ITC 67: The Delayed Choice Experiment

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
H the s threshold omens step through past, impressive future.

(00:29):
We are not time to think, Think Think, think the

(00:52):
time think.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
Welcome to another edition of In the Crease. I apologize.
I'm getting some feedback in my ears, so I'm going
to fix that real quick. There we go. Sorry about that,
another edition of In the Crease, the only podcast that
believe time maybe fake Light is ultimately a liar and
reality itself may try to punk us. I am your host,

(02:44):
jeble F, and tonight we're going to mess around with
your head a little bit. Not in a spooky story
kind of way, not in a shaggy, shadowy figure in
the hallway kind of way. No, this one, this one
may be worse. This is the kind of episode where
the facts may end up being the creepiest part. Because

(03:05):
tonight we're talking about a real scientific experiment, a mind
vendor called the Delayed Choice experiment that suggests, in all seriousness,
that what you do in the future can change what
has happened in the past. That's not a typo, it's
not a misspeak and not a metaphor. A photon of

(03:25):
light leaves a laser, It travels through space, it hits
a detector, and whether it acts like a wave or
a particle depends on something you decide to do afterward. Now,
if you're thinking witty, doesn't that actually break causality? Yes,
yes it does, but it also works. It's real, it's

(03:47):
been replicated, and it punches a glorious, gaping hole right
through everything we thought we knew about time calls effect
and the idea that reality behaves whether we're looking at
it or not. So tonight, we're going to take you
from the dusty halls of nineteenth century physics to the
quantum experiments of today that are so weird they'd make

(04:09):
a time traveling cat blush. We'll meet photons with commitment issues,
mirrors that don't make sense, and physicists standing at the
edge of what reality used to mean. We'll try to
keep it clear, we'll try to keep it as real
as possible, and yes, we'll probably you have a little
bit of fun along the way as well, because when
your brain is spiraling into a quantum paradox, sometimes the

(04:29):
only saying response is to laugh. Think of it this way.
This is like playing poker, folding your hand and just
walking away from the table and yet somehow still winning
the jackpot because Schroidinger's cat was your wingman the whole
flipping time. So grab a flashlight, point it at your wall,

(04:50):
and now ask yourself did that take one path or both?
And if you decide after the fact, can the universe
go back and change that answer? This is ITC sixty
seven The Delayed Choice Experiment. No I know, talking near

(05:10):
death experience in after life in the last episode believe
it or not, This is actually the second part of
a trilogy that ties in with last episode and will
conclude with next week or not next week's next episode
of ITC just laying the foundation for something that will
really really blow your mind. So let's start tonight with

(05:33):
a story, perhaps a simple one. No multiverse, no AI
generated timelines, no photons having existential crisises, just yet, just
a dark room, a candle and a curious mind. The
year is eighteen oh one. The place the Royal Institute

(05:56):
of London. The man standing at the front of the
room and a fine powdered wig in the full pomp
of enlightenment. Araswagger is Thomas Young. Now Young is a polymath,
now I know. Let me explain one of those maddening
geniuses who seem good at everything. I relate medicine, languages, physics,

(06:19):
probably you know bake the mean pie as well. But
on this day, he's trying to solve a puzzle that
has stump sized for over a century. What is light exactly?
Is it a stream of tiny particles like Newton thought,
or is it a wave like ripples on a pond.

(06:40):
To find out, Young builds a simple apparatus, a light source,
a screen, and the star of the show, a thin
card with two vertical slits cut side by side. He
shines the light through both slits and watches what happens
on the far wall. Now, if light is just made
of light particles, say, you know, kind of like microscopic paintballs,

(07:02):
you'd expect two bands on the wall, one behind each slit,
like you, you know, maybe sprayed the bullets through two windows.
But that's not what happened. What he sees instead is
an interference pattern, light and dark bands rippling across the
wall like stripes on a tiger. Some areas are brighter,

(07:22):
some are dimmer, and some go completely dark. It's the
same pattern you get if you toss two pebbles in
the pond and let the ripples overlap, crest, amplifying crest troughs,
canceling drops. In that moment, Thomas Young delivered a bit
of a scientific mic drop light is a wave, or

