Does the Universe Exist if We’re Not Looking? According to the rules of quantum mechanics, our observations influence the universe at the most fundamental levels.

To Wheeler [John Wheeler, scientist and dreamer, colleague of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, mentor to many of today's leading physicists, and the man who chose the name "black hole"] we are not simply bystanders on a cosmic stage; we are shapers and creators living in a participatory universe.

Wheeler’s hunch is that the universe is built like an enormous feedback loop, a loop in which we contribute to the ongoing creation of not just the present and the future but the past as well.

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ars technica: Every article on quantum gravity begins the same way.

(Though every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way … )

Progress in uniting quantum mechanics with general relativity has typically proceeded along two lines. Option one is to generate seemingly outlandish ideas, such as string theory, loop quantum gravity, and their brethren, which resolve the problem by positing the existence of things as yet unobserved.

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Quantum physics says goodbye to reality :

“Some physicists are uncomfortable with the idea that all individual quantum events are innately random. This is why many have proposed more complete theories, which suggest that events are at least partially governed by extra ‘hidden variables’. Now physicists from Austria claim to have performed an experiment that rules out a broad class of hidden-variables theories that focus on realism—giving the uneasy consequence that reality does not exist when we are not observing it (Nature 446 871).”

Kinda reassuring while it lasted, but let this be a lesson to ya, we don’t need nobody to lean on. Now if the universe would just not spin out of control please on my watch, fer Chris sake, I am sposed to write these words not eat em.

Not all.

{ fin }

“How will computation transform the new spaces that it comes to occupy?”

“Our fundamental concern is with the ways in which we encounter space not simply as a container for our actions, but as a setting within which we act. The embodied nature of activity is an issue for a range of technologies.”

Isn’t that lovely. The embodied nature of activity.

“This social character means that spaces are not ‘given;’ they are the products of active processes of interpretation. The meaningfulness of space is a consequence of our encounters with it.

Yeah, okay, so. Read the rest of this entry »