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

Re:Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum exper... by westoncb on Monday June 29, 2015 @08:55PM (#9802162)

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?

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Re:Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum exper... by chakademus on Tuesday June 30, 2015 @01:51AM (#9803172)

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.

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Re:Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum exper... by epitomix on Monday June 29, 2015 @10:04PM (#9802436)

"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.

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Re:Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum exper... by Zigurd on Tuesday June 30, 2015 @10:50AM (#9805649)

He dialed back the radicalism of his position for his TED Talk. He concludes that consciousness must be something other than computation in the brain, something he just teases in the TED Talk. He spends most of the talk on the less radical Interface Theory of Perception.

If I understand him correctly, he says we don't perceive brains as they really are and therefore brains are not a physical basis of consciousness. Whoa.

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Re:Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum exper... by paxcoder on Monday June 29, 2015 @10:51PM (#9802610)

Fun to think about, but his argument is a non sequitur.

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Re:Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum exper... by epitomix on Monday June 29, 2015 @11:10PM (#9802686)

Maybe, but my wording is not his argument. Here is a blog version of the same idea. https://edge.org/response-detail/25450

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Re:Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum exper... by mjklin on Tuesday June 30, 2015 @12:26AM (#9802953)

Is thought part of this UI as well?

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Re:Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum exper... by TuringTest on Tuesday June 30, 2015 @05:35AM (#9803965)

It's more like the model in a Model-View-Controller UI.

The philosophical question would be "what is the controller?"

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Re:Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum exper... by politician on Tuesday June 30, 2015 @12:59AM (#9803036)

There's a great quote in the comments.

> Perhaps humanity is the only species burdened with distinguishing the truth.

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Re:Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum exper... by westoncb on Monday June 29, 2015 @10:08PM (#9802449)

Cool. I'll check it out!

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Re:Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum exper... by deckar01 on Monday June 29, 2015 @10:10PM (#9802460)

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.

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Re:Reality doesn’t exist until it is measured, quantum exper... by sova on Monday June 29, 2015 @11:34PM (#9802769)

holographic instantiation of composite routes

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