When reality is not out there: Making sense of quantum weirdness

When reality is not out there: Making sense of quantum weirdness

Prof. Arash E. Zaghi, PhD, PE, SE

The familiar quantum probabilities are not arbitrary. They express the best possible way for a particular perspective to summarize a deeper situation it can never see completely. Each perspective gets its own least-distorted shadow of the underlying quantum reality. This is how this remarkably accessible essay makes sense of quantum weirdness in a idealist manner: the universe refuses the God’s-eye view, reality being a field of relations in awareness.

...The question I want to explore is more radical. When we set aside common sense and look carefully at how nature behaves in precise experiments and in the mathematics of quantum theory, is it still accurate to say that there is a single physical reality “out there,” existing in the same definite way for everyone, independent of any perspective?

My claim, based on recent work in quantum foundations, is that the answer is no. There is no universal, context-free story of “what is really happening” behind all appearances. Reality does not exist as a fixed inventory of objects with pre-given properties. It is better understood as a web of relations that only become definite within particular perspectives, inside a single field of awareness [4,5].

This sounds like a direct clash with our most intimate experience. That is why it deserves to be unpacked slowly and with care...