Physics Is Rethinking Reality

Started by Deb, April 28, 2018, 09:33:17 AM

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Deb

"The physical universe as idea construction—that instead of the senses perceiving reality, they actually create it." 
—Jane Roberts, Village Voice article part 1, 10/09/78.

"It is quite true that your physical senses create the reality that they perceive."
—SS Chapter 2: Session 515, February 11, 1970

Physics is on the verge of saying "we create our own reality."

From "Should Quantum Anomalies Make Us Rethink Reality?
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/should-quantum-anomalies-make-us-rethink-reality/

Some excerpts:

"because we perceive and experiment on things and events partly defined by an implicit paradigm, these things and events tend to confirm, by construction, the paradigm. No wonder then that we are so confident today that nature consists of arrangements of matter/energy outside and independent of mind."

"according to the current paradigm, the properties of an object should exist and have definite values even when the object is not being observed: the moon should exist and have whatever weight, shape, size and color it has even when nobody is looking at it. Moreover, a mere act of observation should not change the values of these properties."

...when enough "anomalies"—empirically undeniable observations that cannot be accommodated by the reigning belief system—accumulate over time and reach critical mass, paradigms change. We may be close to one such a defining moment today, as an increasing body of evidence from quantum mechanics (QM) renders the current paradigm untenable.

So to salvage the current paradigm there is an important sense in which one has to reject the predictions of QM regarding entanglement. Yet, since Alain Aspect's seminal experiments in 1981–82, these predictions have been repeatedly confirmed, with potential experimental loopholes closed one by one. 1998 was a particularly fruitful year, with two remarkable experiments performed in Switzerland and Austria. In 2011 and 2015, new experiments again challenged non-contextuality. Commenting on this, physicist Anton Zeilinger has been quoted as saying that "there is no sense in assuming that what we do not measure [that is, observe] about a system has [an independent] reality." Finally, Dutch researchers successfully performed a test closing all remaining potential loopholes, which was considered by Nature the "toughest test yet."

The only alternative left for those holding on to the current paradigm is to postulate some form of non-locality: nature must have—or so they speculate—observation-independent hidden properties, entirely missed by QM, which are "smeared out" across spacetime. It is this allegedly omnipresent, invisible but objective background that supposedly orchestrates entanglement from "behind the scenes."

( 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). https://physicsworld.com/a/quantum-physics-says-goodbye-to-reality/ )