The good news is reality exists. The bad is it’s even stranger than people thought

http://www.economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=13226725

by rms • 17 years ago

55 21 17 years ago

economist.com

DaniFong2• 17 years ago

The paper is accessible at http://arxiv.org/abs/0811.1625

grouchyOldGuy• 17 years ago

But if I read the paper, won't I change its outcome?

incomethax• 17 years ago

Only if the paper is a quantum state

vinutheraj• 17 years ago

yea this paper makes me think that quantum physics is bogus... even I could have made this bogus claim. IF I am not looking, shit happens, so how do I prove that I am not looking, by just peeping into it... what shit... what a scam.. now I feel that neone can be a quantum physicist !!

koningrobot• 17 years ago

Here's an article that says entanglement isn't all that weird: http://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf. Admittedly, I'm not familiar enough with quantum mechanics to get it, but it's related and YMMV.

tdavis• 17 years ago

I read (most of) that and, to my own surprise, actually understood the principle behind it. I recommend it as well.

anc20202• 17 years ago

Read this and thought it made sense, but I'm not physicist. I'd really like to know what actual physicists make of this.

lisper4• 17 years ago

Back in the day, I submitted this paper to the American Journal of Physics. It was rejected, not because it was incorrect, but because it didn't say anything new. If you like I can post the review.

eru• 17 years ago

Don't you agree that clicking on a link should automatically cause the target to be rendered on the best suited available device?

I.e. I had to prevent myself from reading the article online, so that I can read it in my dead tree edition later on in the train.

michaelk• 17 years ago

The Economist + Physics = excellent

Hexstream• 17 years ago

Definite proof that we live in a simulation and those who attend to it save up some computational resources by computing only what can be seen, and also they have a bug where they used a signed int instead of an unsigned int ;P

Allocator2008• 17 years ago

Really this result is consistent with the Everett - Wheeler 1958 thesis that the wave function never collapses. This I have held to be the case personally for a long while, and in light of that, this new result is not surprising.

When you get right down to it, it is basically saying the wave functions of the entangled photons do not decay since they are never directly observed. Extrapolating from this one can say that in fact Wheeler and Everett were right, and the wave function never decays at all. Which of course leads to the "branching universe" idea, which to me will one day be seen as no more surprising than the "many galaxies" idea. Remember, the idea of other galaxies before the discoveries of Hubble and so on used to be only speculation, not universally held. Now we know there are at least 10^10 galaxies. Similarly the fact that the wave function never collapses, as Everett and Wheeler proposed will be held to be just as prosaic as the fact that there are other galaxies.

DanielBMarkham• 17 years ago

This made my head hurt.

So by not looking, scientists determined that while they were not looking in some spots there was a negative number of photons. This did not mean there exist anti-photons, just that weird things happen while we're not looking.

(scratches head)

A non-observation found unexpected results, which means that the known laws of physics don't need to change.

I shoulda went into particle physics. It sounds like lots more fun than technology consulting.

DavidSJ• 17 years ago

Either Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle was just refuted, or this is terrible scientific reporting.

The good news is reality exists. The bad is it’s even stranger than people thought

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