Over the past 50 years, astronomers have made dozens of major discoveries that help explain the nature and origins of the universe. They measured the cosmic microwave background, or residual radiation from Big Bangwith extremely high precision to help paint a picture of the first nanoseconds of the universe. They realized that the way galaxies moved was influenced by something invisible called dark matter that’s about a quarter of the universe. And they discovered a new “ghostly” particle that passes through matter without leaving a trace. neutrino.
Scientists have continued to delve into some of the fundamental questions about how the universe and its multitudes of parts work together, but they have not really been able to answer the most fundamental and elusive question that has been asked by scientists. philosophers and scientists since. Human consciousness is born: why us, why here and why now?
Or, as the late physicist Dr. John Wheeler said in an interview with Discover the magazine in 2002: “How come it exists?
“I would be willing to have this arm cut off if I could understand why the quantum? If I could understand how existence comes into being,” Wheeler said in a past interview. “I think it’s something that’s beyond the purview of many people, and yet I think it’s the one that has the best chance of giving a really dynamic impetus to the whole scientific enterprise. “
Wheeler was an ideological leader in the development of quantum cosmology and is commemorated by his many contributions to the field, including the coining of the term black holes.
He was also known for his tendency to push the boundaries of what was possible in physics with creative ideas. “A lover of poetry and philosophy,” who “was acutely aware of the power of words to shape ideas,” wrote Richard Webb in a 2008 biographical article in NatureWheeler had “the habit of writing lessons on the board simultaneously with both hands.”
“He was very impressed by the idea that no phenomenon becomes a real phenomenon until it has been observed.”
One of his ideas, which he calls “the participatory universe,” posits that our own observations might actually be what creates our physical reality.
The idea could be represented by a drawing of the letter “U”, where an observer stands on a column of the letter and looks back at the past history of the universe, said theoretical physicist Dr. Bob Wald at the University of Chicago who was Wheeler’s student at Princeton University between 1968 and 1972.
“He was very impressed with the idea that no phenomenon becomes a real phenomenon until it is observed,” Wald told Salon in a video call. “The idea is that the past history of the universe became definitive when someone or people are now observing things about the past universe.”
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Wheeler was a legendary scientist who studied under Niels Bohr, who created the most widely recognized atomic model called the Bohr model. Wheeler too worked closely with Albert Einsteinhelping to focus his theory of general relativity. Known as a “physicist’s physicist” who worked on “ideas of ideas,” Wheeler inspired countless students during his nearly 50 years of teaching and encouraged their monumental discoveries. One of his students, Hugh Everett III, introduced the idea of ”many worlds” according to which suggests that there are an infinite number of parallel universes.
“In Everett’s mathematical formulation, these possibilities coexisted and could come together and die out,” Wheeler said in a previous article. interview. “It was only when one got to the point where one had an irreversible act of observation that one of them materialized… If there is anything designed to confuse someone on what quantum mechanics is, that’s the case.”
Wheeler’s idea of the participatory universe is rooted in quantum mechanics, which allows a particle to be in two places at once by being in what is called a superposition state. This situation is demonstrated, for example, by the famous theory Schrödinger’s cat experimentin which a cat is placed in a box containing radioactive materials that could kill it. In this hypothetical example, the scientist observing the experiment would not know whether the cat lived or died until he opened the box. Two realities therefore coexisted: the cat lived and the cat died.
The famous “two-slit experiment”, demonstrated something similar but with photons. These particles, which can act as either a particle or a wave, were found to behave like waves passing through the two slits in the experiment when they were not observed. However, when observed, they behave like particles passing through one slit or another.
Wheeler also proposed his own “delayed choice” experiment. While the two-slit experiment shows that observations before or during the experiment influenced its result, Wheeler’s experiment showed that delayed observations influenced the results of the experiment after the particles had already passed through the slots.
“One can decide, at the quantum level, whether an object should take two routes to get to its end point or just one route,” Wheeler once said in an interview. “You can make the decision after you’ve already made the trip. It sounds like a contradiction, but it works.
“They did not share his optimism about the capacity of physics to produce a theory of intelligibility and consciousness responsible for the physical picture of the world.”
To translate this idea into more concrete terms, Dr. Andrei Linde, professor emeritus at Stanford University and one of the authors of the multiverse theory, recommends imagining opening the box with Schrödinger’s cat with a time limit of three days. The cat inside will either be dead or alive, making it appear as if the outcome of the experiment was determined three days ago as planned and the observer is recording what happened in the past, Linde said.
However, to be consistent with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, one would have to attribute some reality to both results and understand that the universe consisted of these two branches: one universe with a dead cat and one with a living cat.
“By observing the cat, we learn which one we live in,” Linde said.
Wheeler’s idea of the participatory universe was initially considered a little too far out and was not pursued by the scientific community when he proposed it in the 1970s, said lecturer Dr. Alexei Nesteruk guest and researcher in the philosophy of cosmology and quantum. physics at the University of Portsmouth, England.
“A lot of physicists didn’t like it because they called it impalpable and a little mystical,” Nesteruk told Salon in a telephone interview. “They did not share his optimism about the capacity of physics to produce a theory of intelligibility and consciousness responsible for the physical picture of the world.”
After all, it changes our traditional way of thinking about how time works. Instead of the past causing the present, which causes the future, Wheeler’s idea reverses the situation by suggesting that the future “determines” the past.
“This past becomes a construct of the human spirit (working toward) the future,” Nesteruk said. “This is a really interesting idea because it completely shatters a naive physical understanding of the past of the universe as being the past of itself. It is not the past in itself. It’s the past for us.
However, the industry’s initial rejection of the idea has begun to change. In fact, an idea like the participatory universe, which takes into account the role of the observer in determining the quantum state of an object, could help explain some mathematical puzzles that have arisen in quantum physics, Linde said. .
“The question is really whether the unobserved universe makes sense in physics if you don’t include that consciousness,” Linde told Salon in a phone interview. “It’s far from what standard physicists would study, but Wheeler wasn’t just any physicist.”
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