Genesis by Observership

"Does the Universe Exist if We're Not Looking?" asks this provocative article in the June 2002 issue of the science magazine Discover. Quantum physicist emeritus John Archibald Wheeler, coiner of the term "black hole," thinks perhaps not. Experiments both real and hypothetical suggest that the act of observing — or at least of recording — the outcome of any one of the quantum processes which underlie all of cosmic reality is what actually fixes it and determines its nature. Which single outcome actually occurs, of many equiprobable outcome possibilities, depends on how the quantum event is observed.

This is true even when the ambiguous quantum event in question happened in the past — even though the observation of the event is taking place in the present! Observations now determine events then.

Imagine a photon, a unit of light energy, emitted by a far off quasar. It has two possible paths between there and here on Planet Earth, each path bent towards us by the gravity of a conveniently positioned galaxy. Which of the two paths the photon actually takes, or took, depends on which way we have pointed our observational telescope!

If we point the telescope toward Path #1, the photon proves to have taken Path #1. But if we point the telescope toward Path #2, the photon proves to have taken Path #2. Yet the photon in question had to "choose" which path to take billions of years ago, before there was even life on Earth.

It gets screwier. The phenomena I just reported are consistent with there having been two photons, not one ... but when the light from the distant quasar is so weak that only one photon arrives here at a time, the same thing happens. "The measurements made now, says Wheeler, determine the [single] photon's past."

And if we don't pin the photon's path down telescopically — if we don't observe it at all — guess what? The photon acts not like a particle at all, but like a wave. Or, rather, like a pair of waves, each of which took one of the two different paths, arrived here concurrently, and set up an interference pattern consistent with ordinary multiple-wave behavior.

This thought experment can't actually be done ... but it can be transformed into a slightly different kind of experiment, also done with photons. That transformed experiment was indeed performed at the University of Maryland in 1984. The Maryland experiment confirmed that an act of observation (or complete lack thereof) in the present determines — selects among — equiprobable quantum events that happened in the past.

This mind-bending phenomenon is what Wheeler calls "genesis by observership." In a "participatory universe" like ours, there are "many possible quantum histories." "Clouds of uncertainty" turn into actualities only after the fact. "The mystery of creation may lie not in the distant past but in the living present."

Per Wheeler himself, a cloud of uncertainty can (probably) be turned into an actuality by virtue of its associated quantum event being somehow recorded by an inanimate mechanism. It doesn't have to be observed by a conscious observer. But Stanford University physicist Andrei Linde goes Wheeler one further and claims that conscious observers are indeed necessary. They cannot be replaced by inanimate objects.

"The universe and the observer exist as a pair," Linde says. "You can say that the universe is there only when there is an observer who can say, Yes, I see the universe there. These small words — it looks like it was here — for practical purposes it may not matter much, but for me as a human being, I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers. We are together, the universe and us. The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. A recording device cannot play the role of an observer, because who will read what is written on this recording device? In order for us to see that something happens, and say to one another that something happens, you need to have a universe, you need to have a recording device, and you need to have us. It's not enough for the information to be stored somewhere, completely inaccessible to anybody. It's necessary for somebody to look at it. You need an observer who looks at the universe. In the absence of observers, our universe is dead."

If Linde is right, then Wheeler's own conjecture that "we are part of a universe that is a work in progress; we are tiny patches of the universe looking at itself — and building itself" is true in spades.

I find this interesting because of the parallels between it and my Pearlescence Principle, which says that whatever pearl of wisdom we have utmost faith in shines its "pearlescence" forth from within us, as it were, and colors the external world as we experience it, making it conform to whatever it was we believed it capable of and anticipated it to be. We make the type of world we inhabit, based on our inmost belief.

It's as if our unshakable verities of faith choose which "telescope" we observe the external cosmos through, thereby crystallizing a firm actuality — a Verum Factum — out of what would otherwise be a cloud of uncertainty.