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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, @06:24PM
As entertaining a thought that is, saying the universe is simulated instead of admitting that consciousness does not hold a sacred place in the cosmos is stretching very far.
(Score: 1) by HOLOGRAPHICpizza on Thursday June 11 2015, @08:37PM
I argue that it is more likely that we are in a simulation than not. Because we could theoretically one day build a computer big enough to hold the data and perform all the physics calculations for a universe. It would probably run much slower than real time, but you could just set up the initial conditions and let a big bang occur and watch solar systems form and life evolve and and all that, just by simulating particles and interactions.
So if one civilization was able to create this, so will the civilizations that evolve within the simulation. I think it's extremely likely that we are in a simulation within a simulation within a simulation countless levels deep. Why should we be so arrogant as to assume we are the "top level universe"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2015, @03:12AM
That logic is quite loose isn't it? It is just as likely that our entire universe is a spontaneous superposition within a dust mote of another larger universe within another larger universe and so on. Given that there are easily many trillions of trillions of dust motes in each one, it is even more likely for a Horton Hears a Who scenario to play out than a nested simulation.
This would work with any other scenario that could both theoretically happen and if it did happen would theoretically happen many times.
Our universe could be just a dream.
There really could be a god of sorts within another god's work such that the universe is a shitty uni group project. [smbc-comics.com]
Existence could be an illusion and the idea of a universe having meaning all together does not make sense.
And things get even weirder if you let Cartesian doubt do what it does.
I argue that of the infinite probable possibilities that we have without the data or means to start crossing them off any one possibility, like being in a simulation, is infinitely unlikely compared to any one of the others being true.