The Universe Damaged By Observation?

ScentCone writes "The Telegraph covers a New Scientist report about two US cosmologists who suggest that, a la Schrodinger's possibly unhappy cat, the act of observing certain facets of our universe may have shortened its life . From the article: 'Prof Krauss says that the measurement of the light from supernovae in 1998, which provided evidence of dark energy, may have reset the decay of the void to zero — back to a point when the likelihood of its surviving was falling rapidly.'"

Crap, crap, crap

[SpectreBlofeld]

I sincerely hope this is a case of a reporter misunderstanding a scientist's statement.

  Waveform collapse applies to quantum probabilities, not passive long-distance observations. They occur because an observer influences an observation; interfering with that which is observed is the only way one can observe it on the scales in which quantum phenomena occur. When observing the light of stars, no information is being sent back to the source; and the idea that consciousness somehow magically induces waveform collapse has all but died, favoring instead theories of quantum decoherence and the indroduction of new 'thermal' states during the observation process as the trigger for waveform collapse.

  My only hope is that they've cooked up this idea simply to show how silly the idea of consciousness-triggered waveform collapse is; much like Schrodinger created the cat thought experiment to demonstrate what he saw as a flaw of the Copenhagen interpretation of superposition.

Re:Already Proposed

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I always believe the thorough investigations I read in fucking novels.

This is some of the worst science reporting ever!

[GPS Pilot]

TFA goes on to say that the recent reinterpretation of the source of soft x-rays [slashdot.org] is another example of astronomers "causing damage to the heavens." It actually implies that the x-ray astronomers caused the universe to lose one fifth of its mass.

We need to reign in these rogue astronomers, stat!! LOL

Re:Life imitates Douglas Adams

[onion_joe]

Naw, it was by Arthur C. Clarke. The 9 Billion Names of God [lucis.net]

Re:consciousness does not...

[geekoid]

Yes.

Re:Quarantine by Greg Egan

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Egan later said in interviews that he doesn't believe in the Copenhagen interpretation, and is instead is a fan of Everett's steady-state formulation. He just thought the Copenhagen interpretation made for good science fiction.

Re:On first glance...

[ETEQ]

You misunderstand - that's certainly true if this were about us measuring light from stars of planets, but that's not what this is about. The form of Dark Energy this article is talking about is generally modeled as a quantized scalar field. But one of the things that lets Dark Energy act the way it does is that its essentially uniform on all scales, so it can be thought of as sort of a universal wave function (this isn't strictly true, but to a first approximation, its probably the easiest way to think about it). It actually turns out that the math behind a scalar field is substantially easier than the math for photons (which are EM radiation, which is a quantized vector field), and if you treat dark energy that way, it's sort of like treating the whole universe as a a single particle with a unified wave function that we're collapsing when we measure cosmological values.

Re:On first glance...

[BungaDunga]

Quoth Wikipedia:

The most baffling part of this experiment comes when only one photon at a time is fired at the barrier with both slits open. The pattern of interference remains the same as can be seen if many photons are emitted one at a time and recorded on the same sheet of photographic film. The clear implication is that something with a wavelike nature passes simultaneously through both slits and interferes with itself -- even though there is only one photon present. (The experiment works with electrons, atoms, and even some molecules too.)