Nobel Prize Winning Scientists’ Findings show the Universe isn’t ‘Real’.
How do you define “real”?
This is a question typically left to the philosophers of the world, or the 1999 cult classic film, The Matrix. However, physics now has something significant to add to the debate.
Under what you would call a non-quantum mechanical definition of real, known as local realism, real is defined as when an object, like a car, has definite properties independent of observation or measurement. Meaning the universe exists external to our minds.
For example, a car can have wheels even when no one is looking. And “local” means that this car can only be influenced by its immediate surroundings. And any measurable influence (causes), under the normal rules of physics, cannot travel faster than the speed of light.
But under quantum mechanics, local realism gets a little dicey. And three theoretical physicists, John Clauser, Anton Zeilinger and Alain Aspect, were recently jointly awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for a 1972 experiment, and many subsequent experiments, showing that the local realism view of the universe is likely to be false.
“This work has made clear what quantum mechanics really means,” said Professor Thors Hans Hansson, a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, in response to the…
