The linked article is titled "Experiment confirms quantum theory weirdness". Please don't exaggerate the title. These experiments do not show that "reality doesn't exist until it's measured".
First, "realism" [1] is not the same thing as "reality". "Realism" basically means "physical quantities have a definite value". "Reality" is that thing that determines your experimental outcomes. Don't mix them up.
Second, interpretations of quantum mechanics disagree wildly about what kind of weird you use to explain things. Some interpretations have "realism", some don't. Some interpretations have retrocausality, some don't. Some interpretations have FTL effects, some don't. Since all the interpretations give (mostly) the same experimental predictions, it's misleading to single one out and say just that particular brand of weirdness was confirmed.
We confirmed that there's weird there. We didn't distinguish what brand of weird it is. Physicists widely disagree about which brand of weird to use, with no position achieving even a majority [2]. The original title was better.
A standard case of mixing (or actually confusing) epistemology with ontology. That is to say that something doesn't exist until we get to know something about it. Or, by all means, knowing something about something is posterior to us being here AND that something being there. Here lies the danger of dismissing philosophy as a bag of words when compared with the Holy Science that works, bitches.
I don't think the title is a misrepresentation of the article, just the physics:
From the article: "It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it..."
The article does appear to be (incorrectly) arguing that this experiment proves one interpretation of QM correct. It's definitely incorrect - some years back myself and others used non-experimentalist interpretations of QM to get the same result - but it's not a misrepresentation of the article.
To be fair, the submitted title is directly culled from the first sentence of the article:
> 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.
And perhaps someday we'll get to meet the great programmer in the sky the developed the simulation we are living in and we will ask him why he designed it that way and he will say something like "oh I just wanted to optimize the code so I simply excluded reality subroutines when there were no beings looking. I just never thought you guys would notice. As soon as I saw that you guys noticed the flaw, I was going to load a patch but then the confusion it was causing with the simulated beings became interesting and so I just left it in as an accidental feature of the game."
Meh, but probably not.
I always find it fascinating at just how much of our fundamental physics ends up being constraints on information movement. The laws of thermodynamics are about entropy, general relativity puts constraints on the movement of information (for example, Spooky Action as a Distance(tm) is faster than light, but you can't transmit information with it), the Uncertainty Principle puts limits on how much information you can have on a given system.
Information information everywhere you look in fundamental physics. It does make me wonder why.
That would quite possibly be the worst optimization ever.
"Yeah, I could have tracked and updated n values pretty cheaply, but instead I decided to exponentiate an exponentially huge matrix and use that to update a vector containing 2^n complex numbers associated with the possible assignments of the original n bits. Also, you should use bogosort. It's the best."
Off to be the Wizard by Scott Meyer is a very funny fiction book that is based on the concept of reality being a computer program that hackers can manually manipulate to do cool stuff. It mostly occurs in King Arthur's Court, which happens to be the chosen time and place all these hackers wind up.
Well, if you want to prove the simulation argument, all you have to do is simulate a reality for an individual at any time-dilation you like. With the parallel compute capabilities we are increasingly growing, simulating a small section of the universe at a large time-dilation should be within our grasp sooner than we think.
Well, the way I understand this, is that this result proves that we do NOT live in a simulation. Because if reality does not exist until measured, then we apparently cannot compute reality ahead of time. And if we cannot compute reality ahead of time, it does not exist yet.
I'm not familiar with this particular experiment, but all my pondering on the subject - as a layman - leads me to a simple conclusion.
The properties these experiments are measuring are simply bogus. They are not well defined. The answer that comes out is not some intrinsic property of the "particle", but the result of the environment in which the particle interacted with the "measurement" system, so to speak.
The particle has some other properties, but what's being "measured" is not one of those properties.
How can I explain?
Imagine someone who has never tried any Korean food, and you try to ask him/her: what's your favorite Korean food? There's no answer. So you try to "measure" it by feeding him some Korean items and recording his facial expressions. He will like some items more than others, but it has nothing to do with "his favorite Korean food", and has more to do with how the items were prepared and his mood at the time.
A "point" location for a photon is never defined; it's not a property of a photon that it exists in a point in space. When you fire a photon at a "wall" and see a "blip", you're not seeing the position of the photon at some point in time. You're seeing the rough position of the atom that had an electron that absorbed the photon's energy, and I'm not even sure the atom has a well defined point position either. The whole thing is an artifact (a side effect) of some interaction between several systems and doesn't really tell you anything fundamental about the photon (or the quantum object).
