[catanama]

>We didn't bring quarks or quasars into existence, we "discovered" them as and when we extended our senses far enough using technologies

Did we? If we're in a simulation instead of base reality, it's possible that simulation have actually created them for us when we started looking, depending on the scope and paramaters of simulaiton scenario.

[rralian]

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. The idea that the act of observation impacts an experiment (or how particles behave) is one of the most counterintuitive and surprising “truths” I’ve ever heard. I would love to hear a logical explanation of why (not just a description of it).

[nathan_compton]

Observation doesn't impact experiments. Interaction does. In fact, it is quite difficult to formulate the "collapse" of the wavefunction as a physical interaction and to the extent that we can, the experimental evidence seems to suggest that it is not. This is a common misconception about quantum mechanics, partly because even undergraduate texts conflate the uncertainty principal with observation.

[082349872349872]

The logical explanation: "observation" has nothing to do with conscious woo, it's just that in order to have a definite answer we build experiments so they collapse the wavefunction.

It's like asking someone on a date: maybe they were in a superposition before, but now they have to answer, and having answered ("been observed"), that answer is highly likely to stay constant in the short term.

(when you think about it from this point of view, it's classical physics that's counterintuitive: why should we expect that asking questions about one projection of state doesn't affect the answers we get from later asking about others, not even in the slightest?)

Does that make sense?

[goatlover]

Decoherence from the measuring device is why the wave function appears collapsed.