Title: What Erwin Schrödinger Said About the Upanishads - The Wire Science
Headings: What Erwin Schrödinger Said About the Upanishads
What Erwin Schrödinger Said About the Upanishads
A strange world
Image: Paweł Czerwiński
Subjective reality of the Upanishads
Image: Paweł Czerwiński
Physicists and Upanishads

Content: But this is not what we experience. The computer on which I wrote this article and the device on which you are reading it surely don’t feel like waves! So when does something stop behaving like a wave and start behaving like a piece of matter, an object composed strictly of particles? Surprisingly, this happens when we observe it. According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, observing an object causes it to lose its quantum nature and collapse into the classical form we’re used to. This collapse of the wave function implies that the reality we see exists only when we are there to observe it. And an observer does not merely observe reality; she creates it. If left to themselves, things would remain as waves until somebody observed them. Einstein, who could not reconcile himself with this, summed up the strangeness of quantum physics when he asked a friend, “Do you believe the Moon exists only when I look at it?”