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exclusive58
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Registered: 04/16/04
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Physicists: "Reality is an illusion!"

#4753023 - 10/04/05 05:35 AM (20 years, 10 months ago)

AT THE LIMITS OF MATTER, REALITY IS NOT A CERTAINTY ANYMORE

At the university of Constance last August, a large group of researchers consisting of physicists, theoreticians and philosophers known to be the world's best specialists on the behavior of matter at a microscopic scale, got together to revolutionize our understanding of the world.

The conference revolved around one main idea: physics may not be here to talk to us about material reality; the world it describes may only be nothing more than a gigantic hallucination!

The idea at the heart of the debate was this: quantum mechanics doesn't describe the object itself, but only what we know of it.

At first sight, this idea may seem banal and ordinary, its obvious that we only have access to the world by the information we get from it through our rather poor and simplifying senses: from Democrite to Kant, philosophers have warned us about this inevitable veil that separates us from reality.

But this could actually shatter our conception of reality. Because what we thought was attached to reality would mainly be tied to our perception. A little bit like if someone only saw the world through his computer: he must not deduce that the world is itself pixelised!

For Christopher Fuchs, the american physicist at the head of the conference, the task is therefore to make allowances between what falls under information...and the rest. We must expurgate from the data all the characteristics of the screen so that the rest belongs exclusively to the world itself.

"The pure distillate that would be left - as small as it may be compared to the whole of the quantum theory - will then be our first general oversight of what quantum mechanics is trying to tell us on nature itself", he says. He also underlines that it is too early to know what this "distilled reality" would look like.

Michel Bitbol, a french physicist, for his part is delighted to see " this re-flux of the realistic wave that submerged physics in the 70s. These works confirm and actualize the power of transcendental reasoning first proposed by Emmanuel Kant."

WHAT IF EVERYTHING IS NOTHING BUT INFORMATION!

A "New physics" is being born: one which considers all things from the single notion of information. How? By redefining time, space and matter, which will ultimately lead us to discover a new world: ours.

"Welcome to the Matrix." What if this was the message that today's quantum mechanics specialists addressed to us? Far from describing the behavior of matter, quantum mechanics, they affirm, only talks to us about..."information". As a result, as we thought that we were reaching the bottom of things, the tangible fundamentals of our world, these disappear and make room for a sort of massive hallucination, an artifact generated by our own questioning.

In an article published last year, the mathematician John Barrow, from the very serious University of Cambridge, imagines that a civilization 'only a bit more advanced than ours, would be capable of simulating the apparition of stars and the formation of planetary systems, and then, by integrating biochemical laws, would observe the evolution of life and of consciousness, then watch civilizations grow and communicate with each other, and fight over the fact that there may exist a Great Programmer in the skies who created the universe" etc. So the idea that we are only virtual creatures in a huge video game isn't so absurd. Although this idea relies more on fiction than on science, since we can't make an experience that refutes it. Contrarily to the Matrix movie, we don't have a red pill to cross to the other side of the screen! (this is questionable... we do have MESCALINE!!!)

Even then, the informational tidal wave that has been flooding into physics for a number of years pushes certain people to play with this scenario. Its that the idea is fruitful if it is taken in the right manner: not in order to take us to a reality above the appearances or to unmask a potential "Great Programmer", but, on the contrary, in order to re-concentrate on our world and redefine the physical relation that we maintain with it.

We only need to start from an observation, almost a tautology: we only have access to reality through the information we have of it.

Information is the mediator between the material and the abstract, between the real and the ideal", underlines the american physicist Hans Christian von Baeyer. "Physics, before being an ontology, must be an epistemology - the study of the way we know what we know and the limits tied to this knowledge. If we can understand the nature of information and incorporate it in our model of the physical world, we will then have made the first step on our road that leads towards a comprehension of the objective reality."

It seems that Physics, which has entered the age of information, henceforth aims to describe, rather than the world itself, the relentless effort of our brain to understand this world. Instead of putting in equations the agitation of matter in time and space, it attempts to spurt out these notions from our attempt - limited but courageous - to master the flow of information. Rather than the exterior world, it is finally the human condition that it is redefining.

Yes, in one way, we are entrapped in a "Matrix"! But far from the movie, its not a matter of a naughty program: it is the matrix of our own calculations carried out by the information that we gather when we confront ourselves to the world. Instead of enslaving us, this matrix liberates us, by avoiding of drowning us in the stream of information that surrounds us. And today, an army of new physicians is decided to break the code.

Time and space are modes by which we think and not the conditions in which we live. - Albert Einstein

The goal of physics isn't to discover what Nature is, but what we can say on it. - Niels Bohr

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