The scenario has long remained an interesting thought experiment. However, he later departed from this view, and according to formal textbooks on quantum mechanics, the description is perfectly valid.
Wigner originally didn’t consider this much of a paradox, he argued it would be absurd to describe a conscious observer as a quantum object. The reality perceived by the friend cannot be reconciled with the reality on the outside. Wigner, however, will disagree whenever he observed friend and coin in a superposition.
When Wigner and the friend compare notes later on, the friend will insist they saw definite outcomes for each coin toss. Wigner can now in principle verify this superposition using a so-called “ interference experiment” – a type of quantum measurement that allows you to unravel the superposition of an entire system, confirming that two objects are entangled.
That’s because they are “entangled” – spookily connected so that if you manipulate one you also manipulate the other. Wigner doesn’t have access to this fact from the outside, and according to quantum mechanics, must describe the friend and the coin to be in a superposition of all possible outcomes of the experiment. The fact that nature behaves this way has been proven multiple times in the lab – for example, in the famous double slit experiment (see video below). The second you observe a quantum system, it picks a specific location or state – breaking the superposition. But oddly, this is only the case when they aren’t observed. According to the theory, particles can be in several places or states at once – this is called a superposition. Observers are powerful players in the quantum world. In other words, according to our best theory of the building blocks of nature itself, facts can actually be subjective. A fact, as established by a measurement, should be objective, such that all observers can agree with it.īut in a paper recently published in Science Advances, we show that, in the micro-world of atoms and particles that is governed by the strange rules of quantum mechanics, two different observers are entitled to their own facts. The scientific method is after all founded on the reliable notions of observation, measurement and repeatability. Now it seems they have even infected science – at least the quantum realm. 20 men are chosen to participate in the roles of guards and prisoners in a psychological study that ultimately spirals out of control.Alternative facts are spreading like a virus across society.
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