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so basically if a particle and it's antiparticle meet in a forest and nobody is around to hear it.....
Wrap your little brains around the "we specifically did NOT observe it, and if we did, it wouldn't have happened, but we proved it happened and that nothing exists when we aren't looking" aspect of this story.
Physics and philosophy
I'm not looking, honest!
Mar 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition
The good news is reality exists. The bad is it’s even stranger than people thought.
“HOW wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.” So said Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Since its birth in the 1920s, physicists and philosophers have grappled with the bizarre consequences that his theory has for reality, including the fundamental truth that it is impossible to know everything about the world and, in fact, whether it really exists at all when it is not being observed. Now two groups of physicists, working independently, have demonstrated that nature is indeed real when unobserved. When no one is peeking, however, it acts in a really odd way.
In the 1990s a physicist called Lucien Hardy proposed a thought experiment that makes nonsense of the famous interaction between matter and antimatter—that when a particle meets its antiparticle, the pair always annihilate one another in a burst of energy. Dr Hardy’s scheme left open the possibility that in some cases when their interaction is not observed a particle and an antiparticle could interact with one another and survive. Of course, since the interaction has to remain unseen, no one should ever notice this happening, which is why the result is known as Hardy’s paradox.
This week Kazuhiro Yokota of Osaka University in Japan and his colleagues demonstrated that Hardy’s paradox is, in fact, correct. They report their work in the New Journal of Physics. The experiment represents independent confirmation of a similar demonstration by Jeff Lundeen and Aephraim Steinberg of the University of Toronto, which was published seven weeks ago in Physical Review Letters.
The two teams used the same technique in their experiments. They managed to do what had previously been thought impossible: they probed reality without disturbing it. Not disturbing it is the quantum-mechanical equivalent of not really looking. So they were able to show that the universe does indeed exist when it is not being observed.
The reality in question—admittedly rather a small part of the universe—was the polarisation of pairs of photons, the particles of which light is made. The state of one of these photons was inextricably linked with that of the other through a process known as quantum entanglement.
The polarised photons were able to take the place of the particle and the antiparticle in Dr Hardy’s thought experiment because they obey the same quantum-mechanical rules. Dr Yokota (and also Drs Lundeen and Steinberg) managed to observe them without looking, as it were, by not gathering enough information from any one interaction to draw a conclusion, and then pooling these partial results so that the total became meaningful.
What the several researchers found was that there were more photons in some places than there should have been and fewer in others. The stunning result, though, was that in some places the number of photons was actually less than zero. Fewer than zero particles being present usually means that you have antiparticles instead. But there is no such thing as an antiphoton (photons are their own antiparticles, and are pure energy in any case), so that cannot apply here.
The only mathematically consistent explanation known for this result is therefore Hardy’s. The weird things he predicted are real and they can, indeed, only be seen by people who are not looking. Dr Yokota and his colleagues went so far as to call their results “preposterous”. Niels Bohr, no doubt, would have been delighted.
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You're welcome in advance.
so basically if a particle and it's antiparticle meet in a forest and nobody is around to hear it.....
That just made my head hurt.
Just when I think I might have a tiny grasp on relativity and quantum mechanics, I get smacked upside the head with something new.
I give up.
Makes sense to me. Good read.
This is so much scheiße. Herr Gott does not play dice with the universe.
Not only does Gott dice spielen, the dice are loaded.
"Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not" — Albert Einstein
Although it is do ented that later in life while seeing his own quote, he commented: "Who knows perhaps He is a little malicious..."
Pfft, I already knew this.
1.21 gigawatts!!!!!!!!!
I think someone has to recalibrate their measuring device.The stunning result, though, was that in some places the number of photons was actually less than zero.
Awesome story.
my personal favorite Einstein quote:
"Imagination is more important than knowledge"
Hahahaha.
If this is Mouse's troll . . . color me impressed.
Einstein :
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly."
particles meeting their anti-particle opposites is evidence of the existence of God.
Given that such an interaction annihilates both particles, I say we throw a few billion worth of that stimulus package towards finding an anti-stupid particle that we can shoot at stupidity to make *it* go away.
(note: not at all saying you're stupid or anything, just musing)
WHAT??
Do you even know what the you're talking about??
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