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Quantum observations of God?


Wormwood

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What I was trying to say above is that the connection is a tempting but false one, based on misunderstandings from purely superficial commonalities

 

I could agree with most of what you say in many respects, and you make some very valid argumants, but the quote above is something you have no proof of either.

 

The fact that 'free will' would seem to be the ability to affect the movement of 'electrons' in the brain by consciousness alone, and the fact that conscious observation can seemingly affect the results of experiments in quantum theory, and consciousness itself may be able to collapse wave functions into discreet values seems to be more than just superficial commonalities to me.

 

Maybe that is exactly how the reality and the universe works, how consciouness works, and why quantum theory seems so wierd.

 

Maybe the truth is shouting at us but we refuse to listen!

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lol, now that sounds a bit like mumblejumble to avoid consciousness issues..

 

with no observation of the system, the system will be in some state Q(t) which might include an electron in some excitation level and when t is set, an observer per definition, comes along to see which the total state looks like.

 

An electron observing a photon hitting it? erm, that doesnt sound much like physics :)

 

 

yeah, most of QM sounds like mumbo jumbo to me. i get few thiings like electron orbitals though.

 

observation in this case means interaction.

 

when you say is at an electron interacting with a photon it doesn't sound so wierd.

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Maybe its just a product of using very abstract and even somewhat obscure wording. Its like flipping a coin, I am not going to know with certainty what side is going to come up until the coin finishes the flip action, so for what its worth I don’t see a great deal of difference with that or any of the other wording. I do find the uncertainty principal and the probability cloud as terms probably a product of limited technology, as in 100 years I don’t know how uncertain probability clouds will be due to technological advance. I think its the same think with dark matter, its a mysterious term really that does not denote a whole lot of information about such, then again the word matter is somewhat ambiguous but there is an existing library of information on matter compare to the mysterious dark matter:eyebrow:

 

Maybe one last part of its simply the somewhat dependent relationship physics shares with math spilling across. The level of math and constant use of such by the people that brought you the uncertainty principal I know surely is much higher then anything I am capable of, and I am sure having to converse in such or think in such terms at a constant probably leads to the evolution of such things, or even ways of talking about reality.

 

Lastly, I don’t think people warp reality via thought, if that were true I think reality would be drastically different from what it is. Giving the idea of a subconscious and the reality that other organisms also "think" I just don’t see any proof for it anywhere past basically speculation on the behalf of humans of course. I mean for a second just think about placing four people in a dark room with an object on the table they are to imagine, the object should then experience that if such were true, unless they have to view it, but I don’t know of any place on the world where its been recorded for peoples thoughts to influence matter on any level. If by viewing it we can only see so much, well that’s all it says, I can look at a mountain, but I cant know for sure what’s on the other side.

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  • 2 weeks later...
yeah, most of QM sounds like mumbo jumbo to me. i get few thiings like electron orbitals though.

 

observation in this case means interaction.

 

when you say is at an electron interacting with a photon it doesn't sound so wierd.

 

ye, sounds fine then :)

 

however, interaction and observation do not have equal signs between them...else consciousness would 'have to be' pretty much deterministic (I can't right now think about long slender female thighs out of the blue , etc ;))

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It is my understanding that wave functions need consciousness or an observer to collapse. I recently heard someone say that since consciousness or an observer are required, that the universe as we know it could not exist without some greater consciousness that collapsed the wave functions,

 

That was an idea that was put forward in the late 1980s and 1990s. Paul Davies toyed with the idea of a "quantum god" in several of his books.

 

This was built around the thought experiment often called "Schroedinger's Cat". Put a cat in a box and hook a cyanide system to some radioactive substance such that, the next time a nuclei decayed, it would release the cyanide and kill the cat. Now, without looking, could you know if the cat was dead or alive? According to quantum mechanics, it was both at the same time, however much that offends common sense. This condition of superposition of two possibilities is called "coherence" and the collapse "decoherence". The idea was that the wave function did not collapse until someone opened the box and looked.

