Re: Physicists Losing Their Grip??

From: George Bajszar (george_bajszar_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 12/22/04 

Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2004 06:49:50 -0700

> Got the following from somewhere. If you have time this holiday,
> pls. go over it. It's a serious comment about what is occuring
> inside quantum physics. What quantum reality versions (he
> mentions a lot) do you believe in. What part did the author
> make a wrong assumption, if ever. Thanks. - Consc.
>
> Nick Herbert talks about "Quantum Reality":
>
> "Physicists Losing Their Grip
>
> One of the best-kept secrets of science is that physicists have
> lost their grip on reality.
>
> News of the reality crisis hardly exists outside the physics
> community. What shuts out the public is partly a language
> barrier-the mathematical formalism that facilitates communication
> between scientists is incomprehensible to outsiders-and partly
> the human tendency of physicists to publicize their successes
> while soft-pedalling their confusions and uncertainties. Even
> among themselves, physicists prefer to pass over the
> uncomfortable reality issue in favor of questions "more
> concrete".
>
> "No development of modem science has had a more profound impact
> on human thinking than the advent of quantum theory. Wrenched out
> of centuries-old thought patterns, physicists of a generation ago
> found themselves compelled to embrace a new metaphysics. The
> distress which this reorientation caused continues to the present
> day. Basically physicists have suffered a severe loss: their hold
> on reality." - Bryce DeWitt Neill Graham
>
> Recent popularizations such as Heinz Pagels' Cosmic Code have
> begun to inform the public about the reality crisis in physics.
> In Quantum Reality I intend to examine how physicists deal with
> reality -- or fall to deal with it-in clear and unprecedented
> detail.
>
> Nothing exposes the perplexity at the heart of physics more
> starkly than certain preposterous-sounding claims a few outspoken
> physicists are making concerning how the world really works. If
> we take these claims at face value, the stories physicists tell
> resemble the tales of mystics and madmen. Physicists are quick to
> reject such unsavory associations and insist that they speak
> sober fact. We do not make these claims out of ignorance, they
> say, like ancient mapmakers filling In terra incognitas with
> plausi ble geography. Not ignorance, but the emergence of
> unexpected knowledge forces on us all new visions of the way
> things really are.
>
> The new physics vision is still clouded, as evidenced by the
> multiplicity of its claims, but whatever the outcome it is sure
> to be far from ordinary. To give you a taste of quantum reality,
> I summarize here the views of its foremost Creators in the form
> of eight realities which represent eight major guesses as to
> what's really going on behind the scenes. Later we will look at
> each of these realities in more detail and see how different
> physicists use the same data to justify so many different
> pictures of th e world.
>
> Quantum Reality #1 The Copenhagen Interpretation, Part I (There
> is no deep reality.) No one has influenced more our notions of
> what the quantum world is really about than Danish physicist
> Niels Bohr, and it is Bohr who puts forth one of quantum physics'
> most outrageous claims: that there is no deep reality. Bohr does
> not deny the evidence of his senses. The World we see around us
> is real enough, he affirms, but it floats on a world that is not
> as real. Everyday phenomena are themselves built not out of phe
> nomena but out of an utterly different kind of being.
>
> Far from being a crank or minority position, "There is no deep
> reality" represents the prevailing doctrine of establishment
> physics. Because this quantum reality was developed at Niels
> Bohr's Copenhagen institute, it is called the "Copenhagen
> interpretation." Undaunted by occasional challenges by mavericks
> of realist persuasion, the majority of physicists swear at least
> nominal allegiance to Bohr's anti-realist creed. What more
> glaring indication of the depth of the reality crisis than the
> official rejectio n of reality itself by the bulk of the physics
> community?
>
> Einstein and other prominent physicists felt that Bohr went too
> far in his call for ruthless renunciation of deep reality. Surely
> all Bohr meant to say was that we must all be good pragmatists
> and not extend our speculations beyond the range of our
> experiments. From the results of experiments carried out in the
> twenties, how could Bohr conclude that no future technology would
> ever reveal a deeper truth? Certainly Bohr never in tended
> actually to deny deep reality but merely counseled a cautious
> skepticism t oward speculative hidden realities.
