Others keep probing the theory. In 1961 a prominent theorist, Eugene Wigner, proposed a thought experiment similar to the conundrum of Schrodinger's cat. Instead of the fabled cat in a box, imagine that a friend of Wigner is inside a laboratory monitoring a radioactive specimen. When the specimen decays, a detector flashes.
Now imagine Wigner is outside the lab. If Wigner's friend sees the detector flash, he knows that the specimen has decayed. But to Wigner, standing outside the lab, the specimen, his friend and the entire lab hover in a blur of possible states. Wigner and his friend seem to occupy two distinct realities.
In 2020, physicists performed a version of Wigner's thought experiment and concluded that his intuitions were correct. In a story for Science headlined "Quantum paradox points to shaky foundations of reality", physics reporter George Musser says the experiment calls objectivity into question. "It could mean there is no such thing as an absolute fact", Musser writes, "one that is true for me as it is for you".
A newish interpretation of quantum mechanics called QBism (pronounced "Cubism", like the art movement) makes subjective experience the bedrock of knowledge and reality itself. David Mermim, a prominent theorist, says QBism can dispel the "confusion at the foundations of quantum mechanics". You just have to accept that all knowledge begins with "individual personal experience".
According to QBism, each of us constructs a set of beliefs about the world, based on our interactions with it. We constantly, implicitly, update our beliefs when we interact with relatives who refuse to get vaccinated or sensors tracking the swerve of an electron. The big reality in which we all live emerges from the collisions of all our subjective mini-realities.
QBism hedge their mind-centrism, if only so they don't come across as loons or mystics. They accept that matter exists as well as mind and they reject solipsism which holds that no sentient being can really be sure that any other being is sentient. But QBism's core message, science writer Amanda Gefter says, is that the idea of "a single objective reality is an illusion. A dream, you might say.
Proponents bicker over definitions and physicists and philosophers fond of objectivity reject QBism entirely. All this squabbling, ironically, seems to confirm QBism's premise that there is no absolute objectivity; there are only subjective, first-person viewpoints.
Physicists have more in common than most would like to admit with artists who try to turn the chaos of things into a meaningful narrative. Some artists thwart our desire for meaning. TS Eliot's poem The Waste Land is an anti-narrative, a grab bag of images that pop in and out of the void. The poem resembles a dream or nightmare. Its meaning is that there is no meaning, no master narrative. Life is a joke and the joke is on you if you believe otherwise.
If you are a practical person, like one of the finance majors in my freshman humanities class, you might conclude, along with TS Eliot, that efforts to comprehend existence are futile. You might urge friends majoring in philosophy to enjoy life rather than fretting over its meaning. You might summarize this advice with a catchy slogan : "Shut up and procreate!" But even those pragmatists must wonder now and then what our communal dream means.
........concluded.
- John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology. His books include The end of Science, The End of War and Mind-Body Problems, available for free at mindbodyproblems.com. For many years he wrote the popular blog Cross Check for Scientific American.
Tailpiece.
Got up at a trifle past 6, the chores and was ready by a quarter to 10. After breakfast and my work on the laptop, went to town to collect our fruit basket and some grocery.
Participated in the 554th version of the Aazhchakkoottam : "2022 Union Budget and the Common Man" by Dr K Ravi Raman, Member, Planning Board, Government of Kerala. An interesting lecture.
Helped Lekha in watering the plants.
No comments:
Post a Comment