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More Than One Reality Exists (in Quantum Physics) (livescience.com)
Zorro (Slashdot reader #15,797) quotes Live Science:
Can two versions of reality exist at the same time? Physicists say they can -- at the quantum level, that is.
Researchers recently conducted experiments to answer a decades-old theoretical physics question about dueling realities. This tricky thought experiment proposed that two individuals observing the same photon could arrive at different conclusions about that photon's state -- and yet both of their observations would be correct.
For the first time, scientists have replicated conditions described in the thought experiment. Their results, published Feb. 13 in the preprint journal arXiv, confirmed that even when observers described different states in the same photon, the two conflicting realities could both be true. "You can verify both of them," study co-author Martin Ringbauer, a postdoctoral researcher with the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, told Live Science.
Researchers recently conducted experiments to answer a decades-old theoretical physics question about dueling realities. This tricky thought experiment proposed that two individuals observing the same photon could arrive at different conclusions about that photon's state -- and yet both of their observations would be correct.
For the first time, scientists have replicated conditions described in the thought experiment. Their results, published Feb. 13 in the preprint journal arXiv, confirmed that even when observers described different states in the same photon, the two conflicting realities could both be true. "You can verify both of them," study co-author Martin Ringbauer, a postdoctoral researcher with the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, told Live Science.
None of which suggests what the article summary implies: parallel realities. Everything in your experiment involves two people interacting with one another in one shared space-time continuum.
The whole "multiverse" thing annoys me because it is intrinsically non-falsifiable. It gets a lot of attention because a specific group of physicists who favor this model happen to be famous and popular. So people think this is a done deal. And it's not. Just as many, just as smart and just as prominent physicists do not accept this model.
No, I won't give you links. You can find your own links if you actually care, which you don't.
In contrast to standard Bell inequalities, (the probability distribution) is not concerned with the coexistence of local properties for two separate physical systems, but rather with the coexistence of facts with respect to different observers.
Yet this apparent discrepancy in observed measurements, or "facts about the world being observer independent" has several loopholes including locality, freedom of choice, and the detection loophole (only a fraction of photons are successfully detected). The locality and freedom of choice loopholes can be removed by sufficiently seperating the events in space. Neither of these was able to be done in this experiment. Further you would need to ensure that the measurement of the observers "memory" (an observer could simply be an instrument, sensor, or interaction of matter/energy of some kind and not a person) and are clearly independent systems initially.
Tl:dr this is less about showing multiple realities exist and more about showing how the "cut" between indeterminate quantum and deterministic classic macro systems work. A good discussion is here