 

That all came to an end recently when it became possible to make a version of "Schroedinger's Cat" using microwave photons in an indeterminant state and then use an unconscious atomic "mouse" to see if the cat was "alive" or "dead". The mouse could be run by the photons and, if the wave function had collapsed, that would be detected (see next post). It turned out that just running the mouse by the microwave photon cat did NOT collapse the wave function by itself. Instead, the wave function collapsed on its own without an observer. Here are some of the papers so you can read about it yourself:

5. G Taubes, Atomic mouse probes the lifetime of a quantum cat. Science, 274 (6 Dec): 1615, 1996.

6. P Yam, Bringing Schrodinger's cat to life. Scientific American, June, 1997, pp. 124-129. Summary of recent experiments of superposition (coherence) and dechoherence.

7. GP Collins, Schrodinger's SQUID. Scientific American 283: 23-24, October 2000. Electric current flows both ways around a superconducting loop at the same time.

 

The idea of God serving as the ultimate observer to ensure reality is now out the window. It was a nice idea while it lasted ...

 

I challenge you to make an observation without involving a person.

 

5. G Taubes, Atomic mouse probes the lifetime of a quantum cat. Science, 274 (6 Dec): 1615, 1996.

 

"How do you tell whether a cat is alive or dead without looking directly at it? Simple, answers Serge Haroche, a physicist at the École Normale Superieure (ENS) in Paris: You let a mouse run past its nose and see what happens to the mouse. Haroche is not, however, thinking of an ordinary cat. The cat in this case is Schrödinger's cat: a version of the elusive beast pictured by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in a thought experiment. Schrödinger imagined a cat shut in a box with a radioactive atom that has a 50-50 chance of decaying in an hour. If the atom decays, it kills the cat. If it doesn't, the cat lives. This setup is supposed to transfer the quantum indeterminacy of the atom to the cat, leaving it neither dead nor alive but in a superposition of both states: dead and alive.

 

To detect this strange state, says Haroche, you make a small hole in the box and send in the mouse: "You should have one probability for the mouse to escape if the cat is alive and another one--presumably larger--if the cat is dead. With the cat in a quantum superposition, both dead and alive, these probabilities would combine in a strange way, incompatible with classical logic, in an effect called quantum interference." He adds, however, that such an experiment will never work with such macroscopic systems as cats or mice. A ubiquitous process known as decoherence will instantly destroy the quantum superposition, making the cat either dead or alive and washing out the quantum interference between the two outcomes.

 

But by constructing minute versions of Schrödinger's cat and mouse, Haroche, Jean-Michel Raimond, Michel Brune, and their ENS colleagues have actually measured this decoherence process, as they report in the 9 December Physical Review Letters. They created a Schrödinger's cat consisting of a few microwave photons in an indeterminate quantum state and sent in a mouse--an atom prepared so that it can react to the dead-and-alive state of the cat. Investigators have caught glimpses of Schrödinger's cat before (Science, 24 May, p. 1101), but the mouse allows the ENS group to monitor its condition: to see how long the quantum superposition survives before collapsing into one state or the other.

 

"The experiment is one of the first very controlled measurements of decoherence," says physicist Chris Monroe of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who has also been involved in creating laboratory versions of Schrödinger's cat. "Everyone thinks that you can't have live and dead superpositions in the macroscopic world. The theory shows how these things just shouldn't last long, and this is really one of the first measurements that vindicates that point of view."

 

Laboratory versions of Schrödinger's cat look nothing like the original, but they do resemble it in existing in two distinct states at once. In the ENS experiment, for instance, the cat is a dead-and-alive superposition of two phases of an electromagnetic field resonating in a centimeter-sized cavity. (The phase of the field can be thought of as the timing of its crests and valleys.) What generates the superposition of phases is a passing Rydberg atom, an atom excited to such high levels that it swells to 2500 times the size of a normal atom. One such huge atom can easily create macroscopic changes in the electromagnetic field, explains Haroche.

 

Before reaching the cavity, the Rydberg atom encounters microwaves that excite it into a superposition of two different energy states. When the atom enters the cavity, each energy state induces its own phase shift in the electromagnetic field, resulting in the superposition of two field states, each with a different phase. In essence, the atom transfers its own indeterminacy to the electromagnetic field.

