Re: [asa] The cat strikes again!

What I find problematic is the idea that dark energy has remained completely unentangled from other observables over a period of 15 billion years.? We are able to perform the 2-slit experiment because we can maintain the coherence of the photon over such a short path.? But if we allow the two paths of the photon to interact with everything in the room before putting them through the interferometer then the coherence will have been lost (because we are already observing the photon's effects indirectly through the other observables in the room).? Similarly, dark energy has been interacting with the entire universe, so even though its existence may not have been deduced its presence has nevertheless "thermalized" with too many things and it would be impossible for us not to have observed its effects unknowingly already.? Even dinosaurs have looked up in the sky?and surely they saw the twinkling stars, and those stars would not have been in precisely those locations if dark energ
 y were not accelerating the universe ever-so slightly.? So haven't dinosaurs already made this measurement, albeit without going through the mathematical calculations to discover what it was that put the stars exactly where they observed them??

This also raises the question, how intelligent does a species have to be before its observations will affect quantum mechanics?? If a chimp looks?through the microscope, will it reset the?timing of the quantum events the same was as if a human did the looking?? This is one of the conceptual problems that makes the Copenhagen view difficult to swallow.? I.e., if Schroedinger's cat was inside the box, then didn't the cat itself already observe whether the poison vial was broken before we opened the box?? Or can only an observer with an IQ of 120 or higher collapse the wavefunction?

Phil

The editor says at the start,?"this report apparently assumes that humans are alone in the universe" but doesn't comment further on that.? It does deserve further reflection.? The validity of Krauss & Dent's argument does at least require that no other intelligent species in the universe has developed to the point of being able to make the astronomical observations we've made in the past?20 years.

?

& there's another point:? Speaking of "observing dark energy" is a bit problematic.? We've observed accelerating expansion of galaxies & have explained that in terms of the gravitational effect of dark energy.? But is dark energy in fact the explanation for cosmic acceleration?? In the double slit experiment, we could in principle determine which slit a photon has gone through by looking for its gravitational influence because we know that there is EM energy somewhere in the system & that (at least if general relativity is right)?that such energy has a gravitational effect, so we could reasonably infer the position of a photon from observations of the motion of a?test particle.? But we don't know enough about what causes cosmic acceleration to be able to make such inferences with complete confidence in that case.

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Received on Wed Nov 28 10:37:23 2007