Don’t Panic, But Physicists In Australia Just Proved Reality Doesn’t Exist

Get ready to have your mind blown. According to an experiment led by two physicists in Australia, reality doesn’t exist. Turn on, tune in, and drop out man, because the world as you know it is all kinds of weird, at least on a quantum level. The experiment raises a basic question: if there is an object, when will it decide to behave like a particle or a wave? The mysterious behavior of light is an example. You can see the effect even when a light shines through two narrow slits.

Light behaves as much as a particle, passing through each slot and casting direct light on the wall behind it and as a wave, generating a pattern of interference, resulting in more than two stripes of light. By deducing from common sense, the object should be a wave or a particle, regardless of how it is measured. However, Australian scientists have been able to demonstrate what quantum physics stands for: how this object will be measured will define whether it has assumed a behavior of a wave, or a particle. At the time when John Wheeler's experiment was proposed in 1978, there was no technology available to carry out the experiment, which had beams of light returned by mirrors.

"It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it," lead researcher and physicist Andrew Truscott said in a press release.

Now, however, the attempt was recreated using one hundred helium atoms scattered in a suspended state, known as the Bose-Einstein condensate. Then they were ejected until only one atom remained. Then they let the atom pass through a pair of laser beams, propagating in opposite directions, forming a pattern as if it were a grid pattern, like a solid grid that would disperse the light. The full results have been published in Nature Physics.