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Reality does not exist

by on04 July 2022


It is Monday, so this should cheer you up

Boffins from the Federal University of ABC (UFABC) in Brazil claim that they have conclusive proof that reality might be "in the eye of the observer."

Searching for the answer to the question “If a Tree Falls in a Forest does any one hear?” he boffins appear to have proof that waking up this morning was probably a pointless exercise.

In their new research, published in the journal Communications Physics in April, the scientists in Brazil attempted to verify the "complementarity principle" the famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr proposed in 1928.

It states that objects come with certain pairs of complementary properties, which are impossible to observe or measure at the same time, like energy and duration, or position and momentum.

So no matter how you set up an experiment involving a pair of electrons, there's no way you can study the position of both quantities at the same time: the test will illustrate the position of the first electron, but obscure the position of the second particle (the complementary particle) at the same time. This makes the reality you see unmeasurable and therefore subjective.

So when you opened your eyes this morning you could only see a realtity you created, so what happened at breakfast was all your own fault.

Roberto M. Serra, a quantum information science and technology researcher at UFABC, who led the experiment, told  Popular Mechanics. We used nuclear magnetic resonance techniques similar to those used in medical imaging.  Particles like protons, neutrons, and electrons all have a nuclear spin, which is a magnetic property analogous to the orientation of a needle in a compass.

"We manipulated these nuclear spins of different atoms in a molecule employing a type of electromagnetic radiation. In this setup, we created a new interference device for a proton nuclear spin to investigate its wave and particle reality in the quantum realm," Serra said.

"This new arrangement produced exactly the same observed statistics as previous quantum delayed-choice experiments," Pedro Ruas Dieguez, now a postdoctoral research fellow at the International Centre for Theory of Quantum Technologies (ICTQT) in Poland, who was part of the study, tells Popular Mechanics. "However, in the new configuration, we were able to connect the result of the experiment with the way waves and particles behave in a way that verifies Bohr's complementarity principle," Dieguez said.

Basically, the physical reality in the quantum world is made of mutually exclusive entities that, nonetheless, do not contradict but complete each other.

 

Last modified on 04 July 2022
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