(ORDO NEWS) — Imagine this situation: a friend comes up to you, holding his hands behind his back, and says: “Guess which hand the coin is in.”
Your friend knows exactly which hand the coin is in, but for you, the results “right hand” or “left hand” seem to overlap each other, having an equal chance of realizing.
In other words, until a friend shows you in which hand the coin was hiding, it can, as it were, be in the left and right hand at the same time.
Hey, this is stupid! A coin can only be in one hand…
Is it? Let’s go back a couple of years and visit the laboratory at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh where a small quantum computer was assembled .
Physicists measured the polarization of three pairs of photons, turning one of them into a “friend with a coin”, where each photon (there are two in total) could be an “empty hand” or a “hand with a coin” depending on the polarization.
Two other pairs were used as observers to measure the polarization of the first pair. Simply put, two pairs of photons “followed” the third pair.
So, when the quantum computer was launched, observer photons began to “report” different results of observations.
One pair of photons “shouted” that “the hand is empty”, and the second “asserted” that “there is a coin in it.” The polarizations did not match, the photons-observers recorded different results from each other.
The experiment was repeated over and over again , but the results continued to be insane! Each pair of photons had its own reality, which was different from the reality of the other pair.
This suggests that at the quantum level, the observer is able to distort reality. But since our macrocosm consists of a quantum microcosm, a reasonable question arises: “Is our world real?”
Albert Einstein once asked a rhetorical question:
“Does the moon only exist because a mouse is looking at it?”
Maybe a coin, a friend, and reality itself are just a product of your consciousness? What if the world as you know it was created by your imagination?
“Do the rules of quantum mechanics apply on larger scales? Is reality objective? ask Alessandro Fedrizzi and Massimiliano Proetti, lead authors of the study.
—
Online:
Contact us: [email protected]
Our Standards, Terms of Use: Standard Terms And Conditions.