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posted by Fnord666 on Monday November 18 2019, @10:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-reject-your-reality-... dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956__

Study: There may be no such thing as objective reality

Everyone is entitled to their own facts. That's not an opinion. At least, according to a new quantum mechanics study.

What we view as objective reality – the idea that what we can observe, measure, and prove is real and those things we cannot are theoretical or imaginary – is actually a subjective reality that we either unravel, create, or dis-obfuscate by the simple act of observation.

A smarter way of putting it can be found in the aforementioned study, "Experimental test of nonlocal causality" conducted by lead author Martin Ringbauer and an international team of physicists and researchers:

Explaining observations in terms of causes and effects is central to empirical science. However, correlations between entangled quantum particles seem to defy such an explanation. This implies that some of the fundamental assumptions of causal explanations have to give way.

Also at The Conversation


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Monday November 18 2019, @02:29PM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) on Monday November 18 2019, @02:29PM (#921506)

    Everyone is entitled to their own facts. That's not an opinion. At least, according to a new quantum mechanics study.

    Nope major mistake of scaling. You can't scale quantum sized effects to human political issue size.

    For example, friction exists on a large macro scale that makes nuts and screws and car tires work. On a microscopic scale there's just massively complicated mechanical engineering interactions between rough surfaces with some bias between parts due to differing chemical composition. You can simulate the interaction of a rolling rubber round-thing and a concrete flat-thing and none of that "friction" stuff exists its merely an artifact of microscopic mechanical engineering issues. Therefore scientists have proven nuts and bolts will magically unscrew themselves and car tires no longer work. Naw wait the real world doesn't work that way.

    Or imagine the stupidity of claiming that because electrons can jump nano-scale insulator films under certain probability and electric field conditions, the existence of various working commercialized electronic devices somehow "proves" the existence of Harry Potter magic doors that people who really want to really hard can walk thru. Surely if electrons can jump thin insulator films via scientific physics, then large humans who really feel strongly or hate Trump hard enough or similar nonsense can walk thru solid doors and walls, I mean popular science proved it because Quantum is a magic word that means there's no rules, at least to the uneducated.

    A math CS analogy would be childish attempts at using Gödel's incompleteness theorems as an "out" to avoid learning number theory or doing research. Its possible in theory to define unanswerable questions doesn't mean a get out of jail free excuse to be lazy. And then bad journalists tend to pervert the math/scientific result into something trendy and meaningless, "Godel proved Jesus is real" if pandering to somewhat more sane people, or "Godel proved Greta is a saint" for the somewhat more insane people.

    I mean I get the motivation by popular science reporters to try and excrete some kinda of sermon about a cool scientific result in a format that the marching morons will understand; sometimes its not possible, and its a major ethical / moral failure to try to drum up attention by, frankly, outright lying about the scientific result.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18 2019, @07:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 18 2019, @07:38PM (#921638)

    And then bad journalists tend to pervert the math/scientific result into something trendy and meaningless, "Godel proved Jesus is real" if pandering to somewhat more sane people, or "Godel proved Greta is a saint" for the somewhat more insane people.

    Exactly true. As a case-in-point, consider the Higgs-Boson. Just because some scientists out of frustration called it "the Goddam particle," which got censored to "the God particle," you had all these reports and pop-culture references about finding spirituality in the search for it.

    Poe's Law, only applied to real life I guess.

    As a side note, as I'm already responding, this article does not pass the "sniff" test, at least to me. It smacks of the Romantic-era "everything in subjective." I'll admit many things are subjective, but it's hard to imagine that EVERYTHING is subjective. If somebody really says that, I'd be more than happy to wager with them that the sun will rise tomorrow... they can even set the odds.