Reality

 Reality

What is and Should Never Be

Objective Reality

What you see is what you get! Not always it seems but following the Copenhagen interpretation of the results of the dual slit experiment and Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment Einstein decided that the moon is still there even when he is not looking at it. Einstein never liked the idea that nature is uncertain, and he once said “does that mean the Moon is not there when I am not looking at it”. He believed in an orderly rational universe with a cause and effect giving reason to how things happen and not the roll of the dice that the quantum model is based on. Is there is a way to have the objective Universe of Einstein and the uncertainty of quantum physics? By explaining quantum mechanics as the physics of ‘time’ with the future as an emergent property, does this do away with objective reality?

If the mathematics of quantum mechanics represents the physics of ‘time’, as a physical process with classical physics representing process over a period of time as in Newton’s differential equations, then is this a process formed by the spontaneous absorption and emission of light photon energy. This forms a continuous process of energy exchange that forms the ever-changing world of what we observe. And is reality something that is actual independent of the mind? Well, to consider that our mind is the ‘creator’ of reality is to presuppose that the universe did not exists before our mind became aware of our surroundings. Smell of arrogance to me. So the universe didn’t begin until after humans became conscious? That’s not what the astrophysicists tell us.

Subjective Reality

It has been strongly suggested that in the micro-world of atoms and particles, governed by the rules of quantum mechanics, two different observers are not only entitled to their own view of reality that could be different but both are actual facts. Facts are subjective?

In this view the observer plays a key role in the quantum world. The theory states that particles can be in several places or states at once, known as superposition, and that take all probable paths simultaneously. Only when the ‘observer’ interferes does some kind of objectivity arise. The moment a quantum system is observed then its location or state becomes real thus breaking the superposition. This behaviour has been demonstrated many times in the lab – for example, the famous double slit experiment.

To theoretical physicists Carlo Rovelli and Julian Barbour, time is something of an illusion. Its flow is a perception and not physical reality. Indeed, as Julian Barbour states in The End of Time, "If the Machian approach to classical dynamics is correct, quantum cosmology will have no dynamics. It will be timeless. It must also be frameless". The way I understand his conclusion is that we are connecting the dots and coming up with the picture of reality. The dots are all their.

What Rovelli thinks is somewhat the same. He says that reality is a complex network of events onto which we project sequences of past, present and future. The Universe obeys the laws of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, out of which time emerges.