(07:43):
at least that is what everyone thought. We hold up,
We're just not to the weird part yet. Fast forward
about one hundred years now we've got access to electron
and we're trying the same experiment, but this time we're
firing particles one at a time. No beam, no wavefront,

(08:07):
just a little if you will, quantum bullets. You'd expect
them to hit the wall like individual dots, you know,
two neat little clusters, one behind each slit, And at
first they do. But as you fire more and more
and more, a pattern, well, it begins to emerge, and
it's not two clusters once again, it's an interference pattern,

(08:31):
exactly like the one Thomas Young saw with light. Now
it's not a wavefront. It's individual particles hitting one at
a time, somehow coordinating with particles that haven't even been
fired yet. Okay, let let that sink in. Each electron

(08:53):
or photon or atom, depending on your flavor, goes through
the setup alone, No wave buddies, no tag team, just
a single isolated quantum, and yet it behaves like it's
split into, interfered with itself, and then recombined on the wall.
Now that's like sending one person down two hallways at
the exact same time and having them argue with themselves

(09:14):
you saw, besiding which exit to take. The only way
this makes sense is that maybe at a quantum level,
particle behave like waves of probability, not things, but maybees,
not paths, but potentials until you observe them. Now we're

(09:35):
getting into the really truly weird aspect of this. If
you set up a detector, a little measuring device at
the at the slits and try to watch which slit
the particle goes through, Boom, no more interference pattern. Now
you get two bands again, just like you expected with

(09:56):
the particles. Simply observing which path the particle takes, or
even just making it possible to know, ends up collapsing
the wave function. It no longer acts like a wave.
It picks a path and becomes a particle. So now
your active measurement decides how it behaves. Let me let

(10:18):
me let me say that again for the folks that
maybe have just tuned in and in the back, or
anyone you know, trying to multest multitask while listening to this.
Whether a quantum particle behaves like a wave or a
particle is determined by whether you look at it, not
when it leaves, not when it arrives, but whether you

(10:40):
could no, So, what's going on here? Why does the
universe act normal when you're watching it in all sorts
of weird when you're not, well, what is happening? There
are a few major schools of fault here. You have
the Copenhagen interpretation, the most famous explanation in one of
the earl This is called that. It says that the

(11:02):
quantum system exists in a kind of fuzzy, superpositioned limbo
until observed, the act of measurement collapses all the possible
outcomes into a single one. The photon doesn't choose a
path until you look. It's not really hiding a secret.
It's just that you haven't looked yet. It's like the
photon itself is asking, hey, are you watching? Are you

(11:24):
looking at me? Kind of like that only fans page
that has one follower. Now, it's kind of cool if
you're not watching, because I'll just take all paths. Oh
you are watching okay, let me, let me, let me
just pick one. You also have the mini World's interpretation

(11:46):
in this theory, and I'm not making this up, says
that the photon actually does go through both slits, and
when you observe it, the universe splits and one reality
and one version of a reality. The particle went left
in the other one, it went right. You don't collapse
the wave function. You just fork the cosmos. And for

(12:09):
those that weren't, maybe just not catching. I said fork,
not the other F word. Now, this sounds a bit
like science fiction, and it kind of is in a way,
but also might be the most mathematically coherent explanation we
actually have. Of course, it means there's an alternate you

(12:30):
know you right now still listening to the show hopefully
because I would love my numbers to go up, but
also eating pudding with a shoehorn. Sorry, quantums just weird.
There's no other way to say it. But let's get
back to the lab a second. Physicists have done this
experiment with electrons, photons, bucket balls, which are giant molecules

(12:55):
made of about sixty carbon atoms, and even atoms themselves.
And every single time the result is the same. Don't
observe it, it's a wave. You do observe it, it's a particle,
which leads us to a terrifying question. What if the

(13:17):
universe isn't made of stuff? What if it's made of
questions and reality only shows its answer when we ask
it to. And that's, my friends, is the curtain that
we're entertaining, And the real magic trick is well that