 

Having set up the Schrödinger's cat-type field, the physicists then probe its collapse, which is triggered by the quantum state's environment. Now they use a second Rydberg atom--the Schrödinger's mouse. "The first atom prepares this strange state," says Haroche, "and the second atom goes across the cavity and interacts with this strange state, again by shifting its phase, and then it goes out and you detect it" and compare its state with the final state of the first atom. By repeating the experiment many times, the physicists can measure the probability that the second atom emerges in a given state relative to the first atom. This "conditional probability" has a measurable quantum interference term if the electromagnetic field is in a quantum superposition when the second atom passes through.

 

The strategy allows for two crucial measurements of decoherence. First, the ENS physicists can determine how long the field takes to decay into one phase or the other, by changing the time delay between the two atoms. "If you have a longer delay between the two atoms," says Haroche, "the coherence decays, and the second atom does not detect it anymore." They can also measure how the lifetime of the catlike field superposition changes with its size. Injecting more microwave photons into the cavity or increasing the phase difference between the two states both make the cat more macroscopic, and the researchers found, as theory predicted, that both changes sped up the decoherence. "The decay becomes faster and faster," says Haroche.

 

This size effect, he continues, may be the explanation for why even Schrödinger's mouse would never be able to detect a full-grown Schrödinger's cat. "If you had a real Schrödinger's cat in a box," says Haroche, "you would never see the superposition, because the decoherence time is so short for big systems."

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But that's hardly unique to quantum physics. Yes, the fact that somebody is looking at the results is assumed, just as it is assumed in any other branch of science. And just as in any other branch of science, that person is assumed not to have an effect, no? As in, the "observation" is the interaction, and the person watching it on a computer screen is not. ...right?

 

That is not true, it is not the same thing at all. In a QM system you can have interference between the different states which gives you a measurably different result from that which would be obtained by no interference. It is the presence or lack of this interference which is indicitave of whether the wavefunction has collapsed. Classical physics does not have this effect.

 

(Notice that unobservability of interference does not mean that you have none.)

 

5. G Taubes' date=' Atomic mouse probes the lifetime of a quantum cat. Science, 274 (6 Dec): 1615, 1996.

[/quote']

 

This doesn't really have anything to do with consciousness - it is studying decoherence which is not the same thing. QM interferences are only present when the final states are identical; quantum mechanically you are performing a projection of the state onto the eigenbasis, and if the state is very different from the eigenstate yur are interested in you get a very small interference (techincally you project the final state onto the eigenvectors of the observable and only coherently sum states which can give the same eigenvectors). When a state becomes very complicated or lives for a very long time, it becomes increasingly hard to get the same eigenvectors because more and more possibilities open up. Therefore you expect a decoherence - the effect of the coherent sum (the interference) becomes less and less.

 

That is why the article says "and the researchers found, as theory predicted, that both changes sped up the decoherence".

 

So, in other words, they are not showing that the wavefunction collapsed without 'concious observation' (whatever that means). They are showing that the interference effects from QM is dominated by the early time evolution (and/or is reduced for large systems), as one would expect from the QM formalism itself. But even though the late-time interference is small, if you are applying QM then you still need to perform the projection onto the eigenbasis at the end, which is in reality (definition!) the collapse of the wavefunction.

 

Now of course, you are free to reformulate QM to never require the collapse onto the eigenbasis (since the difference from the eigenbasis for a complicated system is effectively unobservable) but then it is not Quantum Mechnics - it is something else.

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This doesn't really have anything to do with consciousness - it is studying decoherence which is not the same thing.

 

Severian, go back and look at the OP. The original idea was that coherence would be maintained until observed by a consciousness. Schroedinger's Cat would remain both dead and alive until someone opened the box!

 

In this case, no one looked and the wave function collapsed anyway, without an observer.

 

When a state becomes very complicated or lives for a very long time, it becomes increasingly hard to get the same eigenvectors because more and more possibilities open up. Therefore you expect a decoherence - the effect of the coherent sum (the interference) becomes less and less.

