"James P. Hogan - Giants 5 - Mission to Minerva" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

On the face of it, the situation seemed no different from that of, say, a
gambler's die, which from the rolling state could assume any of six discrete
final states, each showing a different number. The mechanics of moving objects
was well understood, and only inability to specify precisely the die's shape,
mass, and motion prevented the outcome to be predicted reliably every time. In
other words there was no mystery. The outcome was determined, but imperfect
knowledge made it unpredictable. However, this was only another way of saying
that the situations were not the same to begin with. At the quantum level,
this was not so. The systems being investigated were identical in every way
that could be established. Why, then, should they behave differently?

Quantum objects acted as if they were everything at once while they were not
interacting with their environment, but the instant they encountered another
entity capable of pinning them downтАФfor instance, a detector in a measuring
instrument designed to find out something about themтАФthey abruptly took on one
from the available selection of possible states. Hardly surprisingly, such
oddness did not sit lightly with beings accustomed to a world in which things
knew what they were and continued to be so while nothing was looking at them.
The scientific debate about the perplexing accumulation of quantum paradoxes
raged through the first two decades of the twentieth centuryтАФbeginning,
ironically, immediately following a series of confident assurances that
everything of substance was known and science was effectively a closed book.
But there could be no getting away from what the results of countless
experiments seemed to indicate. The challenge was to account for them in a way
that described what was "really" going on.

Some refused to get embroiled in the issue at all, and instead took the view
of science as being simply a pragmatic process for generating numbers to be
compared with experimental results, beyond which nothing more could be said.
For a long time the predominant view was that nothing really existed in any
objective sense at all until an act of observation caused it to assume one of
its possible sets of attributes ("states") randomly. Exactly what constituted
an "observation" was a further source of contention, opinions covering the
range of steps from any interaction with another quantum object, to the final
registering of an impression upon a human consciousness. Others avoided the
disturbingly mystical implications of this kind of approach by maintaining
that the allegedly identical objects weren't really identical but differed in
some subtle ways that eluded detection at the present time. The problem with
this, however was that it required everything in the universe to be capable,
just as subtly, of instantly influencing everything else, a notion which many
considered to be every bit as mystical as anything else that was being said,
if not more so.

By the end of the twentieth century, the scientific world had come to terms
with accepting that whatever answer they settled on was going to be bizarre by
normal standards anyway, so they might as well get used to throwing away all
preconceptions and focus purely on what the facts seemed to be trying to say.
And what the facts said, when the formalism was taken at face value without
imposing some arbitrary wave-function "collapse" that the mathematics said
nothing about, was that the world showed evidence of being everything at once