Quantum Experiment Breaks Reality By Seeing Two Versions Of Reality Existing At The Same Time

Physics

We recognize the distortion in our view of reality. Our perception of the world is influenced by our knowledge, societies, and senses


Furthermore, you might want to reconsider your conviction that science will always provide you an objective reality.

Today, physicists can confirm a theory first proposed by Nobel Prize winner Eugen Wigner in 1961. The experiment, called “Wigner’s Friend,” has a rather simple setup. Starting from scratch, you have a quantum system in superposition, which means that up to the measurement moment, both of its states exist simultaneously. The polarization, or the axis around which a photon spins, is both horizontal and vertical in this example.


The system will collapse when it is measured, trapping the photon in one of those two states. Wigner’s friend is doing the experiment in the lab. But for Wigner, who is not inside the lab and is unaware of the experiment’s result, the quantum system—which, importantly, also includes the lab—remains in superposition. They both have different results, yet they are both correct. (If Schrödinger and his cat-in-a-box were in a box together, this would be comparable to Schrödinger’s cat, a superposition-related thought experiment.) It appears as though Wigner’s reality and his friend’s reality coexist as a result. And it presents a challenge.

For a very long period, testing this notion has been impossible. When Wigner watches his friend do an experiment, he finds it challenging to compute the quantum mechanics formula. However, because of recent developments, researchers were able to design an exact clone of that using quantum physics.

Four entangled observers in the system, together with a state-of-the-art six-photon experiment, showed that although one part of the system produced a measurement, the other part showed that no measurement had been performed. Two realities were assessed at once. The study concludes that this validates the assertion made by quantum theories whose structure already accounts for observer dependency.

According to the researchers’ work, which is available for reading on ArXiv but has not yet been subjected to peer review, “this calls into question the objective character of the facts established by the two observers.”


“Can their multiple records be reconciled, or are they fundamentally incompatible—making it impossible for them to be regarded as objective, observer-independent “facts of the world”?

Though science is the best tool available to us for comprehending reality, the effects and limitations of the observers are well recognized. Relativity suggests that observers might not perceive simultaneous events at the same moment. Quantum physics teaches us that observers affect their experiments. It appears that two worlds might coexist right now, at least at the quantum level.

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