>
> Bohr refused to accept such a watered-down version of the
> Copenhagen doctrine. In words that must chill every realist's
> heart, Bohr insisted: "There is no quantum world. There is only
> an abstract quantum description"
>
> Werner Heisenberg, the Christopher Columbus of quantum theory,
> first to set foot on the new mathematical World, took an equally
> tough stand against reality-nostalgic physicists such as Einstein
> when he wrote: "The hope that new experiments will lead us back
> to objective events in time and space is about as well founded as
> the hope of discovering the end of the world in the unexplored
> regions of the Antarctic."
>
> The writings of Bohr and Heisenberg have been criticized as
> obscure and open to many interpretations. Recently Cornell
> physicist N. David Mermin neatly summed up Bohr's anti-realist
> position in words that leave little room for misunderstanding:
> "We now know that the moon is demonstrably not there when nobody
> looks." (We will take a look at Mermin's "demonstration" in
> Chapter 13.)
>
> Quantum Reality #2. The Copenhagen interpretation, Part 11
> (Reality is created by observation.) Although the numerous
> physicists of the Copenhagen school do not believe in deep
> reality, they do assert the existence of phenomenal reality. What
> we see is undoubtedly real, they say, but these phenomena are not
> really there in the absence of an observation. The Copenhagen
> interpretation properly consists of two distinct parts: I. There
> is no reality in the absence of observation; 2. Observation
> creates reality . "You create your own reality," is the theme of
> Fred Wolf's Taking the Quantum Leap.
>
> Which of the world's myriad processes qualify as observations?
> What special feature of an observation endows it with the power
> to create reality? Questions like these split the
> observer-created reality school into several camps, but all
> generally subscribe to quantum theorist John Wheeler's memorable
> maxim for separating what is real in the world from what is not.
> "No elementary phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an
> observed phenomenon," Wheeler proclaims. Without a doubt,
> Mermin's description of the inconstant moon qualifies him for
> membership in the observer-created reality school.
>
> The belief that reality is observer-created is commonplace in
> philosophy, where it serves as the theme for various forms of
> idealism. Bertrand Russell recalls his fascination with idealism
> during his student days at Trinity College: "In this philosophy I
> found comfort for a time . . . There was a curious pleasure in
> making oneself believe that time and space are unreal, that
> matter is an illusion and that the world really consist of
> nothing but mind."
>
> Since pondering matter is their bread and butter, not many
> physicists would share Russell's enjoyment of matter as mere
> mirage. However, like it or not, through their conscientious
> practice of quantum theory more than a few physicists have
> strayed within hailing distance of the idealist's dreamworld.
>
> Quantum Reality #3 (Reality is an undivided wholeness.) The views
> of Walter Heider, author of a standard textbook on the
> light/matter interaction, exemplify a third unusual claim of
> quantum physicists: that in spite of its obvious partitions and
> boundaries, the world in actuality is a seamless and inseparable
> whole - a conclusion which Fritjof Capra develops in Tao of
> Physics and connects with the teachings of certain oriental
> mystics. Heitler accepts an observer-created reality but adds
> that the act of ob servation also dissolves the boundary between
> observer and observed: "The observer appears, as a necessary part
> of the whole structure, and in his full capacity as a conscious
> being. The separation of the world into an 'objective outside
> reality' and 'us,' the self-conscious onlookers, can no longer be
> maintained. Object and subject have become inseparable from each
> other."
>
> Physicist David Bohm of London's Birkbeck College has especially
> stressed the necessary wholeness of the quantum world: "One is
> led to a new notion of unbroken wholeness which denies the
> classical analyzability of the world into separately and
> independently existing parts . . . The inseparable quantum
> interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental
> reality.
>
> Quantum wholeness is no mere replay of the old saw that
> everything is connected to everything else, no twentieth-century
> echo, for instance, of Newton's insight that gravity links each
> particle to every other. All ordinary connection s-gravity, for
> one-inevitably fall off with distance, thus conferring
> overwhelming importance on nearby connections while distant
> connections become irrelevant. Undoubtedly we are all connected
> in unremarkable ways, but close connections carry the most
> weight. Quantum wholenes s, on the other hand, is a fundamentally
> new kind of togetherness, undiminished by spatial and temporal
> separation. No casual hookup, this new quantum thing, but a true
> mingling of distant beings that reaches across the galaxy as
> forcefully as it reaches across the garden.
