Hampsters and concrete packing cases.

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It has gone beyond Solopsism now, It is science. It waa science as early as Young's double slit experiment. I am refering to scientists such as the late John Wheeler. He seemed to be saying the moon only exists when we look at it. I gather it had to do with the Wave Collapse. Clearly we shouldn't confuse that with the Newtonian universe. Obviously a bit of radio active waste, encased in lead and concrete, buried way deep in the ocean, may never be seen again, yet its dangerous existance is going to carry on for a long time. Let's blame the Danish Bohr who said something only exists when it is measured. He was presumably refering to quantum physics, not encased radioactive waste. Even so there seems to be a tremendous debate about the nature of reality.

Maybe it is light that only exists at the Wave Collapse. Matter has just been waiting for it, but that encased radio active material will have a long wait.

The implications of the double slit experiment are mindblowing.

Let's say that particles only exist when they are observed (happy to be corrected on this by any physicists). The Moon would still be observed even if sight had never evolved, because its gravity impacts the Earth. Its presence is constantly being observed by all living things, though we don't realise it.

What's a hampster? I know what hamsters are, but I've never of hampsters.

The wave function collapse is believed happen based on *anything* "knowing of it", not just a human.


Yes.

The determinism camp, and the probability (free will) camp.

Believers of determinism like Albert Einstein were winning, and now the free-will believers cite quantum mechanics as evidence that matter functions based on indeterministic probability, not determinism.

At first QM seems like mysticism, however, fundamentally, all that happening is random particle collisions, and consequently indeterministic positions/momentum/energy imparted to these particles based on these collisions (exemplified by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal of Momentum and Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal of Energy) .

The free will believers say that since human thought is particle matter, then it follows the above mentioned indeterministic probability. Therefore, humans have free will.

The believers of determinism counter-argue that QM only seems probabilistic, because we just don't understand the greater deterministic math of the universe.

When you observe people put toxic waste into a vault, and then observe them dump the vault into the Marianna's Trench in the ocean, and you don't observe it leave the vault in the trench in the ocean, then it doesn't take much faith to believe that the toxic waste still exists, and is still where it was last seen (in the vault et al).

So the waste is pretty much like hamsters in that regard. Its existence is pretty well proven.

I call them hampsters sometimes, too. It's like the word hamper and hamster combined even though small, furry animals do not really resemble hampers but a hamper could easily be converted to look like a rather large hamster. It's just the words that compliment each other.

But would you toss God, and hamsters, into the same hamper?

THAT's the question!

The moon exists with or without us.

But yeah. when I was a school kid I thought that the country where Vikings came from was "Noraway", and was surprised to learn that there is no "a" in the middle of its name. As with "hampster" when you hear it, or even say it, it's hard to tell the difference.