Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde believes this quantum paradox gets to the heart of Wheeler's idea about the nature of the universe: The principles of quantum mechanics dictate severe limits on the certainty of our knowledge. — Our universe could have popped into existence 13.7 billion years ago without any divine help whatsoever, researchers say. Put a cat in a closed box, along with a vial of poison gas, a piece of uranium, and a Geiger counter hooked up to a hammer suspended above the gas vial. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. For the past two decades, though, he has pursued a far more provocative idea for an idea, something he calls genesis by observership. The observer simultaneously plays a part in creating the reality he is observing. The problem goes back to the earliest days of quantum mechanics and was formulated most famously by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who imagined a Rube Goldberg-type of quantum experiment with a cat. Science does not know if there was any universe before conscious man, Adam, opened his eyes to look at it. Wheeler is gracious to a fault; one colleague describes him as "a gentleman hidden inside a gentleman." Neither becomes real until someone opens the box and looks inside. Bottom line: reality begins and ends with the observer. He just died. The measurements made now, says Wheeler, determine the photon's past. The striped pattern would still show up, meaning that a lone photon not observed by the telescope traveled both paths toward Earth, even if those paths were separated by many light-years. It's got to generate at least some good ideas, even if the question doesn't get answered. John Wheeler, scientist and dreamer, colleague of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, mentor to many of today's leading physicists, and the man who chose the name "black hole" to describe the unimaginably dense, light-trapping objects now thought to be common throughout the universe, turned 90 last July. An astronomer verifies it this way: “The universe brought forth life in order to exist; the very cosmos does not exist unless observed”. And that may indeed be the case. Where Is There Still Room For Growth When It Comes To Content Creation? He is one of the last of the towering figures of 20th-century physics, a member of the generation that plumbed the mysteries of quantum mechanics and limned the utmost reaches of space and time. After a lifetime of fundamental contributions in fields ranging from atomic physics to cosmology, Wheeler has concerned himself in his later years with what he calls "ideas for ideas. Your website access code is located in the upper right corner of the Table of Contents page of your digital edition. If someone tells you this, he is talking nonsense. It's not even really a theory but more of an intuition about what a final theory of everything might be like. At the same time I think it's great to ask the question and see how far you can go before you bump into awall.". In order for us to see that something happens, and say to one another that something happens, you need to have a universe, you need to have a recording device, and you need to have us. It is constructed of what is called qualia, or the subjective conscious experience - that which you experience but which has no external existence. It would be tempting to dismiss Wheeler's thought experiment as a curious idea, except for one thing: It has been demonstrated in a laboratory. But he differs with Wheeler on one crucial point. With that observation, an entire consistent sequence of events— the particle jettisoned from the uranium, the release of the poison gas, the cat's death— at once becomes real, giving the appearance of something that has taken weeks to transpire. Alternating bright stripes in the pattern on the film show where crests from those waves overlap; dark stripes indicate that a crest and a trough have canceled each other. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Is the Multiverse Theory Science Fiction or Science Fact? Wheeler's son, who lives on a cliff a few hundred yards away, has fired a small cannon, a gift from Wheeler. Sometimes light behaves like a compact particle, a photon; sometimes it seems to behave like a wave spread out in space, just like the ripples in a pond. From the quantum perspective the universe is an extremely interactive place. "That rock is about 200 million yearsold," says Wheeler. Something cannot be of different colors, smells or sounds at the same time. We are together, the universe and us. Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news. The Universe is not Observer-Dependent And this is the final part we have arrived at concerning my view on consciousness and possibilities in the realm of physics concerning it. The trail of disrupted atoms left in the mica by the high-energy particle becomes part of the real world. Does this mean humans are necessary to the existence of the universe? Want it all? The outcome of the experiment depends on what the physicists try to measure: If they set up detectors beside the slits, the photons act like ordinary particles, always traversing one route or the other, not both at the same time. So why should we think we're at the point where we can understand everything? "You know, if you say that we're smart enough to figure everything out, that is a very arrogant thought. The universe could probably exist without an observer, but for this existence to mean something there would have to be an observer who is conscious of it. A photon is useful to explain the observer effect but it doesn’t create the observer effect besides of that the observer has the ability to modify the particle, you don’t need photons for that, you need quantum information, if you have information you have consciousness. So,the answer is clear :no time and distances can ever exist in an empty universe,which itself couldn’t be called this way any longer,owing its name to the presence of material objects in it. Instead, what would happen according to quantum physics is that the universe could exist as a superposition of states, unfolding simultaneously in every possible permutation, until such a time when an observer springs up in one such possible universe. "You can say that the universe is there only when there is an observer who can say, Yes, I see the universe there. "That's the same Schrödinger cat question. originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. Linde believes that Wheeler's intuition of the participatory nature of reality is probably right. But the very fact that he asks these questions, and suggests some plausible — and implausible — answers, it has shaken these boundaries of what is possible and what is impossible to ask.". We all learned from people like John Wheeler, who asks strange questions and gives strange answers. This is basically the essense of the mind-body problem in philosophy. Why Is The Future Of Business About Creating A Shared Value For Everyone? "I'm happy that some people who previously thought this question — How come existence? The major result of the subset of the set expression ( A ⊆ B ) is that if the universe is ''A'' then it is not observer … As Wheeler voices his thoughts, he laces his fingers behind his large head, leans back onto a sofa, and gazes at the ceiling or perhaps far beyond it. The question from the human perspective should be "Does the conscious observer needs a universe to exist?" I come from Russia, where there is a fairy tale about two frogs in a can of sour cream. Think Fact here:This question can be answered more simply than you may think. During the interaction, the quantum system is confined to an eigenstate. Outside, the fog is beginning to lift on what promises to be a hot summer day. It's a tenuous lead, a clue that the mystery of creation may lie not in the distant past but in the living present. When physicists use the photon detectors, the result is unsurprising: Every photon is observed to pass through one slit or the other. 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