>
> Quantum Reality #4 The many-worlds interpretation (Reality
> consists of a steadily increasing number of parallel universes.)
> Of all claims of the New Physics none is more outrageous than the
> contention that myriads of universes are created upon the
> occasion of each measurement act. For any situation in which
> several different outcomes are possible (flipping a coiWritingn,
> for instance), some physicists believe that all outcomes actually
> occur. In order to accommodate different outcomes without
> contradiction , entire new universes spring into being, identical
> in every detail except for the single outcome that gave them
> birth. In the case of a flipped coin, one universe contains a
> coin that came up heads; another, a coin showing tails. Paul
> Davies champions this claim, known as the many-worlds
> interpretation, in his book Other Worlds. Science fiction writers
> commonly invent parallel universes for the sake of a story. Now
> quantum theory gives us good reason to take such st ories
> seriously.
>
> Writing in Physics Today, a major magazine of the American
> physics community, Bryce DeWitt describes his initial contact
> with the manyworlds interpretation of quantum theory:
>
> "I still recall vividly the shock I experienced on first
> encountering this multiworld concept. The idea of 10 ^ 100+
> slightly imperfect copies of oneself all constantly splitting
> into further copies, which ultimately become unrecognizable, is
> not easy to reconcile with common sense
>
> Invented in 1957 by Hugh Everett, a Princeton graduate student,
> the many-worlds interpretation is a latecomer to the New Physics
> scene. DeSpite its bizarre conclusion, that innumerable parallel
> universes each as real as our own actually exist, Everett's
> many-worlds picture has gained Considerable support among quantum
> theorists. Everett's proposal is particularly attractive to
> theorists because it resolves, as we shall see, the Major
> unsolved puzzle in quantum theory-the notorious quantum
> measurement problem.
>
> These four quantum realities should give you some feeling for the
> diversity of claims regarding the world's ultimate nature. While
> followers of Everett bear witness to uncountable numbers of
> quantum worlds, plus more on the way, students of Bohr and
> Heisenberg insist that there is not even one quantum world. In
> their struggle to gain firm footing amidst the slippery bricks of
> quantum fact, physicists have invented more realities than four.
> Keep your wits about you as we press on.
>
> Quantum Reality #5: Quantum logic (The World obeys a non-human
> kind of reasoning.). Quantum logicians argue that the quantum
> revolution goes so deep that replacing new concepts with old will
> not suffice. To cope with the quantum facts we must scrap our
> very mode of reasoning, in favor of a new quantum logic.
>
> Logic is the skeleton of our body of knowledge. Logic spells out
> how We use some of the shortest words in the language, words such
> as and, or, and not The behavior of these little linguistic
> connectors governs the way we talk about things, and structures,
> in turn, the way we think about them.
>
> For two thousand years, talk about logic (in the West) was cast
> in the syllogistic mold devised by Aristotle. In the
> mid-nineteenth century, George Boole, an Irish schoolteacher,
> reduced logical statements to simple arithmetic by inventing an
> artificial symbolic language which laid bare the logical bones of
> ordinary language.
>
> Boole's clear codification of the rules of reason jolted logic
> out of the Middle Ages and launched the now-flourishing science
> of mathematical logic. Outside the mathematical mainstream, a few
> creative logicians amused themselves by constructing "crazy
> logics" using rules other than Boole's, These deviant designs for
> and/or/not, although mathematically consistent, were considered
> mere curiosities since they seemed to fit no human pattern of
> discourse.
>
> However, according to some New Physicists, one of these crazy
> logics may be just what we need to make sense out of quantum
> events. Listen to quantum theorist David Finkelstein calling for
> mutiny against the rules of Boole:
>
> "Einstein threw out the classical concept of time; Bohr throws
> out the classical concept of truth . . . Our classical ideas of
> logic are simply wrong in a basic practical way. The next step is
> to learn to think in the right way, to learn to think
> quantum-logically."
>
> As an example of the usefulness of changing your mind rather than
> changing your physics, quantum logicians point to Einstein's
> general theory of relativity, which achieved in the realm of
> geometry what they propose to do with logic.
