You may think you’re the protagonist of your own story. According to Oxford physicist Vlatko Vedral, however, you’re more like a puppet — whose strings are being pulled into a million parallel universes at any given time.
As Vedral argues in a recent issue of Popular Mechanics, the pop-sci version of the “observer effect” — where the act of observation or measurement affects a system — gets the cause-and-effect backward. The typical story goes something like this: quantum objects hang out in multiple states at once, until some observer glances over. At this point, the multiple states collapse and only one is left, an assumption that can lead various woo-woo interpretations, like that we create reality simply by observing it.
Physics, Verdal says, does not support that idea. That collapse effect isn’t a special power of human consciousness, but rather a fact of physics that says interactions — any interaction — forces a quantum system to commit to a definite state.
For example, when a photon hits your sunglasses, it isn’t waiting around for your brain to take notice. The photon either passes through the lens or reflects off it, depending on the precise variables at play. In other words, the photon’s path isn’t shaped by you. Instead, Verdal asserts that you are shaped by the photon’s path: the “you” that receives that particular photon is different from the “you” that didn’t.
Extrapolate this out and it gets dizzying quick. But at the core of Verdal’s argument is the idea that both “yous” will go on to exist simultaneously, though the “you” that consciously perceives the light is necessarily shoved off onto a different quantum path than the one that doesn’t.
“Without too much exaggeration, it’s fair to say that all quantum experiments are really just more or less complicated versions of Schrödinger’s,” Vedral argued.
With so many forks and branches splitting from each tiny interaction into their own parallel universe, there are infinite “yous” subtly coming into being at any given time, subtly leaving the observable you holding the bag. As Verdal writes it, the “elements of reality that are encoded into quantum objects are fundamental, and you — in this reality and others — are shaped each time you observe them.”
To sum it all up: somewhere out there, a cooler and luckier you is living your best life — while the version of you reading this blog has evidently been stuck with the short end of the stick.
More on physics: Outer Space Is a Viscous Fluid, New Paper Claims
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