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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
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday November 19 2019, @04:55PM
My take is that we have big problems with language. The way things are being described, there's a lot of stuff that simply does not make sense. The fault is in the inadequate and plain wrong names and descriptions, not objective reality.
For example, a glass of water can be full, half full/half empty, totally empty, or anything in between. It can even be slightly overfull, temporarily. But it can't have a negative quantity of water.
Extrapolation is a technique that must be considered cautiously. It's so easy for a simple extrapolation to be garbage, routine for a naive application to produce values outside the possible, a color whiter than pure white, blacker than totally, completely black (fuligin?), emptier than empty, or colder than absolute zero. A famous example is Moore's Law about the doubling of computing power every 18 months. We all realize it can't really hold up, that it must break down at some point. Also in this category is the whole notion of traveling backward in time, by extrapolating Relativity to faster than light speeds. The passage of time slows to zero as an object approaches light speed. Therefore, if something were somehow to go faster than light, time would have to run backward for it, and viola! Time travel into the past! Another bad extrapolation is the notion that a black hole might be a point with infinite density and mass.
Adding to the problem is journalistic drama. To use a Betteridge Law style of headline, they might as well have said "Is Everything You Thought You Knew Wrong??" Count on them to mangle scientific findings out of all recognition. They love misusing extrapolation by not bothering to limit it, as that way it is so wont to produce dramatically impossible values.