>
> Geometry is the science of points and lines. For two thousand
> years only one geometry existed, its rules compiled by the Greek
> mathematician Euclid in his bestselling book The Elements, which
> once rivaled the Bible in popularity. The latest revival of
> Euclid's Elements is your high school geometry book.
>
> Coincident with Boole's pioneer work in logic, a few adventurous
> mathematicians thought up "crazy geometries," games points and
> lines could Play outside of Euclid's rules. Chief architect of
> the New Geometry was the Russian Nicola] Lobachevski along with
> German mathematicians Karl Gauss and Georg Riemann. Their
> cockeyed geometries were regarded, like "on-Boolean logics, as
> high mathematical play, clever business but out of touch with
> reality. Euclidean geometry, as everyone knows, was the geometry,
> being after all, nothing but common sense applied to triangles
> and other geometric figures.
>
> However, in 1916 Einstein proposed a radical new theory of
> gravity that demolished the Euclidean monopoly. Einstein, in
> opposition to Newton and everybody else, declared that gravity is
> not a force but a curvature in space-time. Objects in free fall
> are truly free and move in lines as straight as can be-that is,
> lines straight by the standards of a gravity-warped geometry.
> Einstein's theory has testable consequences: for instance the
> deflection of starlight grazing the sun (confirmed by Eddington
> in 1919) and the existence of black holes (according to
> astrophysicists, in the constellation Cygnus, black hole Cygnus
> X-1 resides). On Earth, where our common sense was formed,
> gravity is weak and space almost Euclidean; out near X-1, high
> school geometry flunks.
>
> Einstein's lesson is plain to see, say the quantum logicians. The
> question of the world's true geometry is not settled by common
> sense but by experiment. Likewise with logic. For the rules of
> right reason, look not inside your own head but get thee to a
> laboratory.
>
> Quantum Reality #6. Neorealism (The world is made of ordinary
> objects.) An ordinary object is an entity which possesses
> attributes of its own whether observed or not. With certain
> exceptions (mirages, illusions, hallucinations), the world
> outside seems populated with objectlike entities. The clarity
> and ubiquity of ordinary reality has seduced a few physicists - I
> call them neorealists - into imagining that this familiar kind of
> reality can be extended into the atomic realm and beyond.
> However, the unrem arkable and common-sense view that ordinary
> objects are themselves made of objects is actually the blackest
> heresy of establishment physics.
>
> "Atoms are not things," says Heisenberg, one of the high priests
> of the orthodox quantum faith, who likened neorealists to
> believers in a flat earth. "There is no quantum world," warned
> Bohr, the pope in Copenhagen; "there is only an abstract quantum
> description."
>
> Neorealists, on the other hand, accuse the orthodox majority of
> wallowing in empty formalism and obscuring the world's
> simplicity with needless mystification. Instead they preach
> return to a pure and more primitive faith. Chief among neorealist
> rebels was Einstein, whose passion for realism pitted him
> squarely against the quantum Orthodoxy: "The Heisenberg-Bohr
> tranquilizing philosophy -- or religion? - is so delicately
> contrived that, for the time being, it provides a gentle pillow
> for the true believer from which he cannot very easily be
> aroused. So let him lie there."
>
> Despite their Neanderthal notions, no one could accuse
> neorealists of ignorance concerning the principles of quantum
> theory. Many of them were its founding fathers. Besides Einstein,
> prominent neorealists include ,max Planck, whose discovery of the
> constant of action sparked the quantum revolution; Erwin
> Schrodinger, who devised the wave equation every quantum system
> must obey; and Prince Louis de Broglie, who took quantum theory
> seriously enough to predict the wave nature of matter.
>
> De Broglie, a French aristocrat whose wartime involvement in
> radio swerved his research from church history into physics,
> fought for ordinary realism until 1928 when he converted to the
> statistical interpretation (another name for Copenhagenism).
> Twenty years later, however, influenced by David Bohm's
> neorealist revival, de Broglie recanted and returned to the faith
> of his youth:
>
> "Those interested in the psychology of scientists may be curious
> about the reasons for my unexpected return to discarded ideas . .