 

That is why the article says "and the researchers found, as theory predicted, that both changes sped up the decoherence".

 

If that is the case, then the idea of the necessity of an observer was already refuted. Are you saying that the popular literature was just slow in catching up?

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mixing terms here. observer does not mean 'a person' or 'a conciousness'

 

what it means here is an interaction.

 

 

But, without some kind of conscious agency how can an 'interaction' have any meaningful status? What is present to define an interaction?

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That was an idea that was put forward in the late 1980s and 1990s. Paul Davies toyed with the idea of a "quantum god" in several of his books.

 

This was built around the thought experiment often called "Schroedinger's Cat". Put a cat in a box and hook a cyanide system to some radioactive substance such that, the next time a nuclei decayed, it would release the cyanide and kill the cat. Now, without looking, could you know if the cat was dead or alive? According to quantum mechanics, it was both at the same time, however much that offends common sense. This condition of superposition of two possibilities is called "coherence" and the collapse "decoherence". The idea was that the wave function did not collapse until someone opened the box and looked.

 

That all came to an end recently when it became possible to make a version of "Schroedinger's Cat" using microwave photons in an indeterminant state and then use an unconscious atomic "mouse" to see if the cat was "alive" or "dead". The mouse could be run by the photons and, if the wave function had collapsed, that would be detected (see next post). It turned out that just running the mouse by the microwave photon cat did NOT collapse the wave function by itself. Instead, the wave function collapsed on its own without an observer. Here are some of the papers so you can read about it yourself:

5. G Taubes, Atomic mouse probes the lifetime of a quantum cat. Science, 274 (6 Dec): 1615, 1996.

6. P Yam, Bringing Schrodinger's cat to life. Scientific American, June, 1997, pp. 124-129. Summary of recent experiments of superposition (coherence) and dechoherence.

7. GP Collins, Schrodinger's SQUID. Scientific American 283: 23-24, October 2000. Electric current flows both ways around a superconducting loop at the same time.

 

The idea of God serving as the ultimate observer to ensure reality is now out the window. It was a nice idea while it lasted ...

 

 

 

5. G Taubes, Atomic mouse probes the lifetime of a quantum cat. Science, 274 (6 Dec): 1615, 1996.

 

"How do you tell whether a cat is alive or dead without looking directly at it? Simple, answers Serge Haroche, a physicist at the École Normale Superieure (ENS) in Paris: You let a mouse run past its nose and see what happens to the mouse. Haroche is not, however, thinking of an ordinary cat. The cat in this case is Schrödinger's cat: a version of the elusive beast pictured by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in a thought experiment. Schrödinger imagined a cat shut in a box with a radioactive atom that has a 50-50 chance of decaying in an hour. If the atom decays, it kills the cat. If it doesn't, the cat lives. This setup is supposed to transfer the quantum indeterminacy of the atom to the cat, leaving it neither dead nor alive but in a superposition of both states: dead and alive.

 

To detect this strange state, says Haroche, you make a small hole in the box and send in the mouse: "You should have one probability for the mouse to escape if the cat is alive and another one--presumably larger--if the cat is dead. With the cat in a quantum superposition, both dead and alive, these probabilities would combine in a strange way, incompatible with classical logic, in an effect called quantum interference." He adds, however, that such an experiment will never work with such macroscopic systems as cats or mice. A ubiquitous process known as decoherence will instantly destroy the quantum superposition, making the cat either dead or alive and washing out the quantum interference between the two outcomes.

 

But by constructing minute versions of Schrödinger's cat and mouse, Haroche, Jean-Michel Raimond, Michel Brune, and their ENS colleagues have actually measured this decoherence process, as they report in the 9 December Physical Review Letters. They created a Schrödinger's cat consisting of a few microwave photons in an indeterminate quantum state and sent in a mouse--an atom prepared so that it can react to the dead-and-alive state of the cat. Investigators have caught glimpses of Schrödinger's cat before (Science, 24 May, p. 1101), but the mouse allows the ENS group to monitor its condition: to see how long the quantum superposition survives before collapsing into one state or the other.

