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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.'"
Will it revert?
:-)
Or will it turn into a dead cat in a box
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
Do I also shorten the life of this post by reading it?
Upon the first reading of the summary, this sounds retarded.
We don't send out EM to study the cosmos, we look at EM radiation that was already coming to us. What's the difference between harmlessly absorbing this radiation and measuring it with scientific instruments? The fact that we think about it?
What am I missing here?
Universe doesn't care about conscious observers. For example, slight heating of the Earth atmosphere by the light from SN1988 _also_ counts as 'observation'.
In fact, if an event changes macroscopic state of ANY physical object - it already counts as observation.
...have a privileged place in the universe that would fundamentally change the universe.
YOU ARE NOT SPECIAL.
This new theory suggests two things I see off the top of my head:
1. There is no other intelligent life in the universe, otherwise they would have killed the universe by looking at it.
2. The theory is flawed and the universe is doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing. We just don't understand all the process yet.
Personally, my money's on #2.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
What we don't realize is all this study into quantum mechanics is falling right into Schrodinger's cat's hands. It wants us to make him an undead kitty so it can open a hole in the universe and let the infinite number of possibilities of it all flow into this one, and thus will take over the world. The only way we'll win this future battle is if we observe it enough that it goes away.
I won't pretend to be an expert, but I don't see how passive observation using the naked eye is any more likely to screw up the universe than passive observation using any number of more scientific methods. If so, just by existing we would cause all the same problems.
Either way, what it really depends on is whether we're inside or outside of the box. If we're outside the box we may cause the events to collapse by observation, but if we're inside the box, then we're fine...As long as the universe doesn't open the box, in which case we're either fine or dead or both.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Track Announcer: And the winner is ... Number 3, in a quantum finish.
Farnsworth: No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!
09:F9:11:02 - 9D:74:E3:5B - D8:41:56:C5 - 63:56:88:C0
That explains a lot! Everytime I stare directly into a light source, the light goes away for a while! The stronger or more "pure" the light, the longer it is affected by me staring at it.
Why, a few years ago I stared directly into a laser pointer, and to this day whenever I point it back into that eye, it generates NO LIGHT AT ALL.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
I sincerely hope this is a case of a reporter misunderstanding a scientist's statement.
Waveform collapse applies to quantum probabilities, not passive long-distance observations. They occur because an observer influences an observation; interfering with that which is observed is the only way one can observe it on the scales in which quantum phenomena occur. When observing the light of stars, no information is being sent back to the source; and the idea that consciousness somehow magically induces waveform collapse has all but died, favoring instead theories of quantum decoherence and the indroduction of new 'thermal' states during the observation process as the trigger for waveform collapse.
My only hope is that they've cooked up this idea simply to show how silly the idea of consciousness-triggered waveform collapse is; much like Schrodinger created the cat thought experiment to demonstrate what he saw as a flaw of the Copenhagen interpretation of superposition.
You know, I recognize most of the words in the article as being from astrophysics and quantum mechanics, but when you put them all together, they don't make a lick of sense.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Finally! The proof I always knew existed!
SETI@Home is an Al Quaeda plot dedicated to the destruction of the universe!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.