> . I am thinking not so much of my constant difficulties in
> developing a statistical interpretation of wave mechanics, or
> even of my secret hankering after Cartesian clarity in the midst
> of the fog which seemed to envelop quantum physics [but the fact
> that, as I examined the statistical picture) I could not help
> being struck by the force of the objections to it and by a
> certain o bscurity in the arguments in its defense . . . too
> abstract . . . too schematic . . . I realized that I had been
> seduced by the current fashion, and began to understand why I had
> been so uneasy whenever I tried to give a lucid account of the
> probability interpretation."
>
> One of the physics community's few traditions is the custom of
> celebrating the birthdays of its great men with a Festschrift - a
> festival of papers. In 1982, Louis de Broglie, ninety years old
> and gloriously unrepentant, was honored in this scholarly manner
> by his scientific colleagues. Virtually every neorealist In the
> world attended de Broglie's birthday party: there was no need to
> send out for extra chairs.
>
> Einstein, despite his numerous contributions to its success,
> never accepted quantum theory into his heart and stubbornly held
> to the oldfashioned belief that a realistic vision of the world
> was compatible with the quantum facts. During the thirties
> Einstein and Bohr engaged in an extended debate on the quantum
> reality question. Bohr argued that as far a' reality was
> concerned, quantum theory was a closed book. By 1928 Perceptive
> physicists had already grasped the theory's essence. Quantum
> theory would devel op in detail but its principles would not
> change. Bohr's confidence has been upheld so far; fifty years
> later, physicists still follow the old rules.
>
> Quantum theory is complete as it stands, said Bohr. It has no
> need of ordinary objects. Furthermore such objects cannot be
> added without spoiling its predictive success. Ordinary objects
> are not merely unnecessary luxuries in quantum theory, they are
> strictly impossible.
>
> Einstein's strategy was to confront Bohr with a series of thought
> experiments which aimed to show that quantum theory had left
> something out. He did not attempt to show that the theory was
> wrong, but by demonstrating that it was incomplete Einstein hoped
> to open the door for what he called "elements of reality."
>
> As the winners tell the story, Bohr closed each of Einstein's
> loopholes, but in the minds of each the debate was never settled.
> Long after their arguments had ended, on the day Bohr died, his
> blackboard contained a drawing of one of Einstein's thought
> experiments. Bohr struggled with Einstein to the end.
>
> Einstein too never gave up. In his autobiography he expresses his
> final thoughts on the quantum reality question: "I still believe
> in the possibility of a model Of reality - that is, of a theory
> which represents things themselves and not merely the probability
> of their occurrence."
>
> Quantum Reality #7 (Consciousness creates reality.) Among
> observercreated realists, a small faction asserts that only an
> apparatus endowed with consciousness (even as you and 1) is
> privileged to create reality. The one observer that counts is a
> conscious observer. Denis Postle examines reality-creating
> consciousness in Fabric of the Universe. I include this quantum
> reality not only because it is so outlandish but because its
> supporters are so Illustrious. Consciousness-created reality
> adherents include ligh t/matter physicist Walter Heitler, already
> cited in connection with undivided wholeness, Fritz London,
> famous for his work on quantum liquids, Berkeley S-matrix
> theorist Henry Pierce Stapp, Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, and
> world-class mathematician John von Neumann.
>
> Hungarian-born von Neumann was the mathematical midwife for some
> of the twentieth century's most exciting developments. Wherever
> things were hottest, the brilliant von Neumann seemed to be there
> lending a hand. In the late forties he invented the concept of
> the stored-Program computer; today's computer scientists refer to
> all computers from pocket calculators to giant IBMs as "von
> Neumann machines." In collaboration with Oskar Morgenstern, von
> Neumann laid the mathematical foundation for strategic game theo
> ry, on which much government and corporate policy in both the
> East and the West is based. He also worked on early robots and
> helped develop the atom bomb. In 1936 with Harvard mathematician
> Garrett Birkhoff he came up with the idea of quantum logic, but
> von Neumann's biggest contribution to quantum reality research
> was his book on quantum theory.
>
> By the late twenties physicists had constructed a quantum theory
> that met their daily needs: they possessed a rough mathematical
> structure which organized the quantum facts. At that point von
> Neumann entered the picture, putting physicists' crude theory
> into rigorous form, settling quantum theory into an elegant
> mathematical home called "Hilbert space" where it resides to this
> day, and awarding the mathematician's sea] of approval to
> physicists' fledgling theory.