(13:39):
kind of comes next because a man named John Wheeler
comes along in the late nineteen seventies and says, hey, hey,
what if you ask a question after the show's already over.
What if your choice of whether you're to measure was
made after the particle already made its journey. What if

(14:04):
the universe isn't just waiting for you to observe, but
waiting for you to decide what you would have observed?
Did I mention it's going to be a little little
weird tonight? Like I said, this isn't the weirdest of
the trilogy, I'm sorry it's not. It gets weirder in

(14:25):
two weeks. So if Act one was a bit of
the Magician's reveal waver particle, depending on whether you looked.
Then Act two, Here is the part where the magician
turns to the audience and says, I'll pick a card,
but don't worry, I already know which one you'll choose,

(14:47):
because now we enter the wild territory of delayed choice,
a concept that sounds like it was invented by sleep
deprived dungeon master, but actually came from one of the
most respected physicists of the twentieth century. And his name
was John Archibald Wheeler. I mean, let's face it, anyone
with the middle name of Archibald, you know, is going

(15:08):
to be respected, in esteemed, the physician of some sort.
I think, I think it just comes with the territory.
And now I'm taking myself for not naming my son
middle name Archibald. He was born in nineteen eleven and
he was trained under Neil's Bore. He helped develop nuclear fission.

(15:30):
He coined the term black hole. He mentored Richard Feynman.
He often did speak in metaphors and paradoxes, the kind
of man who could write a scientific paper and make
it sound like kind of a haiku carved into stone
by a time traveling monk. And in nineteen seventy eight,
Wheeler proposed an idea that pushed the double split experiment

(15:52):
to its breaking point, an idea that asked, what if
we wait to make the choice in whether to observe
the particle until after it already passed through the slits? Okay,
so we're gonna we're we're gonna walk through this a
little bit, Okay, the best we can on a podcast

(16:13):
where I could do visuals, but I'm not even sure
the visuals would help. Imagine, if you will your classic
double slit set up. A laser fires a single photon
at two slits. Behind the slits is a screen that's
where the photon lands. You get an interference pattern. If

(16:34):
you don't observe the slits, you get two stripes if
you do. Now, Wheeler is asking, what if you delay
the decision to observe the slits until after the photon
has already passed through them, but before it hits the screen.
At first, this kind of sounds like a neat salt experiment,
perhaps something more for a philosophy class, perhaps, But then

(17:02):
they decided to build it. Businessists crossed the Globe, an
Ist in Colorado, the University of Vienna even Labs in Australia. Well,
they actually performed this experiment using beam splitters, entangled photons,
and fast switching detectors. We're going to do a little
bit of a simplified breakdown on this. You fire a

(17:25):
photons or to beam splitter. The photon is either a
detected directly revealing its path, or to combined with another beam,
creating the interference pattern. But the trick, the decision of
which set up the photon encounters, is made after it
passes through that slit. Using fast switches and sometimes random
numbered generators, the experimenters delay that final configuration until the

(17:50):
last possible moment. And what do they find. If you
set the apparatus to measure interference, you get an interference pattern.
You set it to measure measure path, you get two
stripes every single time, even though the photon had already

(18:10):
made the journey, as if a reality rewrote its history
to match the measurement you were doing. It's a little creepy,
so so a little strange. This should violate everything we
thought we knew about how time works. I mean, this

(18:36):
is kind of like getting pulled over for speeding after
you parked in the officer says sir, we just thought
a radar gun behind you in the past, and it
turns out you were breaking the law two exits ago.
But here's here's where it starts to get even a
little little spicier. In some versions of the delayed choice

(18:59):
set up, physicists, you entangled photons, two linked particles created
at the same time. Photon A goes through the slits
and hits the screen. Photon B, it's twin, is sent
on a longer path to a detector. The setup is
set is such that how you measure photon B determines
whether photon A showed an interference pattern. Remember, let us

(19:23):
settle in a minute. You never even touched the original photon.
You mess with its twin after the fact, and suddenly
photon A, which has already hit the screen, either does
or does not show interference depending on what you do

