Before I get into the main point of my blog, those of you familiar with the new Flaming Lips album will not be surprised to hear that they had their asses sued by Cat Stevens for its similarity to his son “Father and Son”. According to an NME article it only became obvious when Janice Long on BBC Radio 2 played the two songs back to back. I think not! And so, Michael, You raise an interesting point and one that I am not qualified to answer in any depth. However, that has never stopped me in the past so here goes: Firstly, it is important to differentiate Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle with the Theory of Superposition (with which we are here concerned). In quantum physics, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that one cannot simultaneously know both the position and the momentum of a given object precisely – not, as is often claimed, because the measurement of position necessarily disturbs a particle’s momentum but simply because it is more accurate to say that the particle is a wave, not a point-like object, and does not have a well-defined simultaneous position and momentum. The principle of superposition, on the other hand, claims that while we do not know what the state of any object is, it is actually in all possible states simultaneously, as long as we don’t look to check. It is the measurement itself that causes the object to be limited to a single possibility. Schrodinger designed his Cat Thought Experiment to show how the implications of the theory of superposition were absurd in reality. Instead he created one of the most famous teaching aids in physics. My point in all of this, however, is that the scientists, having proved that the wave function collapses, went off and happily used this formula to build their description of the, admittedly, sub-atomic world. But what causes the wave function to collapse? How do we go from two potential states to just one? And which one becomes reality? To date science has almost ignored this question completely. ملاعب يورو 2023 The scientists don’t care so long as it works (which it seems to). I say “almost”. In fact Eugene Wigner, a Hungarian-born physicist, quantum theory expert and Nobel Laureate devoted time to it and believed that what causes the wave function to collapse is – consciousness! So this does bring us back to murky waters. OK I may only be able to snap quantum particles in and out of existence but huge amounts of information can be transferred in this way alone. How would this affect a quantum computer, for instance? Does it make it impossible to build because our consciousness would always wreck its inner workings – or does it become a fantastically powerful extension of our minds? لعبة طاولة محبوسة بدون نت And so I come back to the idea of reality engineers. Only this time imagine the world as a series of infinitely branching possibilities (the so-called many worlds interpretation). كازينو العرب Every time we make a decision or, we learn now, even simply observe something, we are sending our current reality shooting left on a branch here, now jumping right, back left, left, left right like one of those early computer games where you flew forward through an asteroid field and had to dodge the missiles coming at you and which you could only see at the last minute. Why couldn’t I then intentionally move reality towards some point that I wanted? I leave the last word (at least for now) with the University of Toronto and their elegantly phrased summary of the problem of Quantum Physics: “Quantum Physics forces us to the conclusion that: […] Physical properties have no objective reality independent of the act of observation OR the act of measurement can, in principle, act instantaneously over enormous distances (i.e. non-local interactions exist).” I don’t know about you but that sounds suspiciously like magic to me.