Some Schmo wrote: ↑Fri Oct 27, 2023 3:43 pm
I'm starting to really feel like there is a critical relationship between the reality of the universe and the act of humans observing it, that our consciousness is somehow bound up in that equation, influencing it. Hearing about quantum physics does that to me... but I won't pretend to understand what I'm hearing.
It bothers me because there's something mystical in that idea given that it sounds a lot like magical thinking.
We're pretty sure that what human observation does in quantum mechanics is also done whenever anything microscopic has any effect on larger scales, regardless of whether anything conscious is involved, or not. For example, there have been a lot of experiments in which information about which path a particle takes is picked up by some inanimate object, even another microscopic one, and never observed by any human being. This information transfer can have a dramatic effect on where that first particle ends up, but it is exactly the same effect whether anyone looks at the data, or not.
On the other hand, observing things certainly can affect them, even without quantum mechanics, simply because observation is always an interaction, even if indirect. Observing something is having it affect you. There is always an equal and opposite reaction. If it affects you, you do affect it.
How big the effects are—that's another question. They involve exactly the same amount of momentum, each way, but how much difference does that much momentum make? The momentum transfer that can kill you won't do much to a freight train.
Or so we might think. Actually, judgements about how significant a change is are usually subjective, human judgements. The strict laws of physics are as obsessively detailed as miserly Scrooge McDuck, who feels every penny he loses, even out of his billions. The tiny momentum loss to the freight train, from every mosquito it hits, is an exactly matching change, mathematically.
How much change does it take to mean something, though? Sometimes tiny changes, that don't seem to mean anything right away, turn out eventually to have caused things that we find important. I don't think there's anything magical happening in observation, even in quantum mechanics. To me the real point is that small changes can be important. Maybe sometimes paying attention to something can be that kind of small change.
I was a teenager before it was cool.