and Hanrahan's SIGGRAPH paper on potentially-visible set computation, you instantly grok what quantum mechanics is for. At least in an "I want to believe" sense.

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#38

Post by has2k1 » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 2:10 AM UTC

davidrusu wrote: post #15

Clever optimization by our simulators, Big up

How do we go about determining if we are in a lossless compression or not?

I wonder if there is some ordering of "conservation of ---" laws that is strictly enveloping/hierarchical, such that you could choose a level at which to simulate/design a universe.

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#39

Post by deckar01 » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 2:10 AM UTC

westoncb wrote: post #5

This is of course extremely interesting and probably important for understanding our universe—but how is it helping anyone to say something like, "...with scientists performing a famous experiment and proving that reality does not exist until it is measured." The statement is like a distraction at a magic show, drawing the reader to the glittery 'reality' and 'exist,' which are totally undefined so the reader's imagi…

I think it is the most digestible title. "The Causality of Atomic Particles is Symmetric with Respect to Time" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Re: Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum experiment finds

#40

Post by vectorpush » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 2:11 AM UTC

armchair musings of a layperson physicist/philosopher follow:

the non-interference pattern is the optimized result of a deterministic universe that requires the observation to occur. The measurement didn't reach back in time, the results were specifically determined by the same causal chain that determined an experiment would be performed.