Quantum physics is a world where we’re told that probability and uncertainty rule and causality is thrown to the winds. However, I think it’s the observer that’s the real fly in the quantum physics ointment. Left to its own devices, the micro (quantum physics) would (certainly should) mirror the macro (classic physics) and thus causality rules both realms. Whatever applies to the micro must apply to the macro since the macro is made up of the micro (and thus I feel free to sometimes use more familiar macro examples in the following text). It’s the observer who is interpreting, albeit through no fault of her own, things as being in a state of uncertainty or as just probability.
Continued from yesterday’s blog…
It is also claimed that the very act of observing or measuring alters the properties or values of what you are observing or measuring. Well, yes and no. Let’s take the ‘yes’ case first. If you put a photon detector between the photon emitter and its target (say at the point of the double slit to try and pin down which slit the photon is going through, then of course the act of doing that, the act of measuring or observing in midstream disrupts the otherwise natural state of affairs.
A biologist monitoring wildlife populations, movements and interactions may, if not very careful, influence those very parameters by her presence, just like human behaviour is altered if you know you’re in the spotlight.
Is a grain of salt that goes untasted salty? Presumably the act of tasting (an observation or measurement) alters the properties of what is being tasted – in the case of table salt, it dissolves when tasted.
Sticking some sort of device into flowing water to measure its rate of velocity, force, etc. will subtly change that flow and its properties. Stick a thermometer into a bowl of soup to measure its temperature – well that very act will of course change the temperature of the soup!
Now examples from the ‘no’ side: observing a star through a telescope doesn’t change the properties of the star. Placing a seismometer on the ground to measure earthquake activity and intensity isn’t going to cause any change in seismic activity. Hearing the thunder doesn’t alter the properties of the lightning bolt.
Of course it could also be a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ depending. You’d think that observing an electron because the photon has to bounce off it in order for you to measure it, must thus alter its course, and thus has affected the direction-of-motion property of that electron. But, it depends – would it have happened anyway or did you deliberately introduce the photon. If the former, your observation didn’t affect the electron; if the latter, it did.
Upgrading the issue to the broadest of scales, if something is only known or has reality or is created by observation, then which came first, the observer, or the Universe? Since observers, of the flesh and blood kind, could not survive the reality of the Big Bang event (whether or not they created that reality) and conditions that existed shortly after the Big Bang – even long after the Big Bang in fact until the heavier elements like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. were manufactured inside stars – and since one can explain how an observer-less Universe can evolve observers, it seems the simplest explanation (simplicity, all else being equal, being one of the core philosophies in science) is that the Universe created the observer and not the other way around. I suspect that if all observers were to become extinct, the Universe would go on its merry way, caring not one bit.
Now if one has an observer as creator of the universe and its reality, that seems to be just a sleight-of-hand way of replacing the term ‘God’ with the term ‘observer’, and as physicist Victor Stenger and biologist Richard Dawkins (among others) have recently argued, there is no scientific evidence for a ‘God’ existing far less creating anything.
However, I can think of (not as my original thoughts I must add) two scenarios where our Universe and its reality were created by ‘observers’. The first is a variation on physicist Lee Smolin’s idea that a universe can ‘reproduce’ via black holes. Black holes can create or spawn baby universes, and so a universe that has physics that maximise the production of black holes maximises its own reproductive fitness. My variation is that an ultra advanced extraterrestrial civilization/technology could in fact have the ability to manipulate matter/energy into forming a black hole and thus creating a new universe – like our Universe!
The second scenario is again of an extraterrestrial intelligence nature. I can imagine some alien Ph.D. student doing a thesis along the lines of “Planet Earth and Associated Universe: A Simulated Construction”. In other words, we are all, and our reality is all, just a simulation – a software package. But that’s not so strange an idea. By analogy, there are multi-thousands of software simulation packages right here available for our scientific use, as a training tool (say for pilots, astronauts, medical doctors), and just for fun (video games). I actually find this quite plausible. Simulated universes can greatly outnumber a real universe, so what odds that we’re in a real universe instead of a simulated one? I find one piece of evidence suggestive. That is, there are apparently two independent sets of software that together, but apart, run the cosmos – classical physics and quantum physics. I have sometimes wondered whether the quest for a Theory of Everything, for quantum gravity, is a futile exercise. See, our extraterrestrial Ph.D. student is a computer geek, not a physics geek!
If either of these above scenarios are correct, one can readily equate a supernatural God with a flesh-and-blood extraterrestrial whose technology is, from our point of view, indistinguishable from magic (i.e. – supernatural happenings), as Arthur C. Clarke would postulate.
What’s at stake here? The macro universe, which is made up of by the micro (quantum) universe, at the level of billiard balls and pussy cats is anything but a universe measured in probabilities and degrees of uncertainty. The micro universe, from the point of view of observers, is everything probability and uncertainty. But, is the micro universe really that way or does it only give an illusion of that? If there were no observers (which would unfortunately mean we wouldn’t have any ways and means of discussing the issue) I would maintain that the micro would mirror the macro. In short, causality rules at the most fundamental of levels.
Einstein fought this battle and lost. There’s currently experimental evidence that quantum physics is at the heart an uncertain world and a measure of all things that are just probability. That’s the sort of environment that allows for free will – you just can’t predict in advance which way you’re brain is going to jump, brain activity being chemical, thus physical, thus ultimately quantum. But perhaps there’s yet an undiscovered level of reality that governs al things quantum and eliminates probability and uncertainty, even though to us, as observers, that’s what things look like - now. But even if some deeper level of reality within the quantum world exhibits real causality, if electrons have coordinates; if cats are alive or dead and not in-between, then there can’t be free will. Perhaps that’s what’s ultimately at stake.
CONCLUSION: Things are only in-deterministic or uncertain (as in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principal) or have probability (as in the cat is probably dead but equally probably alive) to the observer – or to use a layman’s term, all things (well, some things) quantum are ‘fuzzy’. However, from the point of view of Mother Nature, all things are deterministic, certain, and absolute. She knows where the electron is; and She knows all about that cat’s state of animation. My bottom line is that if there were no observers, no life of any kind, no measuring devices like photographic film or Geiger counters or rulers or thermometers, the Universe would still exist. It would have an absolute physical reality. It would have to have that in order to bring forth into being observers who could and would observe and construct measuring devices to measure.
And with that statement, I’ve been expelled from Quantum Physics 101 – again.
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