(19:43):
to photon B. It's like kind of sending your twin
brother into a bar fight, and based on whether you
picked up a pol Q three blocks away the cop
besides whether he was the aggressor Now, of course, you

(20:04):
know you might be thinking, okay, Jeff, this has got
to be some sort of sleight of hand, some kind
of delayed electronics or a trick of interpretation. Nope, nope,
The results are statistical but replicable. The quantum eraser experiments,

(20:25):
especially in the nineteen ninety nine version by kim Yu,
Kulikshi and Scully, have been confirmed, critriqued, and then confirmed
again In the consensus, the future appears to influence the past,
but only in the quantum realm for now. So what's

(20:49):
going on here? Well, let's run through a few idea.
You have retrocausality. Some physicists argue the quantum states can
backfill the past and what happens now who actually determines
what happened? Then it's not a message necessarily sent back whard,
just a reshuffling of the narratives that is take consistent
with what we end up knowing. In other words, reality

(21:10):
doesn't commit to a story until you ask itself to
explain it. You have number two. Time as a block.
Other interpretations suggest that time isn't flowing forward like a river,
but is more like a frozen block. The past, present,
and the future all exists simultaneously. Our consciousness just slices

(21:34):
through it one frame at a time. In this view
of photon's history isn't written or rewritten, it's just read
differently depending on how we observe it. Third, about cubism.
Some physiness believe quantum mechanics isn't about what's out there.
It's about what we know. The wave function isn't a thing.

(21:56):
It's a reflection of our knowledge, and it updates when
we get more So when we change the setup after
the fact, it's not that the photon change, it's that
our description of it did. It's kind of like arguing
over whether Schrodinger's cat is dead or alive. But the
real problem is that the cat has been watching you
the whole time, and it's probably judging your grammar. So

(22:21):
is this time travel ugh' sort of but not in
the step in the machine, kill your grandfather butterfly effect
kind of way. The lay choice isn't about sending signals
to the past. It's about probability and knowledge. You can't
use it to send a message. You can't predict lottery
numbers or stop a photon from hitting a wall, but

(22:41):
it does suggest that events can remain undecided until conditions
in the future lock them in. And that's that's really
the real kicker of all, this reality doesn't run like
a movie playing on a film. It's more like those
old Choose your own adventure books waits until the last
page is turned before deciding what that middle chapter actually

(23:03):
was about. Now I admit it, This whole whole thing
feels like you're arguing with the universe over who ordered pizza,
and the universe sits that just sits there, like, well,
I might have ordered it, depending on whether you know
you tip the driver in ten minutes or not. Oh
and if you didn't tip, I retroactively didn't order anything.

(23:24):
Enjoy your timeline, loser. But this kind of brings us
into the deep stuff of the implications for free will
and the self. This is stuff philosophers whisper to each
other over candlate with trembling hands. If the future can

(23:44):
affect the past, if the decisions are not final until
you know after they should have been, then what does
that say necessarily about free will? Are we just passengers
on a train that occasionally let us think we're steering?
We're Are we, through attention, choice, observation, co authors of
the world we live in? And this is where Wheeler

(24:08):
himself drops the mike with his most famous quote. No
phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.
And I know you all got the stupid Muppet song
in your brain. But in Wheeler's universe, the observer isn't
just a passive audience. We are part of the story.

(24:31):
Reality h kind of depends on us. Now, in a moment,
rather short moment, we'll be taking a break, So go
stretch your legs, maybe roll a photon across the floor
and stare it down and see what happens. And when
we come back, we're going to ask, perhaps an even

(24:51):
scarier question, if the universe doesn't make up its mind
until we observe it, what happens when we stop?

Speaker 1 (25:27):
I love.

Speaker 3 (25:43):
When a passing fine oh Day said, decide.

Speaker 1 (25:57):
A second race, yet step.

Speaker 3 (26:05):
Don't take until the move one set the two lose
the boy.

Speaker 1 (26:18):
I'm happy the town.

Speaker 4 (26:26):
Then quite lover before in my.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
Flight the world night shift was begat in the.

Speaker 4 (27:06):
Past, presens into my name, but only join.

