Quantum theory describes an immaterial quantum world, of which Bohr said we must not speak, but some physicists still wonder what the universe is like when it isn’t being observed:
“Little has been said about the character of the unmeasured state. Since most of reality most of the time dwells in this unmeasured condition …the lack of such a description leaves the majority of the universe … shrouded in mystery.” (Herbert, 1985), p194.
If quantum waves spread at light speed until a physical event restarts them, physical events are few and far between amidst the constant press of quantum events. By what logic then are these restart moments the reality of our universe? Surely reality is what is there most of the time? And according to quantum theory, most of the time, most of our universe exists in an unmeasured state.
It follows that in-between observations, in the unmeasured state, physical things aren’t there at all. We see substances that constantly exist but a hologram that only presents when we look has no substance. According to quantum theory, the material world is, as Buddhists say, empty of self-existence, so it appears but doesn’t exist permanently.
Most people of course don’t see the world that way, but that is expected if quantum events occur too fast for the gaps to be seen, like a movie but faster. The Dirac equation predicts that electrons have an ultra-fast tremble, called Zitterbewegung, that occurs 1015 times a second, so a quantum foam could flash the events we see faster than can be discerned. After all, we can’t expect the quantum world to act at a rate convenient to our observations.
Yet even if our world is an ultra-fast hologram, it still reflects the reality around us, and so is locally real. This means that when you kick a stone, it still hurts, because that is the lawful result of that act. We don’t need to know what creates our world to live in it, just the irreversible results of our acts, which appear when we look. Evolution may then have primed our species to see what we need to survive rather than the truth:
“You may want the truth, but you don’t need the truth. Perceiving truth would drive our species extinct. You need simple icons that show you how to act to stay alive. Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.” (Hoffman, 2020).
According to Hoffman’s interface theory, perceptions are like desktop icons, useful but not true. For example, a blue email icon on a screen doesn’t mean the program that made it is blue. Likewise, seeing an object on the screen of space doesn’t mean that an object made it. Indeed the opposite is expected, as screen icons exist to protect users from program details they don’t need to know about. It follows that if our perceptions are also helpful icons, they will hide the quantum world from us.
Yet if science is the search for truth, does evolution then hide it from us? Does the same evolution that produced us now oppose our science? It probably does, but hasn’t it always been so? For a long-time humanity didn’t know that bacteria cause disease, because we couldn’t see them, until science proved they did. And later, when atoms were proposed, Mach argued that they couldn’t exist because they were unseen but we now accept them thanks to science. When science takes us beyond appearances, we always resist.
And now, when quantum theory says that what we can’t see causes what we can, again we turn away, saying “Enough! It cannot be.” Even physicists struggle with the idea that the unmanifest causes the manifest. How can the certainties we see come from uncertain probabilities? Is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, just a set numbers? This, it seems, is a step too far, even for physics. But after two thousand years of scientific struggle, do we now abandon science because our brains can’t handle the truth? It seems so yet long ago, some of us conceived what others find inconceivable.