Are Physicists Losing their Grip on Reality?

[Dr Alain L Fymat]

Eight “realities” representing eight major guesses of what is going on behind the scenes cloud the new physics vision:

QR # 1: There is no deep reality (known as the Copenhagen Interpretation: I): In this prevailing doctrine of establishment physics, the world we see around us is real enough, but it floats on a world that is not real. What more glaring indication of the depth of the reality crisis than the official rejection of reality itself by the bulk of the physics community? To quote Bohr, its prophet: “There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum description”.

QR # 2: Reality is created by observation (Copenhagen Interpretation: II): There is no reality in the absence of observation, and observation creates reality. To quote John Wheeler’s memorable maxim: “No elementary phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon”.

What QR # 1 and QR # 2 have in common is the assertion that only phenomena are real, the world beneath phenomena is not.

QR # 3: Reality is an undivided wholeness: The observer-created reality is accepted but the act of observation dissolves the boundary between observer and observed - object and subject have become inseparable from each other. Quantum wholeness is a fundamentally new kind of togetherness, undiminished by spatial and temporal separation.

QR # 4: Reality consists of a steadily increasing number of parallel universes: A myriad of universes is created upon the occasion of each measurement act.

QR # 5: The world obeys a non-human kind of reasoning (so-called quantum or “crazy” logic:) Quantum logicians point to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which rejected Euclidean geometry in favor of the Lobachevski-Riemann non-Euclidean geometry. Likewise, they propose to do with logic what these authors did with geometry.

QR # 6: The world is made of ordinary objects or neo-realism: An ordinary object is an entity which possesses attributes of its own whether observed or not.

QR # 7: Consciousness creates reality: John von Neumann gave an elegant mathematical home (Hilbert space) to quantum theory and proved that if quantum theory is correct, the world cannot be made of ordinary objects, i.e. the neorealist interpretation is logically impossible. Further, regarding the “measurement problem”, the central issue, quantum theory suggests an active role for the observer’s consciousness.

QR # 8: The world is two-fold, consisting of potentials and actualities (the duplex world of Werner Heisenberg, a world of potentia and a world of possibilities): The quantum world is not a world of actual events like our own but a world full of numerous unrealized tendencies for action. Heisenberg’s two worlds are bridged by a special interaction which physicists call a “measurement”. During the magic measurement act, one quantum possibility is singled out, abandons its shadowy sisters, and surfaces in our ordinary world as an actual event.

The above eight quantum realities are not put forth as science fiction speculations concerning worlds that might have been, but a serious picture of the one world we actually live in. Since these quantum realities differ so radically, one might expect them to have radically different experimental consequences. An astonishing feature, however, is that they are experimentally indistinguishable. For all presently conceivable experiments, each of these realities predicts exactly the same observable phenomena. At the present, each of these quantum realities must be regarded as a viable candidate for “the way the world really is”. They may, however, all be wrong.

There you have the physicists’ reality crisis! It is two-fold: 1. There are too many of these quantum realities; 2. All of them without exception are preposterous: QR # 1 and QR # 2 are compatible with one another; QR # 3 augments QR # 1 and QR # 2; QR # 4 and QR # 6 contradict QR # 1 and QR # 2; QR # 5 wants to change the human mind rather than quantum theory; QR # 6, that quantum reality closest to old-fashioned notions of how a world should behave contains the requirement that some of these objects move faster than light; QR # 7 contradicts QR # 6; and QR # 8 brings us back to the old concept of potentia in Aristotle’s philosophy. What is your reality?