NEWS: The Universe: You're Doing It Wrong

GEEK: The Universe: You're Doing It Wrong

Hey guys, I have a very important message: stop looking at the universe. No seriously, stop it. Don't engage it in a staring contest, don't glance at it sideways. Don't even watch documentaries about it on cable TV. Hell, you know what? Don't even think about the universe. You're doing it wrong, and you'll break it, and then we'll all be sorry.



My important message comes via a couple of leading theoretical cosmologists studying the effects of the quantum theory, who are currently putting forth the idea that simply by observing the reaches of distant galaxies as we have, we are willing them into existence, and by proxy their imminent destruction.

This theory essentially takes Erwin Schrodinger's famous theoretical cat experiment -- the outcome of which being that, though when a cat is encased in a soundproof box he may be either dead, alive, or reciting internet memes with poor grammar, once someone decides to observe the cat, a choice of which state of being to take is forced upon the subject -- and follows it to its seemingly logical conclusion: if it works for a cat, why not for the universe?



Likewise, it is supposed now that the universe was supposed to decay at a certain rate, but by not being observed it was able to languish in uncertainty, but now that we are able to chart it and make note of its progress, it may have "reset" to its original rate of decay. Bummer.

Superb. So what does this theoretical knowledge mean? What should we theoretically do? We could stop looking at the universe, dismantling our telescopes and calling the Space Station home, in the hopes that the universe will settle back into its pattern of uncertainty in the unknown. On the other hand, however -- having already found the dark energy and supermassive black holes, hasn't the theoretical damage already been done? Perhaps we should just keep looking. Maybe whatever we find next will be a cure for all that darkness and decay --as long as the next thing we force to choose existence isn't a space kraken, we theoretically couldn't do much worse.







For a while in college, _DictionaryGirl_ held this theory that, as long as she never looked at handed-back essays and final posted grades, there was as good a probability as any that she had straight As -- it was only upon observation that her GPA was forced into actualization.

I promise to no longer observe cats, the universe, or the Bush administration.

Here's looking at you, kid.

Why wouldn't you want to observe the imminent destruction of the Bush Administration?

This article was a bit much for my brain on a Sunday morning after very little sleep in the past day.

I thought you'd jump on this one

I think the important quote in the linked article was...
"since his interpretation hinges on one of the issues at the heart of quantum theory - do you need people to do the observing?"

"Observation" is one of those words that means something completely different to a scientist (or quantum mathematician) than it does in plain English. Chances are, the cat ain't in a plain cardboard box.

I'm always skeptical of applying quantum mechanics at macroscopic scales.

And there wasn't really a cat. It was a thought experiment. Ein Gedankenexperiment.

You also forgot the umlaut in Schrödinger.

Curses. I shouldn't have attended that lecture on Quantum Physics. Knowing stuff will kill us all!

Look out, soon a self-help book will capitalize on this aspect of quantum physics too!

But what if looking stopped the imminent destruction? Besides I was lying about not watching Bush fail, I am peeking between my fingers.

None of this makes any sense to me AT ALL.

This is such flawed logic it makes me think these professors must be bored and doing this for shits and giggles. It's complete bullshit.

Schrödinger's cat is supposed to relate how weird quantum mechanics is; showing that nothing is ever truly certain at a subatomic level, there are only percentages of what could and couldn't be. The analogy of using a cat wouldn't really work if you tried it, because the cat would have to live under the same quantum mechanics as subatomic particles do, not under classical mechanics. Cats aren't subatomic particles, and don't live under quantum mechanics, so it wouldn't work.

Isn't it giving an awful lot of inflated importance to tiny, insignificant humans by saying the fact that they observe something actually changes reality?

I heard about this Friday on NPR's Science Friday program. It seems dangerous to me to return to pre-Galileo religious dogma. Once again we feel the need to make ourselves the center of the Universe.

There's no going back. The cat -- alive or dead -- is out of the box. Er, bag. The only thing we should worry about now is whether that dark matter is looking back at us, and whether we qualify as observers of our existence to whatever universal principle may govern this sort of thing.

Not the Rapture, kids, just Reset. *poof*

-TTm

Whats that sound ?

I bet this conversation came up after discussing whether god could microwave a burrito so hot even he couldn't eat it.

I'll care about theoretical bullshit as soon as someone makes me a goddamn flying car.

I loved it DG. Great article !

I'm not worried though. If dark matter winds up being our demise I'm riding shotgun through a wormhole to a parallel universe on the next brane. But just to be safe, I'll be going with my eyes closed.

a watched universe never...boils? yeah, i dunno. my brain hurts.

I thought the key component to the Shrodinger thought experiment was that the cat was in a box, and the box contained a cyanide capsule whose trigger was a single subatomic particle - and therefore in a state of quantum flux, where its position could be predicted only using probabilistic mechanics. In that sense, the cat is both simultaneously dead and alive because the shrodinger equation dictates that there is a finite probability of both states coexisting - with the wave function collapsing into a single state upon observation.

The real issue is that if you blow it up to a macroscopic scale, it doesn't really hold, because many, many particles (which is what everything we observe is composed) of are highly unlikely to be a single quantum state, and thus statistical mechanics are sufficient to explain their behavior - no quantum theory required. That's why quantum mechanics seem so strange to us (and I profess that I don't fully understand quantum theory, I just have a basic grasp of it) because we don't observe the world at a scale where quantum mechanics have any significant effect on our daily lives. Aside from superconducters, superfluids and Bose-Einstein condensates I don't know of any phenomena that exhibit quantum behavior at a scale that we're used to dealing with - let alone a cosmological scale, which is what the professor is talking about.

no to all of this.......just...NO

That sounds like something the fundamentalist religious folks would like. Science will spell our doom. Leave the cosmos to [insert divine being of choice here]. Faith and ignorance are the only ways to happiness.

This doesn't make any sense at all. "Observe" in QM just means the interaction of a quantum with something macroscopic (leading to te collapse of the wave function). When I read the title of this article I thought they were talking about the Universe when it was of the size ofthe Plank scale (sub-atomic particles dimensions), but no, they're actually talking about the macroscopic Universe, can't see how QM would apply. I'm not a specialist though.