Speaker 5 (27:11):
The game Chason through that place Britain, and only answers at.

Speaker 3 (27:30):
The dreams st dream.

Speaker 1 (27:39):
Of, said.

Speaker 6 (27:43):
He shine, So it's on his size, scream, I reach
the world my shift with that.

Speaker 3 (27:56):
Damn h.

Speaker 2 (28:19):
And welcome back. I hope everyone was able to stretch
their legs and do whatever they needed to do during
that intermission. I thank you for tuning in the night
and listening. I hope this show has been an entertaining
one for you. I know it can be a rough
subject with audible only, but I'm trying to make it
as fun as I positively can and engaging as much

(28:39):
as I can, and hopefully I'm succeeding in that. So
now as we gin Act three, we're gonna we're gonna
step into that courtroom, if you will, But not not
just any kind of shops. I hit the wrong wrong
with that, but there we go. We're gonna step into

(28:59):
a cosmic sort of courtroom where the laws of physics
sit and judgment, where time is on trial in the charge,
the charge of time being a fraud. Because if you've
followed us so far, thank you, you've probably started to

(29:21):
feel it that cold stream suspicious, knowing at the edge
of your logic that calls might not always come before effect,
that consequence may proceede actions, and that the earrow of
time might be more of a boomerang. And tonight we're
going to call our first witness causality, the very idea

(29:46):
that A leads to B and never the other way around. Now,
it is one of those things we don't usually question,
like gravity, so we should question that too, or why
cheese makes it everything better? Causality is the idea that
events are linked by time. You flip on a late switch,

(30:06):
the room gets brighter. You drop a glass, it usually shatters.
Play on this podcast and hopefully I warp your perception
of reality. But in the quantum world, causality starts to
break down, not always, not everywhere, but in certain places.
Like the delayed choice experiment, it seems to bend. Now

(30:30):
the output of the experiment appears to depend on the
choice made after the key events should have happened. So
are we in the quantum twilight zone? What is really
really happening? So we're going to explore some more possibilities
from the philosophical to the physicist. Approved maybe reality is
a story and not a timeline. Our interpretation is that

(30:52):
reality functions like a sequence of events, and more or
less like a sequence of events and more like a narrative.
Events don't just unfold literally, they are kind of constructed holistically,
like kind of a jigsaw puzzle where the middle piece
helps define the edges. You only get the final picture
when all the pieces are in place, including the ending.

(31:15):
So when we delay the observation, universe doesn't rewind. It
just finally commits to the shape it was always going
to show. In other words, your life may not be
a road, it may be more of a book. And
every time you flip a page, the earlier chapters rewrite
themselves to now match the ending. Now, if only someone
could get that over to a certain author who hasn't

(31:38):
written that one book in what eleven twelve years now?
Or maybe we're in the block universe where all moments
exist simultaneously, and this view time doesn't flow. There is
no past, there is no present, and there is no future. Instead,

(32:01):
every moment exists simultaneously like frames any film. Real We
don't live in a slide show. We live in the
entire power point at once. It's just the consciousness moves
from slide to slide. Now, this theory is actually consistent
with Einstein's theory of relativity, which tells us that time
is relative depending on motion and gravity. There is no

(32:24):
universal now just here at this speed, with this mass.
So Maybe the layed choice doesn't change the past. Maybe
it illuminates a different part of the whole. You're not
actually breaking causality, You're just zooming out and realizing it
never worked the way you thought it did. Oh okay,

(32:46):
what does this kind of mean for us? Let's bring
it a little more into the home, not just in
the lab, not in just the realm, with photons and
detectors and equations that make your forehead hurt. Does all
this mean, you know, for people? So let me paint
for you if you will. Three kind of thought experiments,

(33:08):
not from textbooks, more from the kitchen table. Thought experiment
number one, the locked door. You're walking down a hallway,
you pass a locked door. You think nothing of it.
Hours later, you learned that someone you love was behind it,
calling out, waiting. Did it matter that you didn't try

(33:30):
the handle? In your memory, you did nothing wrong, But
now everything that was feels different. Your new information has
rewritten the meaning of the past. If not the facts,

