In the world of quantum physics, it is believed that the act of observing something can change the outcome. (The observer effect)
So with that in mind; would the universe still exist (as we know it) if no one were in it to observe it?
Of course. Unless you pre-suppose some sort of God/gods then presumably the universe existed for hundreds of millions or billions of years before there could possibly have been any ‘someone’ to observe it.
-XT
Define “exist”.
Are you suggesting that the universe didn’t exist until the first man opened his eyes?
Of course if you believe in the Anthropic principal, it may be that the vast majority of unobserved universes are highly unstable and vanish instantaneously. So from that point of view maybe not.
How do I know that anyone else observes the universe? Perhaps the universe stops existing when I go to sleep, and comes back into existence when I wake up in the morning.
However, an “observer” in quantum mechanics can be nothing more than a nearby atom to be affected by it. It does not require the observer to be sentient.
Apologies, I used a poor choice of words in my OP. I think that it would exist. My question is would it exist as it does today?
Also, we have to question if causality and effect are always so straight forward.
A man with normal sight walks into a room, sees a red lamp, and leaves.
A man who is colorblind walks into a room and sees a grey lamp, and leaves.
When they both walk into the room together, does what the colorblind man see effect the reality of what the man with normal sight sees?
I’m not any sort of expert, but that’s not my understanding. I always thought that, as in the double-slit experiment, if there’s no observer then the particle exists as a wave function that exhibits several outcomes that are contradictory (in the sense of classical physics) simultaneously. If an observer is watching to see whether the particle goes through one particular slit, then the observer collapses the wave function and make the particle ‘choose’ a single outcome. A single atom responding to the particle would not collapse the wave function unless someone is watching the atom. Without the observer watching the atom, it too exists as a wave function. The famous Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment is intended to take this idea to absurd extremes.
What makes you think the Universe exists?
It’d be kind of hard to prove otherwise.
What was he sleeping on before he woke up?
He wasn’t sleeping on anything: the universe didn’t exist, so there was nothing for him to sleep on.
No, the Universe would not exist, but Bishop Berkeley would.
I’m no expert, but it seems to me “Consciousness causes collapse” is a silly theory that introduces far more problems than it feigns to solve. I don’t know the ideal of interpretation of the math, but there seems to me no particular reason to interpret it that way, and given what pop science has done with it, it is perhaps particularly deleterious to understanding…
The universe would exist, because though there is no sentient observer the conditions exist that make the possibility of there being one at a later moment of existance.
If you bring this down to the Koan level though with the famous “If a tree fell in a forest and there was nobody there.Would it make a sound ?”
The answer would be different, as the question is different.
Assuming that there are no humans or animals there, there would be no sound.
Sound is an experience of the brain translating a physical event.
No sentient being, no sound.
But there WOULD be vibrations in the air caused by the tree.
Not really. That guy who was quoted in the Wikipedia article is Fritjof Capra, who wrote The Tao of Physics, which was the worst book on quantum physics ever written. I read it back in the 1980s - it’s just Capra desperately trying again and again to tie together any findings from quantum mechanics to traditional eastern mysticism. Deepak Chopra probably gets his goofy ideas from that book.
Anyway, it’s completely accepted that the observer does not need to be conscious. To reply to ITR Champion, an observer in the double-slit experiment can simply be a detector placed at one of the slits, to detect when the electron passes through that one.
A probability wave! Or something.