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from the will-this-help-me-win-the-lottery? dept.
A team in Australia turned thought experiment into lab reality by using lasers. Their subject matter was not a photon but a helium atom. The lasers they used served as a pair of grates, one before the other, with the second grate randomly dropped in.
What they found is weirder than anything seen to date: Every time the two grates were in place, the helium atom passed through, on many paths in many forms, just like a wave. But whenever the second grate was not present, the atom invariably passed through the first grate like a particle. The fascinating part was, the second grate's very existence in the path was random. And what's more, it hadn't happened yet.
In other words, it was as if the helium particle "knew" whether there would be a second grate at the time it passed through the first.
Also covered at: phys.org. An abstract is available; full report is pay-walled. The original news article is at Australian National University
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2015, @04:25PM
Problem is if some scientists are right and consciousness is a fundamental and "everything is conscious" (because they have problems with consciousness[1]).
[1] Consciousness is the 2nd most remarkable thing about this universe. The first being that the universe existing in the first place. It's a bit funny that scientists still have difficulty explaining the very first observation they make (assuming that they all experience consciousness - some might not given their responses/arguments on this topic).
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday June 11 2015, @10:50PM
But you're the only truly conscious entity. The rest of us are like NPCs; we're only a simulation of a conscious entity.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek