When we wake up in the morning and walk to the kitchen, we do not doubt that our coffee mug is sitting right where we left it in the cupboard. When we close our room's door and walk out, we can swear that the chair inside or the book on the coffee table continues to exist with the exact same solidity even when we are not looking at it. The human mind is programmed to believe that the world ticks along on its own, completely independent of our gaze. Because the alternative would mean that the ground beneath our feet could evaporate and vanish at any second, making it impossible to maintain daily sanity.
Is that really the case? When we turn our backs, does the universe maintain that exact same solid state in the unobserved interval, or does it owe its existence to our looking at it?
In fact, this question first came to light through a very simple experiment conducted in laboratories (the double slit experiment first initiated with light waves by Thomas Young in the early 19th century and later deepened with electrons). What they saw in the experiment was this: those tiny building blocks of the most fundamental matter do not stay in a fixed point as long as you do not watch or track them; they spread out like waves. The moment an observer enters the scene, the waves suddenly collapse and get trapped into a single "reality." In other words, matter is a flexible fiction that doesn't know what to do unless you look at it, taking shape the very second you gaze upon it.
The universe is a ghostly structure that can never make up its mind or choose a path as long as we do not look at it. It is a game that turns into reality the moment we look, and silently retreats back into that ocean of probabilities the moment we look away.
Now, look at the glass or the wall in your hand once again. Are you sure it's really there, or is it there only because you are looking at it?
Welcome to our Quantum series (1) post :)
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