>
> In 1932 von Neumann set down his definitive vision of quantum
> theory in a formidable tome entitled Die Mathematische Grundlagen
> der Quantenmechanik. Our most general picture of quantum theory
> is essentially the same as that outlined by von Neumann in Die
> Crundlagen (The Foundations). Von Neumann's book is our quantum
> bible. Like many other sacred texts, it is read by few, venerated
> by many. Despite its importance it was not translated into
> English until 1955.
>
> Many of the issues I discuss in Quantum Reality were first made
> public in von Neumann's book. For instance, there is von
> Neumann's proof that if quantum theory is correct, the world
> cannot be made of ordinary objects -Le., the neorealist
> interpretation is logically impossible. Von Neumann posed, but
> did not solve to everyone's satisfaction, the famous quantum
> measurement problem which is the central issue of the quantum
> reality question, In addition, von Neumann was the first to show
> how quantum theory sugg ests an active role for the observer's
> consciousness. Physical Objects would have no attributes, von
> Neumann said, if a conscious observer were not watching them.
>
> Von Neumann himself merely hinted at consciousness - created
> reality in dark parables. His followers boldly took his arguments
> to, their logical conclusion: if we accept von Neumann's version
> of quantum theory, they say, a consciousness - created reality is
> the inevitable outcome.
>
> At the logical core of our most materialistic science we meet not
> dead matter but our own lively selves. Eugene Wigner, von
> Neumann's Princeton colleague and fellow Hungarian (they went to
> the same high school in Budapest), comments on this ironic turn
> of events: "It is not possible to formulate the laws of quantum
> mechanics in a fully consistent way with out reference to the
> consciousness . . . It will remain remarkable in whatever way our
> future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external
> w orld led to the conclusion that the content of the
> consciousness is an ultimate reality."
>
> Quantum Reality #8. The duplex world of Werner Heisenberg (The
> world is twofold, consisting of potentials and actualities.)
> Most physicists believe in the Copenhagen interpretation, which
> states that there is no deep reality- QR # 1) and observation
> creates reality QR # 2). What these two realities have in common
> is the assertion that only phenomena are real; the world beneath
> phenomena is not.
>
> One question which this position immediately brings to mind is
> this: "if observation creates reality, what does it create this
> reality out of? Are phenomena created out of *** nothingness or
> out of some more substantial stuff?" Since the nature of
> unmeasured reality is unobservable by definition, many physicists
> dismiss such questions as meaningless on pragmatic grounds.
>
> However, since it describes measured reality with perfect
> exactness, quantum theory must contain some clues concerning the
> raw material out of which phenomena spring. Perhaps using the
> power of imagination we can peer beneath this theory and make
> some shrewd guess about the background world against which our
> familiar world of solid observations stands.
>
> Werner Heisenberg was fully aware of the difficulties of
> attempting to describe the subphenomenal world: "The problems of
> language here are really serious," he said. "We wish to speak in
> some way about the structure of the atoms and not only about the
> 'facts'-for instance, the water droplets in a cloud chamber. But
> we cannot speak about the atoms in ordinary language." Although
> he realized the difficulty in doing so, Heisenberg was one of the
> few physicists to try to express what he saw when he looked into
> quantum reality.
>
> According to Heisenberg, there is no deep reality-nothing down
> there that's real in the same sense as the phenomena] facts are
> real. The unmeasured world is merely and achieves full reality
> status during the act of observation: "In the experiments about
> atomic events we have to do with things and facts, with phenomena
> that are just as real as any phenomena in daily life. But the
> atoms and the elementary particles themselves are not as real;
> they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than
> one of things or facts . . .
>
> "The probability wave . - - means a tendency for something. It's
> a quantitative version of the old concept of potentia in
> Aristotle's philoso- phy. It introduces something standing in the
> middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a
> strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between
> possibility and reality."
>
> Heisenberg's world of potentia is both less real and more real
> than our own. It is less real because its inhabitants enjoy a
> ghostly quantum lifestyle consisting of mere tendencies, not
> actualities. On the other hand, the unmeasured world is more real
> because it contains a wealth of coexistent possibilities, most of
> which are contradictory. In Heisenberg's world a flipped coin can
> show heads and tails at the same time, an eventuality impossible
> in the actual world.
>
> One of the inevitable facts of life is that all of our choices
> are real choices. Taking one path means forsaking all others.
