From Ars Technica:
For example, say I shoot a single photon at a single atom, which may or may not absorb the photon. According to quantum mechanics, the atom enters a superposition state where it’s both in its ground state and its excited state. We describe this superposition state with a wave function. One view of quantum mechanics states that the wave function really represents the atom. But an alternative interpretation is that the wave function represents what I, the observer, know about the atom—reality may be something else entirely.
…
Now, a group of researchers has extended previous work to show that, yes, under a wide range of conditions, these two points of view do differ. They show that the wave function must in some sense represent the observed system rather than what the observer knows about the system.
…
This paper is one of a series that is starting to reveal that our world is actually a quantum mechanical world at its very heart. Some aspects of it are non-local, some aspects of it are not real, and some aspects of it allow you to perform counterfactual operations.
The paper referenced is here.
See also: What great physicists have said about immateriality and consciousness
Follow UD News at Twitter!
I really like how he started his article:
Quantum state may be a real thing – July 2, 2014
Excerpt: At the very heart of quantum mechanics lies a monster waiting to consume unwary minds. This monster goes by the name The Nature of Reality™. The greatest of physicists have taken one look into its mouth, saw the size of its teeth, and were consumed. Niels Bohr denied the existence of the monster after he nonchalantly (and very quietly) exited the monster’s lair muttering “shut up and calculate.” Einstein caught a glimpse of the teeth and fainted. He was reportedly rescued by Erwin Schrödinger at great personal risk, but neither really recovered from their encounter with the beast.,,,
http://arstechnica.com/science.....eal-thing/
🙂
Reminds me of this,,,
Why Quantum Theory Does Not Support Materialism – By Bruce L Gordon:
Excerpt: Because quantum theory is thought to provide the bedrock for our scientific understanding of physical reality, it is to this theory that the materialist inevitably appeals in support of his worldview. But having fled to science in search of a safe haven for his doctrines, the materialist instead finds that quantum theory in fact dissolves and defeats his materialist understanding of the world.
http://www.4truth.net/fourtrut.....8589952939
Oooh err…. That writer for Ars Technica nearly gave the game away, subverting atheism’s own subversion of science, back to the realm of theistic reason and reality.
‘Counter-factual’, he wrote. Well you have to concede that that beats ‘counter-intuitive’, but how’s about we don’t keep beating about the bush and start calling it what it really is, i.e. ‘counter-rational’, or ‘counter-logical’.
And, indeed, why not, ‘non spatio-temporal’, instead of ‘non-local’. After all, implying that it’s not just ’round the corner’ is hardly indicative of the full import of the term and its Singularly extraordinary implications.
But, then, non spatio-temporal is unapologetically inimical to scientism, and we can’t have that at any price can we, boys and girls?
@bornagain
Hey born again, can I ask you a question pertaining to the following article?
http://www.reasonablefaith.org.....hen-we-die
In another world, Leonard Susskind followed in his father’s footsteps and became a Jewish Plumber working in New York. In this world, he chose Physics over Plumbing.
The conclusion of this lecture is a bit on-topic, although the subject of “Universe as a Hologram” is a bit off topic. Helpful (no math) explanation though, must be a public lecture
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....ata_player
VunderGuy, yes? Interesting paper that I don’t fully agree with. What would you like to ask.
