{"id":129534,"date":"2022-10-27T16:58:45","date_gmt":"2022-10-27T23:58:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=129534"},"modified":"2022-10-27T16:58:56","modified_gmt":"2022-10-27T23:58:56","slug":"scientist-wins-nobel-for-showing-that-reality-isnt-real","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2022\/10\/27\/scientist-wins-nobel-for-showing-that-reality-isnt-real\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientist wins Nobel for showing that reality isn\u2019t real"},"content":{"rendered":"

BY <\/span>NURY VITTACHI<\/span><\/a> Courtesy Fridayeveryday.com<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

A VISITING HONG KONG scientist has just won the Nobel prize for experimentally proving that the real world\u2026 isn\u2019t real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wait, what? The world isn\u2019t real?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Correct. And even though the physical world is not real, it has nonetheless given scientist Alain Aspect the Nobel Prize for Physics, along with two other scientists in the same field of research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aspect is a Senior Fellow at the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study at City University. He\u2019s actually a Frenchman, but he is on a team of top global scholars that visits Hong Kong regularly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Scientists meet regularly at the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study. Image: HKIAS<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

So, what did he and his colleagues actually discover? It\u2019s interesting. To answer that question, we have to go back a century to the 1920s onwards. An argument started between Einstein and the fathers of a new field of science called quantum physics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Einstein, left, with Denmark\u2019s Niels Bohr, one of the fathers of quantum physics. Image by Paul Ehrenfest, now in Public Domain.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

FLAWED THEORY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1935, Einstein said that the discoveries about the nature of the basic particles that made up everything in the world, including people and objects and space itself, were fundamentally flawed. Quantum physics as a theory only worked if the particles were not subject to the rules of time and space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that, of course, made no sense. It would mean that at a fundamental level, nothing was subject to the rules of time and space. Nothing was actually real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just try and defend that proposition, Einstein challenged his opponents.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The quantum fathers admitted that Einstein\u2019s point was correct \u2013 but they stuck to their findings, even admitting that it made them sound like mystics. They even noted their theory\u2019s similarity to ancient eastern sayings like reality is a dream in the mind of God\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Early experiments suggested that Bohr, was correct \u2013 so Einstein said that the theory wasn\u2019t wrong, but was certainly incomplete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ONGOING DISPUTE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dispute remained unresolved for decades. Einstein was seen as the leader of the side which said that reality was real, while the quantum fathers, led by Niels Bohr, said that reality was an illusion. It remained basically unsolved at the time of Einstein\u2019s death in 1955.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But in the 1960s and 1970s, several scientists worked out solid experimental ways to check whether particles were physically real\u201d or not. The findings were clear. They appeared to indicate that the quantum fathers were right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

REMARKABLE EXAMPLE<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A big step was taken with an experiment designed in 1981. Aspect and his team split a photon (a unit of light) into two pieces and moved them 12 meters (40 feet) apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Artist\u2019s representation of split photons behaving as one. Image: Science Exchange Caltech<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

They then showed how the pieces behaved as if they were still parts of the same particle. This showed that as far as sub-atomic particles are concerned, there\u2019s no such thing as time and space. And everything is made of subatomic particles, so there\u2019s no such thing as time and space for anything. Or anyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, physical reality \u2013 the 3D world in which we exist and move around in \u2013 is an illusion or a projection. This is now the default position in physics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bestselling science writer at the moment is Carlo Rovelli, who writes in his latest book: We are nothing but images of images. Reality, including ourselves, is nothing but a thin and fragile veil, beyond which \u2026 there is nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Congratulations to Professor Aspect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BY NURY VITTACHI Courtesy Fridayeveryday.com A VISITING HONG KONG scientist has just won the Nobel prize for experimentally proving that the real world\u2026 isn\u2019t real. Wait, what? The world isn\u2019t real? Correct. And even though the physical world is not real, it has nonetheless given scientist Alain Aspect the Nobel Prize for Physics, along with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[132],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129534\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}