Quantum Reality: Proof that an Observer is not Needed
In a previous article entitled “The Fallacy at the Heart of Quantum Physics” [1], I said that observers making measurements were not required to collapse the wave function and determine the state of a quantum system. I proposed that any interaction with its environment would cause a quantum particle to take on a specific state in relation to that environment.
My main contention was that for almost 14 billion years the universe unfolded without observers making measurements. In that time, particles formed, combined into atoms and molecules, built stars and galaxies, created life, which eventually evolved the consciousness required to create experiments to measure stuff. The Universe unfolded without the vast majority particles ever being “measured by an observer”.
I would like to provide some support for this by looking at examples of how physicists actually observe quantum particles.
Bubble Chamber
The first example is the old fashioned bubble chamber which give a pretty good view of what’s going on.
The picture above is a bubble chamber photo showing the trajectories of radioactive particles. The straight lines are neutral particles, the curves and spirals charged particles moving in a magnetic field. The high energy radiation ionizes the atoms in a liquid near its boiling point, usually liquid hydrogen. This causes tiny bubbles to collect around the ionized atoms, showing the trajectories of the radiation particles through the liquid. These bubbles last a few seconds or more and can be photographed. From these tracks, the location, momentum, energy, and mass of the quantum particles can be subsequently calculated. The tracks in the chamber occur regardless of whether any observer is looking at them. In any case, the observer is not looking at the quantum particles, they are looking at bubbles.
Atlas
The second example I would like to look at is the Atlas Detector that was used at CERN in the Large Hadron Collider to verify the existence of the Higgs boson. The Atlas detector is a huge piece of equipment, 46 metres long, 25 metres in diameter, and weighing about 7,000 tonnes. It is a collaboration of about 6000 people from 40 countries.
It consists of multiple detection technologies (wire chambers, calorimeters, spectrometers, and many more). When two hadrons collide in the main ring, they generate jets of sub-atomic particles that decay into thousands of components. The detector tracts these, measuring the locations, trajectories, momentum, charge, mass, and the energy of all these components.
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Human observers can’t come close to handling this information. The detector generates 25 megabytes of data for each event and has about 40 million events per second. This is far too much data to output from the detector. First level triggering hardware in the detector, reduces this to about 100,000 events per second. This is further reduced by a second level trigger to about 1000 events per second. These events are uploaded from the detector and stored on computers for later analysis.
“ATLAS permanently records more than 10 petabytes of data per year. Offline event reconstruction is performed on all permanently stored events, turning the pattern of signals from the detector into physics objects, such as jets, photons, and leptons. Grid computing is being used extensively for event reconstruction, allowing the parallel use of university and laboratory computer networks throughout the world for the CPU-intensive task of reducing large quantities of raw data into a form suitable for physics analysis.”
So, no one, other than computers, is actually “observing” any of this data. The human observer in this case is looking at computer printouts, not quantum particles. It seems a bit strange that people seriously believe that some sort of observer has to be making a measurement for these quantum events to become real.
The Double Slit
Let’s go back to the double slit experiment. In 1989 Akira Tonomura did the experiment with individual electrons and filmed their arrival at the screen. The electrons arrive individually at seemingly random locations on the screen, but after about thirty minutes the classic interference pattern emerges. It is likely that Tonomura was observing the screen as the video was shot, so let’s repeat the experiment with no observer present as see what happens when we watch the video later. It will be the same video. The electron’s wave function collapses when it interacts with its environment — the screen, and that defines its location. The result of any double split experiment is the same, regardless of whether an observer is present at the time or not. The picture on the screen is the same even if no one is looking at it.
Schrodinger’s Bloody Cat
Let’s do the same thing with Schrodinger’s Cat, except we don’t have to kill the cat. Replace the cat with a tape recorder and the Geiger counter that unleashes the poison with a regular one that just clicks when it detects radiation. After an appropriate time, we can open the box and listen to the tape recorder. If we hear clicks, we know that the cat would have been poisoned. Based on when the clicks occur, we can also tell when the cat would have been poisoned. There is no mysterious entangled dead/alive cat. The radiation interacts with its environment when it encounters the Geiger counter, causing the click, without the need for a cat or observer.
Conclusion
This idea that the state of a quantum particle is undetermined until measured by an observer, is a fallacy that unfortunately has been repeated by many renowned physicists. Any interaction with the environment will suffice to define the location of the particle within its environment. Unfortunately, we keep confusing the environment provided by the measuring device, with the observer making the measurement.
Finally, the collapse of the wave function has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness.