(33:53):
then their weight. Experiment number two, the forgotten message. Imagine
a letter that arrives tomorrow. Inside it, it says, on
the night of July seventeenth, you made a choice that

(34:13):
changed everything of course you're sitting there racking your brain.
You remember nothing important, but now every second of that
night feels loaded charged. Did that letter change your past

(34:39):
or did it just change you? How about Thalta experiment
number three, the double slit life. Every time you made
a decision, every fork in your path. What if all
outcomes remained in superposition until one was observed. Every job

(35:05):
you didn't take, every phone call you almost made, every
moment you almost turned back but didn't. What if your
life is still collapsing in the being, moment by moment
and the final shape hasn't quite resolved. What if the

(35:27):
past isn't behind you at all? What if it's waiting
for the future to tell it to who it really was? No,
I know, I know. We return to a question from
Act too, but we will maybe a little deeper. Are

(35:51):
we creating the universe when we observe it? Or are
we simply revealing a story that's already been written. This
is kind of where Wheeler boor Heisenberg and modern physicists
start to sound more more like mystics. The observer and

(36:12):
the observed are not separate. Reality is not a fixed background,
It's participatory consciousness. May not just watch the show. It
might decide what the show was. And it doesn't necessarily
just apply to photons. It applies to memories, to identity,
to history itself. Let's think about it again. Your childhood

(36:39):
isn't a film real it's a collection of unstable particles
called memories, collapsing in the stories only when you focus
on them. What you choose to remember or believe changes
what your past feels like. The quantum world isn't far away,
it's happening inside your head. So can we break causality?

Speaker 1 (37:09):
No?

Speaker 2 (37:13):
And yes, all of this weirdness only works at the
quantum level with single particles, tightly controlled environments and probabilities.
You can't build a time machine out of photon, sorry Marvel.
You can't retro texture X and fit it fix it

(37:34):
before it went wrong. You can't observe a better tax
return into existence. I'm not saying I've tried this, but
I may have. Never mind. But what you can do
is rethink what caused an effect. Even means they're not rules.
They're models, useful most of the time, but not necessarily universal.

(37:59):
And when those models break down, well that's when things
sort of get interesting Around here. So what if the
reason reality behaves differently when you observe it is because
you're not just a camera. You are a participant, a
character in the story. But who's also is the one
turning the pages, and in the strange intersection of observation

(38:23):
and meaning, you help write what the story already was. Now,
if that's true, we've barely scratched the surface. So here

(38:45):
we are friends. We've seen light behave like a liar.
We've watched reality rewrite itself after the fact, we put
causality on trial and walked away wondering at times just
a polite illusion. But before we end tonight's journey, let
me ask one question. What if the universe is just

(39:07):
messing with us?

Speaker 6 (39:10):
Now?

Speaker 2 (39:10):
I don't mean that in a cheap clickbait kind of way.
I mean what if the universe knows you're watching and
changes the rules accordingly. What if we're not discovering reality,
we're interacting with it, not a stage, a partner, not
a machine, a trickster. And if that's trickster, and we

(39:35):
may maybe we should talk about with the cosmic comedian. Now,
in many ancient traditions, Native American Norse that most everyone
knows about West African Hindu. There's a figure that often recurs,

(39:57):
and that is the trickster Loki Coyote Essuehnemann. The trickster
doesn't destroy or dominate. He just disrupts. He breaks the
rules to show us the rules. He collapses our expectations,
reveals the truth, and then laughs about it. Could quantum

(40:20):
mechanics be our modern trickster. Let's review. If you don't look,
the photon goes through both slits. If you pick look,
it picks one. If you wait to decide whether to look,
after it's already gone through, it still responds. It's like
trying to solve amaze, only to realize the walls move

(40:42):
based on your attitude. Now, I know one of our
other shows on Killer and Radio have talked about this,
and I was actually a guest on it. We're gonna
talk about the simulation hypothesis. So we're gonna go in
the spirit of juckst full tenfoil hat for just a