The topic outlined in the OP's article has been raised before, multiple times, once every couple of years. It was even the focus of a cult indoctrination propaganda piece called "what the bleep do we know".
Essentially, yes, it's bogus science. Quantum physics are much more complex than these articles ever bring on. But by explaining it simply, it sounds awe inspiring and so it propagates across social media. Over and over again.
It isn't that particles exist in multiple states until they are measured. It is that the mechanism by which you measure very small things affects the outcome.
Intuition tells me this is like saying a droplet of water can both be a sphere and a single point because it'll pass through several holes on a net, but capillary action makes it collapse into a needle.
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 imagination can rove without limit.
Maybe this is really just a fundamental challenge to our assumptions about motion of particles or information transfer in the universe. Isn't that interesting enough without these vague, human aggrandizing assertions about creating reality?
The thing is, this isn't even a challenge to any assumptions physicists have, or even a surprising result. Every prediction of quantum theory for these kinds of atomic systems has been borne out.
All this "weirdness" is the same old story of "Is it a particle or a wave?!," when in reality, we know its neither. Quantum objects are represented by wavefunctions, or vectors in a Hilbert space, to which "particle" and "wave" are intuitive approximations in certain regimes, that makes it easier for humans to talk about in natural, non-mathematical language.
All this experiment has shown is that a object that we expect to be described by quantum mechanics turns out to, indeed, be described by quantum mechanics.
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.
The press around this experiment uses misleading language that leads people like Deepak Chopra to think that we create reality through consciousness. It has nothing to do with consciousness. This article explains it:
John Wheeler's delayed choice thought experiment was already confirmed in the lab over ten years ago. It's neat that they were able to get results with baryonic matter, and it was definitely worthwhile to try to do that, but this article seems to be implying that the results could have been anything else than what they were, or that there is new physics here, and is wrong on both counts.
Also the deference to the Copenhagen interpretation is annoying - it's wrong. What they've observed is a consequence of how decoherence works, and 'observation' has nothing to do with it. Not faulting the researchers on this but seriously, it's time to stop talking about mythical 'observation' as though it's some integral part of quantum theory.
http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html says: at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.
What does 'post human' mean? Unless we go extinct, we will always be humans, regardless of what species we evolve into. Our current species is "Homo Sapiens Sapiens", not "Human". Ergo, if we evolve into amorphous blobs of space goo, we will still be Human but not "Homo Sapiens Sapiens". Which means it is physically impossible for us to ever reach a "post-human" stage.
Proposition (2) is just flagrantly, blatantly bullshit. The amount of computational power needed to simulate even just the bits of the universe we conscious humans happen to be observing at any one time is so stupendously humongous that you'd get more utility out of repurposing your cosmic-scale computers to play video games.
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.
I've always wanted to read (or write?) a book about us determining we are in a simulation, but we find subtle flaws like this we're able to exploit in weird ways. Kind of like breaking out of a VM through register flaws or something. Anyone know of a story along those lines?
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.
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.
I find it fascinating how the speed of light, quantum indeterminacy and Planck's length could all be seen as allegories for computational optimisations in a simulated universe.
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.
The philosophical interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is a very hard, unsolved problem. There are many reasons why quantum mechanics is theoretically good and philosophically terrible, and not just in a subtle, esoteric way. The reason is that in Quantum Mechanics there are 2 main types of entities: particles, "things" that evolve according to the Schrodinger equation, and "observers". Observers are what deliver to us the results of randomly sampling from the probability distribution defined by the squared amplitude of the wave function by "collapsing" it, according to the Copenhagen interpretation. However, there is no particle that acts as an observer, they all just follow the Schrodinger equation, but nothing that exists isn't a particle. How could "observers" exist and interact with particles then? The Copenhagen interpretation is philosophically terrible. And it really pisses me off that this article title seems to hint that they've really confirmed it. In a lab, an experimenter can just point to his apparatus and say, "that's the observer". Or, being more formal, they can say a thermodynamically irreversible process plays the role of an observer. But this is not really a satisfying explanation because how could it be possible to generate these large, discontinuous motions we call "collapse" on the macroscale if it is impossible on the microscale? There are the multiverse theories that you seem to describe, but they have their own problems. Rae's Quantum Physics: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Physics-Illusion-Reality-Class...
goes over a lot of them without getting to messy in the math. Other interpretations of QM are in the book as well. There are many:
Let us not forget about Pilot-Wave theory, where it has both particle and wave-like properties simultaneously. In fact, I don't quite get why people are so enamored by these fanciful interpretations when Pilot-Wave is so much more down-to-earth.
