Closer To Truth – Physics of the Observer
Closer To Truth traveled to Banff, Canada and captured these interviews with support from the Physics of the Observer program of the Foundational Questions Institute (fqxi.org). We had the opportunity to film leading edge physicists and scholars on the role of the observer, and their insights into the profound and mysterious world of quanta, nature and physics. We hope you will enjoy our investigation in Physics of the Observer.
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Closer To Truth investigates Physics of the Observer
Robert, empirical reality is a consensus among observers as to the content of their shared experience.
They can potentially 'experience' a vast welter of worlds. We call that, in humans, imagination.
In a more abstract swarm of, say, identically constructed IGUSs, the totality of "imagination" is equivalent to the space of all the models that the IGUSs can configure.
This is the total potentiality of 'Something'. We can, incidentally, formalise an 'Everything' from this; and even a 'Nothing'.
…And thereby put poor Leibniz out of his misery. Another time perhaps.
Empirical experience is the subset of that potentiality that is consistently shared by the IGUS swarm; and thus deemed subject to scientific investigation.
I emphasise: an 'observer' IGUS must be part of a society of similar IGUSs who who share and elaborate common experiences.
A single IGUS merely hallucinates. It takes a society of IGUSs of a particular ilk to do Science.
A Generalised Quantum situation arises from a description of the filtering process whereby the IGUS society winnows empirical data from their space of potentiality referred to above.
The Big Fiction in the culture of Physics even to today, is that a single Angelic observer can exist independently of the observed system and somehow take notes!
This is absurd. The notetaking IGUS necessarily has to exchange information with the observed system; binding them both into a supersystem in which the IGUS is embedded.
In classical physics (Newton, Lagrange, Hamilton, Maxwell, Einstein) the Big Fiction is sustainable because of the very coarse granularity of the modelling.
QM is too fine grained to sustain the Lie; and the Big Fiction collapses.
Theoretical physics today is a world of vast prodigality, where we squander precious minds who still futilely labour to place epicycles upon epicycles; and ceaselessly argue about angels dancing on pinheads.
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