 

"The experiment is one of the first very controlled measurements of decoherence," says physicist Chris Monroe of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who has also been involved in creating laboratory versions of Schrödinger's cat. "Everyone thinks that you can't have live and dead superpositions in the macroscopic world. The theory shows how these things just shouldn't last long, and this is really one of the first measurements that vindicates that point of view."

 

Laboratory versions of Schrödinger's cat look nothing like the original, but they do resemble it in existing in two distinct states at once. In the ENS experiment, for instance, the cat is a dead-and-alive superposition of two phases of an electromagnetic field resonating in a centimeter-sized cavity. (The phase of the field can be thought of as the timing of its crests and valleys.) What generates the superposition of phases is a passing Rydberg atom, an atom excited to such high levels that it swells to 2500 times the size of a normal atom. One such huge atom can easily create macroscopic changes in the electromagnetic field, explains Haroche.

 

Before reaching the cavity, the Rydberg atom encounters microwaves that excite it into a superposition of two different energy states. When the atom enters the cavity, each energy state induces its own phase shift in the electromagnetic field, resulting in the superposition of two field states, each with a different phase. In essence, the atom transfers its own indeterminacy to the electromagnetic field.

 

Having set up the Schrödinger's cat-type field, the physicists then probe its collapse, which is triggered by the quantum state's environment. Now they use a second Rydberg atom--the Schrödinger's mouse. "The first atom prepares this strange state," says Haroche, "and the second atom goes across the cavity and interacts with this strange state, again by shifting its phase, and then it goes out and you detect it" and compare its state with the final state of the first atom. By repeating the experiment many times, the physicists can measure the probability that the second atom emerges in a given state relative to the first atom. This "conditional probability" has a measurable quantum interference term if the electromagnetic field is in a quantum superposition when the second atom passes through.

 

The strategy allows for two crucial measurements of decoherence. First, the ENS physicists can determine how long the field takes to decay into one phase or the other, by changing the time delay between the two atoms. "If you have a longer delay between the two atoms," says Haroche, "the coherence decays, and the second atom does not detect it anymore." They can also measure how the lifetime of the catlike field superposition changes with its size. Injecting more microwave photons into the cavity or increasing the phase difference between the two states both make the cat more macroscopic, and the researchers found, as theory predicted, that both changes sped up the decoherence. "The decay becomes faster and faster," says Haroche.

 

This size effect, he continues, may be the explanation for why even Schrödinger's mouse would never be able to detect a full-grown Schrödinger's cat. "If you had a real Schrödinger's cat in a box," says Haroche, "you would never see the superposition, because the decoherence time is so short for big systems."

 

This is all based on rubbish. The observation occurs as soon as the results of the experiment are observed for the first time. You can't get away with it like this!

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obviously i can't since i'm a person. but, an electron could observe a photon hitting it causing it to jump up an energy level. seeing as observe in this context means an interaction

 

 

However, an electron hasn't the ability to form concepts such as 'hitting' and 'energy-level', therefore, our ideas about quantum level phenomena can only exist as a function of human consciousness. The implication of this approach is that the Universe as a whole is a concept-driven one that effectively dissolves in the absence of sentient beings. Put simply, the known Universe has no meaning without observers.

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This is all based on rubbish. The observation occurs as soon as the results of the experiment are observed for the first time. You can't get away with it like this!

 

Bombus, nice to see you immediately went to ad hominem. The "mouse" was run past the "cat" many times. While the "cat" is in a state of coherence the mouse does not interact. So we get many "results". Some of which are the cat is still both dead and alive, and then a "result" that the wave function has collapsed.

 

So, which of these are "observations"? According to you the wave function collapses with observation. But several mice can run by the cat and report their "observations" to the humans. Those observations say coherence is maintained. By your idea, coherence should collapse on the FIRST observation, right? But it didn't.

 

Quit trying to force your ideas upon science. Instead, listen to what the data is telling you. Coherence/decoherence exists or not independent of observation.