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.
I always found the notion that "If you measure it, it behaves differently" to be really confusing. When considering the double slit experiment - In both cases (whether we are observing the particle going through a single slit or otherwise observing the interference pattern left afterwards), we are in fact simply measuring 'observable effects' in both cases - It's just that we are measuring them in different ways.
If you didn't measure both cases, you wouldn't be able to compare their outcomes.
It seems that it is not about whether or not the event was measured/observed but about HOW and WHEN it was measured.
In neither case do we actually 'witness it happen' - In both cases, we are just observing effects of those events.
The light which allowed us to 'directly observe it' is as much a byproduct of the actual event as the interference pattern left behind on the surface.
In the time of Empiricism, the philosophers George Berkeley and John Locke proposed something similar. I believe it was called it immaterialism, or the idea that nothing exists without being perceived. Berkeley went further saying that objects only exist in the mind, or something like that.
"If one chooses to believe that the atom really did take a particular path or paths then one has to accept that a future measurement is affecting the atom's past, said Truscott."
Is that equivalent to "reality doesn't exist until it is measured"? Because I don't see the latter claim (which is the headline on HN) anywhere in the text?
Also, didn't Feynman explain in q.e.d. that it's not either a wave or a particle, it's always a particle and the probabilities for the path the particle takes behave like waves? (Something like that, I am foggy on the details).
[+] [-] Strilanc|10 years ago|reply
First, "realism" [1] is not the same thing as "reality". "Realism" basically means "physical quantities have a definite value". "Reality" is that thing that determines your experimental outcomes. Don't mix them up.
Second, interpretations of quantum mechanics disagree wildly about what kind of weird you use to explain things. Some interpretations have "realism", some don't. Some interpretations have retrocausality, some don't. Some interpretations have FTL effects, some don't. Since all the interpretations give (mostly) the same experimental predictions, it's misleading to single one out and say just that particular brand of weirdness was confirmed.
We confirmed that there's weird there. We didn't distinguish what brand of weird it is. Physicists widely disagree about which brand of weird to use, with no position achieving even a majority [2]. The original title was better.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism#Realism_and...
2: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/17/the-most...
[+] [-] cristianpascu|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yummyfajitas|10 years ago|reply
From the article: "It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it..."
The article does appear to be (incorrectly) arguing that this experiment proves one interpretation of QM correct. It's definitely incorrect - some years back myself and others used non-experimentalist interpretations of QM to get the same result - but it's not a misrepresentation of the article.
[+] [-] jdmichal|10 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] zw123456|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antimagic|10 years ago|reply
Information information everywhere you look in fundamental physics. It does make me wonder why.
[+] [-] stingraycharles|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Strilanc|10 years ago|reply
"Yeah, I could have tracked and updated n values pretty cheaply, but instead I decided to exponentiate an exponentially huge matrix and use that to update a vector containing 2^n complex numbers associated with the possible assignments of the original n bits. Also, you should use bogosort. It's the best."
[+] [-] violentvinyl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yummybear|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madaxe_again|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|10 years ago|reply
Well, the way I understand this, is that this result proves that we do NOT live in a simulation. Because if reality does not exist until measured, then we apparently cannot compute reality ahead of time. And if we cannot compute reality ahead of time, it does not exist yet.
[+] [-] andy_ppp|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EC1|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hasenj|10 years ago|reply
The properties these experiments are measuring are simply bogus. They are not well defined. The answer that comes out is not some intrinsic property of the "particle", but the result of the environment in which the particle interacted with the "measurement" system, so to speak.
The particle has some other properties, but what's being "measured" is not one of those properties.
How can I explain?
