Strange science time...

Have you all missed my posts on strange/weird science? (Presses ear against monitor but hears nothing.) Thought so!

Anyhow, Mild Colonial Boy brought to my attention The Telegraph's version of last week's story that maybe astronomers have caused the early destruction of the universe by looking at it.

It's a curious idea which I don't understand at all. It's only appeal is that it has a certain urban myth, cautionary horror tale character about it. ("And as they led the girl away, they warned her, 'Don't look back. Don't look back..' But she didn't heed the warning...etc".)

The second science story from last week which made no sense at all was this one from Nature, which revisits Schrodinger's cat:

Johannes Kofler and Časlav Brukner ... say that the emergence of the 'classical' laws of physics, deduced by the likes of Galileo and Newton, from quantum rules happens not as objects get bigger, but because of the ways we measure these objects. If we could make every measurement with as much precision as we liked, there would be no classical world at all, they say.

It's not "decoherence" that solves the problem, they say, but simply the fact that measurements are imprecise on the macro scale:

The researchers show that it depends on the precision of measurement. If the measurements are a bit fuzzy, so that we can’t distinguish one quantum state from several other, similar ones, this smoothes out the quantum oddities into a classical picture. Kofler and Brukner show that, once a degree of fuzziness is introduced into measured values, the quantum equations describing an object’s behaviour turn into classical ones.

.....watching ...quantum jumps between life and death for Schrödinger’s cat would require that we be able to measure precisely an impractically large number of quantum states. For a 'cat' containing 10²⁰ quantum particles, say, we would need to be able to tell the difference between 10¹⁰ states – too many to be feasible.

If correct, it is difficult to see what this would mean. Is it fair to say that, if we had the eyes of God, we would all look like fuzzy wavefunction balls, with no clear edge to our bodies at all? (I am sure that all anti-religion scientists would hate that as an image, as it sounds like it is offering a possible explanation for the reality of Reiki healing, or other New Age-y ideas.)

Alternatively, does it mean that any living thing, if its life is dependent on a quantum outcome, is in reality in a type of simultaneous dead and alive state? In the article, they say:

"We prefer to say that they are neither dead nor alive," say Kofler and Brukner, “but in a new state that has no counterpart in classical physics.”

Well, that's as clear as mud then!