"Why not see how far you can stretch? The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. 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. For instance, the carbon atoms in your body are "fossils" created in the heart of exploding supernova stars. Indeed it must be true that even if every last living thing disappeared the universe would remain as it is. In the absence of observers, our universe is dead. Why Is January 1 the Beginning of a New Year? To suggest that time cannot exist without matter or energy is not a particularly meaningful statement, GG, albeit a bloody obvious one. And many things in this universe are in eigenstates every once in a while simply because of the way they interact with other things which are, for all practical intents and purposes, classical. Simply put, it cannot be described by ordinary numbers. Wheeler suspects that most of the universe consists of huge clouds of uncertainty that have not yet interacted either with a conscious observer or even with some lump of inanimate matter. But that courtly demeanor also hides something else: one of the most adventurous minds in physics. Wigner doesn't have access to this fact from the outside, and according to quantum mechanics, must describe the friend and the coin to be in a superposition of … Does this mean humans are necessary to the existence of the universe? 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.". 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. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Here's the odd part. Geiger counter) detects radioactivity (i.e. 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. consciousness in … For the past two decades, though, he has pursued a far more provocative idea for an idea, something he calls genesis by observership. What Impact Is Technology Having On Today’s Workforce? Answer by Viktor T. Toth, IT pro, part-time physicist, on Quora: If quantum physics states matter doesn't exist when it's not being noticed, then, without life, would the universe cease to exist? You may have heard that this means that every single electron goes through both slits. So yes, it goes through both slits and does many other things that classical objects just cannot do (and it is wrong even to try to visualize the electron when it is in this quantum state). William Wootters, one of Wheeler's many students and now a professor of physics at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, sees Wheeler as an almost oracular figure. 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. Wheeler is the first to admit that this is a mind-stretching idea. Just as in the two-slit experiment, light — photons — from the quasar can follow two different paths, past one galaxy or the other. When you open the cat's box after a week, you're going to find either a live cat or a smelly piece of meat. To demonstrate, he sketches a diagram on a scrap of paper. If the astronomers point a telescope in the direction of one of the two intervening galaxies, they will see photons from the quasar that were deflected by that galaxy; they would get the same result by looking at the other galaxy. 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