 

Take this article:

7. GP Collins, Schrodinger's SQUID. Scientific American 283: 23-24, October 2000. Electric current flows both ways around a superconducting loop at the same time.

 

Now, why didn't the current flow just ONE way upon observation? Here we have a wave that doesn't collapse upon the first observation.

 

However, an electron hasn't the ability to form concepts such as 'hitting' and 'energy-level', therefore, our ideas about quantum level phenomena can only exist as a function of human consciousness. The implication of this approach is that the Universe as a whole is a concept-driven one that effectively dissolves in the absence of sentient beings. Put simply, the known Universe has no meaning without observers.

 

1. The concepts are a function of human consciousness. But the actions and interactions of the electron happen whether there is a human there to observe them or not.

 

2. Remember, the conditions for sentient beings was not present until relatively recently in the history of the universe. Are you seriously going to try to tell us that the universe did not exist until then? If that was the case, then how could the conditions necessary for sentient beings have developed?

 

3. In your last sentence you move the goalposts. Up until then you were talking about "existence". Now you try to tell us the universe has no "meaning" without observers. Even IF this is true, so what? Does an entity have to have "meaning" in order to exist? Existence and meaning are 2 different things.

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Bombus, nice to see you immediately went to ad hominem. The "mouse" was run past the "cat" many times. While the "cat" is in a state of coherence the mouse does not interact. So we get many "results". Some of which are the cat is still both dead and alive, and then a "result" that the wave function has collapsed.

 

So, which of these are "observations"? According to you the wave function collapses with observation. But several mice can run by the cat and report their "observations" to the humans. Those observations say coherence is maintained. By your idea, coherence should collapse on the FIRST observation, right? But it didn't.

 

 

Quit trying to force your ideas upon science. Instead, listen to what the data is telling you. Coherence/decoherence exists or not independent of observation

.

 

Take this article:

7. GP Collins, Schrodinger's SQUID. Scientific American 283: 23-24, October 2000. Electric current flows both ways around a superconducting loop at the same time.

 

Now, why didn't the current flow just ONE way upon observation? Here we have a wave that doesn't collapse upon the first observation.

 

I apologise for my flippant behaviour - too many beers! But, isn't this essentially the same as the double slit experiment which observation over time shows that electons/photons interact with 'non existent' interferring photons. I thought the problem occured when following individual electrons/photons one at a time and observing their progress continually throughout.

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  • 1 month later...

I believe the name of source is Akeesha. IN a given situation being a massive balckhole in the exact middle of the universe he would, in my opinion, not think too much about quantuum gravity since the the effect of mana cannot be interpolated by gravity and it's effect on a gravimetric colude. The colude has an effect but only if the colude id hyper static for breif periods of time given the energy state of mana which is a^22 or there abouts. The mana effect on quantuum reality is subtle and cannot be manipulated by normal but super interference given a spike in the onclusion of it sub dynamic processes.

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The same way you know any scientific law is always true whether you're consciously looking at it or not. The same way you know that tree falling in the forest still makes a sound even when there's nobody around. In other words, you don't know, but all of science and rational existence depends on making the assumption, and there's nothing special about this case to make us stop.

 

i have to say that ur comment here is retardedly stupid. We know a tree that falls without anyone there to hear it makes a sound because everything that moves within the atmosphere makes the molecules of gas move and vibrate, sound is defined as vibration of atoms and molecules, therefore we absolutely DO know that a tree makes a sound when it falls and there is no one around to hear it. And for the rest of your comment...we dont JUST believe its true cuz thats what life relies on, were that true it would make scientists no better than the catholic church that supressed science cuz it was heresy. We have MATH to PROVE that its true. It may not have been observed, but its certainly not blind faith, scientists reject anything thats just blind faith. To believe its only true because we HAVE to is pure stupidity.

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Hi Joshua. It's helpful if you press the "Quote" button on the post to which your responding. I had to do a search of this thread to find that your first paragraph referred to the post I linked below. Recall that as smart as the membership here is, only about 35% are mind readers. ;)

 

http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showpost.php?p=343370&postcount=9

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