Get the latest tech news
Metaphysical Experiments Probe Our Hidden Assumptions About Reality
Experiments that test physics and philosophy “as a single whole” may be our only route to surefire knowledge about the universe.
He added, “Only the sum of geometry and physical laws is subject to experimental verification.” As the American logician Willard V. O. Quine put it, “The unit of empirical significance” — the thing that’s actually testable — “is the whole of science.” The simplest observation (that the sky is blue, say, or the particle is there) forces us to question everything we know about the workings of the universe. The association published an underground newsletter called Epistemological Letters, a kind of physics “zine,” with typed, mimeographed pages speckled with hand-drawn equations that was mailed out to 100 or so physicists and philosophers who comprised a new counterculture — the daring few who wanted to discuss experimental metaphysics. In their 2020 Nature Physics paper, Cavalcanti and colleagues reported the results of what they called a “proof-of-principle version” of their Bell-cum-Wigner’s-friend experiment, which showed a clear violation of inequalities derived from the joint assumptions of locality, freedom of choice, and the absoluteness of observed events.
Or read this on Hacker News
