‘Metaphysical Experiments’ Test Hidden Assumptions About Reality
‘Metaphysical Experiments’ Test Hidden Assumptions About Reality
Experiments that test physics and philosophy “as a single whole” may be our only route to surefire knowledge about the universe.
A nice write up around the lead researcher and context for what I think was one of the most important pieces of Physics research in the past five years, further narrowing the constraints beyond the more well known Bell experiments.
BELL’S THEOREM WAS only the beginning.
In the wake of experiments violating Bell-type inequalities, several views of reality remained on the table. You could keep realism and give up locality, accepting that what happens in one corner of the universe instantaneously affects what happens in another and therefore that relativity must be modified. Or you could keep locality and give up realism, accepting that things in the universe don’t have definite features prior to being measured — that nature is, in some profound sense, making things up on the fly.
But even if you gave up on a pre-measurement reality, you could still hang on to a post-measurement reality. That is, you could imagine taking all those measurement outcomes and piecing them together into a single, shared reality. That’s typically what we mean by “reality.” It’s the very notion of an objective world.
Pretty interesting, and doesn't invalidate my own beliefs about the universe (many-worlds with some extra flavor). I love these new paradigms of thought and science, testing the contexts themselves to understand the limits of knowledge and testability.