Quantum Uncertainly

I’ve been trying to understand quantum physics recently. Not an easy task and, let’s face it, I’m looking for more a high-level grasp than actually really getting into the maths of it. I think I’m fighting a fairly losing battle, after all, if even Richard Feynman once said “no-one understands quantum physics” and he was a quantum physicist, then what chance do I have?

Well, to be fair, Feynman’s quote is one of those things that’s often taken out of context; he really meant that the basic core of “uncertainty” in quantum physics, that things can exist in multiple states at once at the exact same time and that these things only revert to a single state when they are observed (basically, just observing them causes them to change), is just completely at odds with the way we expect the universe “ought” to behave. Obviously some people understand it, otherwise it wouldn’t be physics, it would just be bullshit.

Anyway, so I read the other day that Heisenberg’s quantum uncertainty principle can be useful in adding weight to the two arguments that:

a) We live in a computer simulation
b) The universe just created itself, completely out of nothing, completely at random

In the computer simulation one, mathematically, as a civilisation becomes capable of creating a computer program that is indistinguishable from reality for its inhabitants, given enough time that simulation will create a civilisation with its own sub-simulation and so on, the chances of our reality being the one at the top of the simulation pyramid are virtually zero; ergo we’re in someone else’s simulation.

I’m not going to go into why quantum physics helps this argument (you can read that here) but my point is that if we’re in a computer game, then so far, its shit. I’ve been playing for ages and I still haven’t collected any decent weapons, I’m level 30, with no spells and, for the most part, the soundtrack is terrible. Also, some bloke called Jesus seems to have cheated much earlier on in the game and pretty much ruined it for everyone ever since.

This kind of brings us back to point number two, that the universe just popped into existence all by itself. Now, I would normally have thought this kind of theory would seem unreasonable, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. None of the other theories - God did it, something unbelievably complicated did it, it didn’t happen at all or we’re all in a computer game or somebody’s dream etc – seem any more plausible when you start to think about them.

I quite like the fact that quantum physics suggests that we’re all here, in fact everything’s just here, by pure fluke and, more to the point, it would be far more likely for us just not to have existed at all. Obviously, we’re not about to solve that one yet but perhaps if more people took that kind of view, we might start appreciating the fact that we’re here, pretty much by the skin of our teeth, and perhaps we should start acting like that means something.