“Today the key features of the Copenhagen interpretation can be more easily explained, and understood, in terms of what happens when a scientist makes an experimental observation. First, we have to accept that the very act of observing a thing changes it, and that we, the observers, are in a very real sense part of the experiment—there is no clockwork that ticks away regardless of whether we look at it or not. Secondly, all we know about are the results of experiments. We can look at an atom and see an electron in energy state A, then look again and see an electron in energy state B. We guess that the electron jumped from A to B, perhaps because we looked at it. In fact, we cannot even say for sure that this is the same electron, and we cannot make any statement about what it was doing when we were not looking at it.”
—John Gribbin, In Search of Schrödinger's Cat
I'm going to be studying cosmology at Oxford this summer, assuming my knee cooperates, and in preparation I've been re-reading some of my old books on astronomy and physics before tackling the class reading. Of course quantum physics describes things on the atomic and subatomic level, while much of astronomy looks at things that are incomprehensibly enormous—the Medulla nebula, for example, a supernova remnant in Cassiopeia, which is still expelling radio waves and gases 10,000 years after it blew up.
Image Credit: Pierre Konzelmann
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