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The Universe Damaged By Observation?
ScentCone writes "The Telegraph covers a New Scientist report about two US cosmologists who suggest that, a la Schrodinger's possibly unhappy cat, the act of observing certain facets of our universe may have shortened its life . From the article: 'Prof Krauss says that the measurement of the light from supernovae in 1998, which provided evidence of dark energy, may have reset the decay of the void to zero — back to a point when the likelihood of its surviving was falling rapidly.'"
Quarantine by Greg Egan...is a great book which explores the idea that the wave function collapse caused by observation is something specific to the human brain, and the rest of the universe is starting to get a bit upset about humans carving up the universe by observing it.
Its a great read, and a good way to get a better understanding of (at least Egans' idea of) quantum mechanics.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This idea is based on the assumption of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics -- the idea that wave-functions exist as superpositions of multiple states and that they're collapsed into discrete states upon observation. First, is an observer only a human being, an animate object or inanimate object? Seems to me that many inanimate systems self-propagate themselves through time, relying on the continuous collapse of wave functions -- without people looking at them. Second, in my mind the Copenhagen interpretation is impossible to prove because you can never really know what the wavefunction is doing before the observation, and this is why it's an interpretation. In this case, you couldn't know if the universe could actually be older than than it is, without our observation. At least this is my view as a statistical quantum mechanicist.
You are missing absolutely nothing. Those that mystify the "observation changest things" are missing something.
To observe something, it must be interacted with. The most common form of interaction involves a photon bouncing off of something, or being generated by something.
This involves a small energy transfer and/or a series of reactions between the "thing" used for observation and the observee. This is why observation causes a solidification of state, and/or change.
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What I don't get is this: energy takes time to travel. If we're looking at it now, it was generated in the past. If we're observing it now, that means we're observing what happened in the past. Doesn't this mean that the universe would have ceased to exist prior to us observing it? ...
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Makes me lend some credence to the "infinite universes" theory. We actually destroyed some other universe, not our own.
Of course, it's more likely I'm just being dense and not understanding the theory involved here, and the universe is just set to collapse a few trillion years before it otherwise would have.
This assumes, of course, that human beings are the only objects in the universe observing such things. Will some other intelligence step up and accuse Humanity of universicide? Or will they observe similar things and bring our universe to a crashing halt?
Several years back I read about an experiment I would have thought would be authoritative on this. It was a classic split-beam type of thing, with detectors that could determine which path the photon went down. In normal circumstances, when you insert the detectors, the interference pattern goes away and you get a classical distribution. When you remove the detectors, you get an interference pattern in the quantum mechanical distribution.
That's all wellandgood, but here's the twist. They inserted the detectors, and disconnected the outputs from any sort of meter or display device. Therefore the detectors "observed," but no conscious knowledge could be gained.
The interference pattern went away, and they got a classical distribution.
IMHO, the wave "collapses" when the potential error exceeds Heisenberg's limit, and that constitutes "observation." Most any other answer makes a special place for consciousness in the universe, and cascades into telepathy, clairvoyance, the Force, etc.
Wish I could remember the reference.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.