As to consciousness in quantum mechanics. That consciousness is integral to quantum mechanics is fairly obvious to the unbiased observer (no pun intended). I first, much like everybody else, was immediately shocked to learn that the observer could have any effect whatsoever in the double slit experiment:
Prof. Zeilinger makes this rather startling statement in the preceding video:
I think Feynman, who had high regard for the double slit experiment, sums the ‘paradox’ up extremely well,
Dean Radin, who spent years at Princeton testing different aspects of consciousness, recently performed experiments testing the possible role of consciousness in the double slit. His results were, not so surprisingly, very supportive of consciousness’s central role in the experiment:
Of course, atheists/materialists were/are in complete denial as to the obvious implications of mind in the double slit (invoking infinite parallel universes and such as that to try to get around the obvious implications of ‘Mind’). But personally, not being imprisoned in the materialist’s box, my curiosity was aroused and I’ve been sort of poking around, finding out a little more here and there about quantum mechanics, and how the observer is central to it. One of the first interesting experiments in quantum mechanics I found after the double slit, that highlighted the centrality of the observer to the experiment, was Wigner’s Quantum Symmetries. Here is Wigner commenting on the key experiment that led Wigner to his Nobel Prize winning work on quantum symmetries,,,
Wigner went on to make these rather dramatic comments in regards to his work:
Also of note:
Then after I had learned about Wigner’s Quantum Symmetries, I stumbled across Wheeler’s Delayed choice experiments in which this finding shocked me as to the central importance of the observer’s free will choice in quantum experiments:
Then, a little bit later, I learned that the delayed choice experiment had been extended:
And then I learned the delayed choice experiment was refined yet again:
i.e. The preceding experiment clearly shows, and removes any doubt whatsoever, that the ‘material’ detector recording information in the double slit is secondary to the experiment and that a conscious observer being able to consciously know the ‘which path’ information of a photon with local certainty, is of primary importance in the experiment. You can see a more complete explanation of the startling results of the experiment at the 9:11 minute mark of the following video:
And then, after the delayed choice experiments, I learned about something called Leggett’s Inequality. Leggett’s Inequality was, as far as I can tell, a mathematical proof developed by Nobelist Anthony Leggett to prove ‘realism’. Realism is the belief that an objective reality exists independently of a conscious observer looking at it. And, as is usual with challenging the predictions of Quantum Mechanics, his proof was violated by a stunning 80 orders of magnitude, thus once again, in over the top fashion, highlighting the central importance of the conscious observer to Quantum Experiments:
The following video and paper get the general, and dramatic, point across of what ‘giving up realism’ actually means:
But, as if all that was not enough to demonstrate consciousness’s centrality in quantum mechanics, I then learned about something called the ‘Quantum Zeno Effect’,,
The reason why I am very impressed with the Quantum Zeno effect as to establishing consciousness’s primacy in quantum mechanics is, for one thing, that Entropy is, by a wide margin, the most finely tuned of initial conditions of the Big Bang:
For another thing, it is interesting to note just how foundational entropy is in its explanatory power for actions within the space-time of the universe:
In fact, entropy is also the primary reason why our physical, temporal, bodies grow old and die,,,
And yet, to repeat,,,
This is just fascinating! Why in blue blazes should conscious observation put a freeze on entropic decay, unless consciousness was/is more foundational to reality than the 1 in 10^10^120 entropy is?
Putting all the lines of evidence together the argument for God from consciousness can now be framed like this:
Related notes on ‘interaction free’ measurement:
Verse and Music:
Supplemental Notes:
supplemental note to Quantum Zeno effect and interaction free measurement:
@bornagain77
I’m trying to understand what Dr. Craig pictures the afterlife to be like, though, since, I suppose you do not agree with it, I suppose I’m trying to figure out how you understand it, preferably in flow chart form with ‘Embodied Death’ being the first part of the events that take place.
Embodied Death–>
VunderGuy, well the reasons why I hold Near Death Experiences(NDES) to be valid are multifaceted. To start, I guess it would be good to point out that, contrary to popular opinion, there is a drastic difference between the Near Death Experiences of Judeo-Christian cultures and foreign cultures. All foreign, non-Judeo-Christian culture, NDE studies I have looked at have a extreme rarity of encounters with ‘The Being Of Light’ and tend to be very unpleasant NDE’s save for the few pleasant children’s NDEs of those cultures that I’ve seen, (It seems there is indeed may be an ‘age of accountability’),.
The following study was shocking for what was found in some non-Judeo-Christian NDE’s:
Here are some other foreign cultures whose NDEs are just plain strange:
I’ve spent several hours looking for foreign cultures that mention the tunnel, the ‘Being of Light’. overwhelming love and happiness, reunion we departed loved ones. And only found a very few. Not so surprisingly, after researching those few a bit more deeply I found that some of them happened to people who had grown up in the Judeo-Christian west and the other positive Near Death Experience happened to a child. Along that line, the following is a very interesting NDE of a Jewish woman who, though being in the presence of Christ, never acknowledge Him as “the Messiah”, nor does it appear Christ was particularly interested in revealing exactly who He was/is to her:
And although there are negative, hellish, Near Death Experiences in the Judeo-Christian west, the majority of Near Death Experiences in the Judeo Christian west, at least the ones which are most often reported, are extremely pleasant, heavenly, experiences, which have an overriding core of similarity between them that lends significant weight to their overall credibility as to being valid.
But are these experiences really real? i.e. Is there any ‘scientific’ backing for them???
Well I think there is overwhelming scientific evidence to back these testimonies up.
