Comments on: Oops, our bad: by observing the universe, we may have doomed it

By: Cat-kha

Cat-kha — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 19:34:00 +0000

ookay. I think I get that. Kind of makes sense actually. Thanks for the info.

Dr. Koslover – my muse says get a grip. While I do not condone her saying rather rude stuff to random randoms I do sort of agree. It was a good post. For those of us without degrees in physics (…yet) it cleared up some stuff, and for those of us who write sci-fi it gave our muses some ideases. Don’t diss what gives us ideases. There aren’t enough to start with!

By: Robert Koslover

Robert Koslover — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 01:11:30 +0000

Speaking as a physicist, it appears to me that this story is an oversimplification of quantum mechanics to such a ridiculous extent that it results in a complete (and quite sensationalist) misunderstanding being conveyed to the public. Making measurements in quantum mechanics can indeed cause “collapse” of the experimental wavefunction involved, but no measurement ever made by a person (who is quite insignificant on the scale of the universe itself) could ever so result in determining or limiting the entire “state” of the universe overall (countless particles and states) such that all of space-time became constrained to conform to a dramatic and macroscopically-different future! My best guess is simply that the scientists who are being cited here are being wildly misquoted and misunderstood by the media. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that has happened. Scientists should be far more careful talking to the press. We (i.e., humans) live in the universe and we can make observations that affect the local quantum states in our lab experiments. But that hardly makes us into all-powerful gods, altering the cosmos itself. After all, nearly all of the universe (which is roughly 13 billion light-years across) goes along just fine without us, and (for now) remains utterly beyond our reach and our control, regardless of whatever measly quantum mechanical experiments we may or may not perform at a university, regardless of what we observe (or do not observe) with our telescopes, and regardless of how excitedly the media may report/misreport our work! Perhaps someday in the future we will learn how to manipulate the entire universe itself. But for now, simply launching a few probes around in our (utterly puny) solar system takes the best technology we have. Does anyone seriously think the universe itself is quaking in its boots just because we are staring at some tiny piece of it through our telescopes and arguing about what we have (or have not) measured and what it means (or doesn’t mean)? Get a grip, folks!

By: SMD

SMD — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 00:14:27 +0000

That’s what confuses me GLP…that’s just completely insane :S.

(thankfully I knew you guys meant “universe” and not “university”, otherwise I would have been even more confused than I am now…)

By: GLP

GLP — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 21:41:29 +0000

What kind of badly designed universe breaks when you look at it?

By: Andres Hax

Andres Hax — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 19:10:00 +0000

Please fix your links so they go to the specific news items and not the home pages of New Scientist and Case Western.

Many thanks. Fantastic site.