Imagine someone who has never tried any Korean food, and you try to ask him/her: what's your favorite Korean food? There's no answer. So you try to "measure" it by feeding him some Korean items and recording his facial expressions. He will like some items more than others, but it has nothing to do with "his favorite Korean food", and has more to do with how the items were prepared and his mood at the time.
A "point" location for a photon is never defined; it's not a property of a photon that it exists in a point in space. When you fire a photon at a "wall" and see a "blip", you're not seeing the position of the photon at some point in time. You're seeing the rough position of the atom that had an electron that absorbed the photon's energy, and I'm not even sure the atom has a well defined point position either. The whole thing is an artifact (a side effect) of some interaction between several systems and doesn't really tell you anything fundamental about the photon (or the quantum object).
At least that's how I understand it.
[+] [-] Kequc|10 years ago|reply
http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2005/04/what_the_bleep_.h...
Essentially, yes, it's bogus science. Quantum physics are much more complex than these articles ever bring on. But by explaining it simply, it sounds awe inspiring and so it propagates across social media. Over and over again.
It isn't that particles exist in multiple states until they are measured. It is that the mechanism by which you measure very small things affects the outcome.
[+] [-] FranOntanaya|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilitirit|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] westoncb|10 years ago|reply
Maybe this is really just a fundamental challenge to our assumptions about motion of particles or information transfer in the universe. Isn't that interesting enough without these vague, human aggrandizing assertions about creating reality?
[+] [-] chakademus|10 years ago|reply
All this "weirdness" is the same old story of "Is it a particle or a wave?!," when in reality, we know its neither. Quantum objects are represented by wavefunctions, or vectors in a Hilbert space, to which "particle" and "wave" are intuitive approximations in certain regimes, that makes it easier for humans to talk about in natural, non-mathematical language.
All this experiment has shown is that a object that we expect to be described by quantum mechanics turns out to, indeed, be described by quantum mechanics.
[+] [-] epitomix|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] deckar01|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] flowctrl|10 years ago|reply
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/more-quantum-we...
[+] [-] deciplex|10 years ago|reply
Also the deference to the Copenhagen interpretation is annoying - it's wrong. What they've observed is a consequence of how decoherence works, and 'observation' has nothing to do with it. Not faulting the researchers on this but seriously, it's time to stop talking about mythical 'observation' as though it's some integral part of quantum theory.
[+] [-] ghosthamlet|10 years ago|reply
COMPUTER SIMULATION vs HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE
http://www.crystalinks.com/holographic.html http://thelaymansanswerstoeverything.com/2013/01/scientific-...
[+] [-] exch|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] z5h|10 years ago|reply
So does a thing which is not affecting anything else and not being measured exist? No! QED
[+] [-] themgt|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wtbob|10 years ago|reply
All that's starting to sound an awful lot like Orthodox Christian theology about the essence of God…
[+] [-] anti-shill|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidrusu|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marwatk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CamperBob2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] has2k1|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] icanhackit|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davej|10 years ago|reply
This is something that I've thought about for some time, I posted a question about this a number of years ago on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/g287k/quantum_indet...
[+] [-] A_COMPUTER|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjfl|10 years ago|reply
goes over a lot of them without getting to messy in the math. Other interpretations of QM are in the book as well. There are many:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mec...
[+] [-] hackinthebochs|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] db48x|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nosuchthing|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graycat|10 years ago|reply
Sounds like that light existed and generated and responded to a gravitational field after it was emitted and before it was detected or measured.
[+] [-] vectorpush|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jondubois|10 years ago|reply
If you didn't measure both cases, you wouldn't be able to compare their outcomes. It seems that it is not about whether or not the event was measured/observed but about HOW and WHEN it was measured.
In neither case do we actually 'witness it happen' - In both cases, we are just observing effects of those events.
The light which allowed us to 'directly observe it' is as much a byproduct of the actual event as the interference pattern left behind on the surface.
[+] [-] agd|10 years ago|reply
So much physics reporting mistakes science for philosophy. It leads to so much confusion among laypeople.
[+] [-] hkailahi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] facepalm|10 years ago|reply
Is that equivalent to "reality doesn't exist until it is measured"? Because I don't see the latter claim (which is the headline on HN) anywhere in the text?
Also, didn't Feynman explain in q.e.d. that it's not either a wave or a particle, it's always a particle and the probabilities for the path the particle takes behave like waves? (Something like that, I am foggy on the details).