As John Dewey said, “Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination”. Maybe time has come for science to take another giant leap of imagination, this time brought about by the amazing findings of quantum mechanics.
All empirical scientific research when stripped to the bone looks the same: we conduct an experiment with certain measurable parameters, and observe the outcome. Depending upon the outcome we tweak the variables and again observe the results. Most science is conducted with one basic premise – the ‘observer’ and the ‘observed’ are independent of each other. Now, any quantum physicist will immediately laugh at this statement, because it has been proven that at the most basic level of matter this simply cannot be true. It is now very well known, although the reasons are not understood, that the two are linked, and it is impossible to separate the two.
Justifiably called the ‘big daddy of quantum physics’ is the double slit experiment, which gave the startling result that an electron exists as a wave and collapses into a particle only when it is observed. This led to a whole lot of studies being done on what is now termed, “the observer effect”. Scientists are now more curious about how the observer and the experiment interact on the quantum level and are trying to define their mysterious findings. Even Einstein dedicated the last years of his life trying to find a unifying theory that would explain the workings of the entire universe in a single equation.
The question we, the scientific community, should be posing ourselves is, when will we have enough evidence to extrapolate these findings into other areas of science? Biologists for example are still following the conventional style of research that experiments give results; and exact same experiments conducted by different people should give the exact same results. In fact an experiment is deemed credible only if its results are repeatable. Can anyone else see the problem with this approach?
After now knowing how the most basic form of matter functions, how can we still make observations with the assumption that we are separate from the outcome of our experiment? Can we be so naïve as to think that the findings of quantum physics only apply to subatomic particles, and the mere fact of observing is not affecting the result of the experiment? How long will it be before we take into account the relationship between the experiment and the observer, and then try to make sense of the universe?
Does an unbreakable connection between all matter mean that objectivity in scientific research goes out of the window? Not necessarily. Maybe we just need to imbibe the fascinating new principles into our scientific thought and design experiments that acknowledge the observer effect, instead of pretending that it does not exist. It may pose some confusion in the beginning, but so does any radical idea. It is said that the mind once expanded by a new thought never regains its original dimensions. After all isn’t that the whole point of every arcane research project – to expand the collective consciousness of human race by understanding the world we live in?