> Ordinary human experience does not encompass simultaneous
> contradictory events or multiple histories. For us, the world
> possesses a singularity and concreteness apparently absent in the
> atomic realm. Only one event at a time happens here; but that
> event really happens.
>
> The quantum world, on the other hand, is not a world of actual
> events like our own but a world full of numerous unrealized
> tendencies for action. These tendencies are continually on the
> move, growing, merging, and dying according to exact laws of
> motion discovered by Schrodinger and his colleagues. But despite
> all this activity nothing ever actually happens there. Everything
> remains strictly in the realm of possibility.
>
> Heisenberg's two worlds are bridged by a special interaction
> which physicists call a "measurement." During the magic
> measurement act, one quantum possibility is singled out, abandons
> its shadowy sisters, and surfaces in our ordinary world as an
> actual event. Everything that happens in our World arises out of
> possibilities prepared for in that other-the world of quantum
> potentia. In turn, our world sets limits on how far crowds of
> Potentia can roam. Because certain facts are actual, not
> everything is possibl e in the quantum world. There is no deep
> reality, no deep reality-as-we-know-it. Instead the unobserved
> universe consists of possibilities, tendencies, urges. The
> foundation of our everyday world, according to Heisenberg, is no
> more substantial than a promise.
>
> Physicists do not put forth these quantum realities as science
> fiction Speculations concerning worlds that might have been, but
> as serious pictures of the one world we actually live in: the
> universe outside your door.
>
> Since these quantum realities differ SO radically, one might
> expect them to have radically different experimental
> consequences. An astonishing feature of these eight quantum
> realities, however, is that they are experimentally
> indistinguishable. For all presently conceivable experiments,
> each of these realities predicts exactly the same observable
> phenomena.
>
> The ancient philosophers faced a similar reality crisis. For
> instance three ancient realities - 1. The World Tests on a
> turtle's back; 2. The World is bottomlessly solid,- 3. The world
> floats in an infinite ocean-led to identical consequences as far
> as anyone could tell at that time.
>
> Likewise modern physicists do not know how to determine
> experimentally what kind of world they actually live in. However,
> since "reality has consequences" we might hope that future
> experiments, not bound by our current concepts of measurability,
> will conclusively establish one or more of these bizarre pictures
> as top-dog reality. At present, however, each of these quantum
> realities must be regarded as a viable candidate for "the way the
> world really is." They may, however, all be wrong.
>
> Physicists' reality crisis is twofold: 1. There are too many of
> these quantum realities; 2. All of them without exception are
> preposterous, Some of these quantum realities are compatible with
> one another. For instance QR # I (There is no deep reality) and
> QR # 2 (Reality is observer-created) are in fact two halves of a
> single consistent picture of the world called the Copenhagen
> interpretation. But other quantum realities are contradictory: in
> the many-worlds interpretation QR #4), for instance, the world's
> deep reality consists of quadrillions of simultaneous universes,
> each one as real as our own, which maximally mocks Bohr's
> no-deep-reality claim. Not only can physicists not agree on a
> single picture of what's really going on in the quantum World,
> they are not even sure that the correct picture is on this list.
>
> None of the conflicting options which physicists have proposed as
> possible pictures of our home universe can be considered
> ordinary. Even that quantum reality closest to old-fashioned
> notions of how a world should behave -the neorealist contention
> QR #6) that the world is made out of ordinary objects-contains,
> as we shall see, the requirement that some of these objects move
> faster than light, a feature that entails unusual consequences:
> time travel and reversed causality, for example.
>
> This book is a snapshot of the reality crisis in physics taken at
> a moment when that crisis is not yet resolved. Nobody knows how
> the world will seem one hundred years from now. It will probably
> appear very different from what we now imagine. Here's what John
> Wheeler, a physicist actively concerned with the nature of
> quantum reality, imagines when he looks into the future:
>
> "There may be no such thing as the 'glittering central mechanism
> of the universe' to be seen behind a glass wall at the end of the
> trail. Not machinery but magic may be the better description of
> the treasure that is waiting."

Especially when you are not in a state to egoisticize anything and
someone comes and punches you in the face. And then you go:
sure, go ahead and kill me like Slavek Krepelka, maybe that's the point.

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