In fact, when compared to the observational evidence for Darwinian evolution (which is zero), the evidence that Near Death Experiences are to be considered valid is a slam dunk:
In the following study, some atheistic researcher(s) set out to prove that Near Death Experiences were merely hallucinations. He/they were very surprised by what they found:
This evidence is pretty good so far as it goes, but does physics, the granddaddy of all science, support the validity of these experiences. In others words, are Near Death Experiences plausible given what we know about the structure of reality from physics? The answer to that question is, YES! Physics reveals that there are two very different ‘qualities of eternity’. One for special relativity and one for General Relativity:
This following confirmation of time dilation is my favorite since they have actually caught time dilation on film
(of note: light travels approx. 1 foot in a nanosecond (billionth of a second) whilst the camera used in the experiment takes a trillion pictures a second):
And, as with any observer accelerating to the speed of light, it is found that for any ‘hypothetical’ observer falling to the event horizon of a black hole, that time, as we understand it, will come to a complete stop for them. This is because the accelerative force of gravity at black holes is so intense that not even light can escape its grip:
And as with the ‘tunnel curvature’ we see in the space-time of a black hole, there is also tunnel curvature in space-time for any hypothetical observer accelerating to the speed of light. Please note, at the 3:22 minute mark of the following video, when the 3-Dimensional world ‘folds and collapses’ into a tunnel shape as a ‘hypothetical’ observer moves towards the ‘higher dimension’ of the speed of light, (Of note: This following video was made by two Australian University Physics Professors with a supercomputer.).
It is also very interesting to note that Special Relativity and General Relativity reveal two very different ‘qualities of eternity’ (as predicted in Christian Theism). In particular, Black Holes are found to be ‘timeless’ singularities of destruction and disorder rather than singularities of creation and order such as the extreme order we see at the creation event of the Big Bang.
Needless to say, the implications of this ‘eternity of destruction’ should be fairly disturbing for those of us who are of the ‘spiritually minded’ persuasion!
Moreover, in stark contrast to Darwinian claims of which we have no direct observational evidence, we have actual observational evidence from Near Death Experience testimonies of eternity and of people going through a tunnel to a higher heavenly dimension,,,
As well, A man, at the 7:00 minute mark of this video, gives testimony of falling down a ‘tunnel’ in the transition stage from this world to hell (perhaps it should more appropriately be termed purgatory!?!):
In light of this dilemma that the two very different eternities present to us spiritually minded people, and the fact that Gravity is, in so far as we can tell, completely incompatible with Quantum Mechanics, it is interesting to point out a subtle nuance on the Shroud of Turin. Namely that Gravity was overcome in the resurrection event of Christ:
Moreover, as would be expected if General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics (QED) were truly unified in the resurrection of Christ from death, the image on the shroud is found to be formed by a quantum process. The image was not formed by a ‘classical’ process:
Also in congruence with Near Death Experience testimonies, if scientists want to find the source for the supernatural light which made the “3D – photographic negative” image on the Shroud I suggest they look to the thousands of documented Near-Death Experiences (NDE’s) in Judeo-Christian cultures. It is in their testimonies that you will find mention of an indescribably bright ‘Light’ or ‘Being of Light’ who is always described as being of a much brighter intensity of light than the people had ever seen before.
All people who have been in the presence of ‘The Being of Light’, while having a deep NDE, have no doubt whatsoever that the ‘The Being of Light’ they were in the presence of is none other than ‘The Lord God Almighty’ of heaven and earth.
Personally, considering the extreme difficulty that many brilliant minds have had in trying to reconcile Quantum Mechanics and special relativity(QED), with Gravity,
I consider the ‘quantum’ nuance on the Shroud of Turin, which a listed previously, to be a subtle, but powerful, evidence substantiating Christ’s primary claim as to being our Savior from sin, death, and hell:
John 8:23-24
But he continued, “You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world. I told you that you would die in your sins; if you do not believe that I am he, you will indeed die in your sins.
That eternity would be confirmed by both physics and direct ‘observational’ evidence, and that there are two different ‘qualities of eternity’ to be concerned about, should make any normal person who is not right with God shake in their boots. Myself, (not that I can do, or am, anything in myself to ‘earn’ his love and forgiveness), I’m more than happy to entrust my soul to Jesus and trust that my sins are atoned for, in light of a infinitely holy and just God, by His perfect sacrifice!
Music and quote:
supplemental note:
As well, there is evidence from physics, and molecular biology, (biophotonic light, quantum DNA and quantum proteins), for a soul that leaves the body upon mortal death, but I think what I’ve laid out thus far is more than enough to chew on for right now, so I will end it here.
@Bornagain
Ummm… that didn’t really answer my question. I would prefer it if you focused on that, please.
Well VunderGuy, I’m sorry that you found my post entirely useless, seeing that it took a while to put it together. I’ll pass on wasting another evening.