(41:05):
little bit, because the delayed choice experiment has not only
shaken physicists, it's gotten tech pros and simulation theorists, lighting
scented candles and whispering code base into the void. So
here's the idea. If reality doesn't resolve itself until we
observe it, and if observation uses fewer resources when unobserved

(41:26):
systems stay fuzzy, then maybe, just maybe, this universe is
running unlimited rendering power. You only get resolution when you look.
Everything else stays in low definition like a video game
loading It just the room you're in. So you ever

(41:48):
lost your keys and then found them in a place
you already checked, don't blame yourself. It was just lag.
Let's be serious. Sort of. The simulation idea isn't fully science,
it's more a metaphor, but it reflects something real. The
universe is not as there as we think it is.

(42:12):
Things only take on definitive form when we demand it.
And that's kind of the joke. That's sort of the dance.
And it's also maybe, just maybe the point. So let's
bring our friends back in. Mister John Wheeler, the man
behind the Delayed Choice experiment. In his later years he

(42:33):
developed a deeply weird, deeply poetic idea, the participatory anthropic principle,
and that goes like this, Observers are necessary to bring
the universe into being, not just to see it, but
to define it now. I actually talked about this on

(42:55):
a previous episode of In Decrease, where I talk about
the cosmic observer. Now, what Wheeler imagined is a self
exciting loop. The yearly universe creates particles, Particles create atoms,
Adams creates starus, Stars create planets. Planets evolve the observers.

(43:17):
Observers then create the universe's meaning. It's kind of a movie,
a strip made of light and consciousness. Now, before you
dismiss this as poetic nonsense, let me remind you quantum
physics already broke determinism. There is no final answer. There

(43:40):
are only outcomes with probabilities, and every time you measure one,
you collapse possibility. And to fact, the observer change is
the observed. You affect the world just by being aware. Now,

(44:04):
quantum physics has made it weird, but mystics, poets, and
theologians have been dancing around the idea for centuries. We
do not see things as they are. We see them
as we are. On as nin the eye with which
I see God is the same eye with which God
sees me, Meister Eckhart, the observer is the observed. Krishna muturi. Now,

(44:32):
what modern physics has done is put in math where
mystery used to be. We can now calculate with precision
the uncertainty in your particle's momentum. But we still don't
know why choice you make now might determine what happened. Then,
So what do we do with this? Well, let's step back.

(44:56):
What does it mean? I mean, really mean to say
the observation creed it's reality. Does that mean we can
manifest things? Does it mean staring hard enough will fix
your taxes? No? But it does mean this The universe

(45:17):
isn't a script. It's more of a draft. At the
moment you observe it, you add the ink. It doesn't
mean you're a god, but it might mean you're a
co writer. And we always hear the quote if you
gaze along into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you,

(45:40):
or back into you, whichever phrase you've heard it. But
what quantum mechanics suggests perhaps is more disturbing. It's not
that the abyss sees you, it's that it might not
even exist until it sees your gaze. The ghost doesn't

(46:04):
haunt the house. The ghosts becomes the house once you
ask if it's real. Observation isn't passive, it's constructive. And
in that sense, the universe doesn't just allow you to
be there, it requires you. So where does this leave us?

(46:29):
Maybe nowhere, maybe everywhere. But I'll say this, if you
ever wondered whether your thoughts matter, if you ever asked
whether choice is real, if you ever stood in the

(46:51):
dark and whispered, did any of it count? The lad
choice experiment will whisper back. It's not decided yet. The
ink isn't dry, your photon hasn't picked a path. The
story isn't done. It's waiting for you to look. Now. Tonight,

(47:30):
we've walked the edge of reason, pass the microscopes, beyond
the equations, and straight into the place where physics stops
whispering answers and starts asking questions. We had fired photons
through slits. We waited to choose and watch the universe
respond as if it already knew. We put causality on

(47:54):
a bit of a little bit of a trial, and
we laughed at quantum furniture, and we dare to considered
whether the future writes the past. But deeper than all that,
the real real thread. Tonight, I hope you've picked up
is it's us, the observer, you me, the act of

(48:16):
looking that somehow matters more than it should, as if
in the deepest structure of reality, consciousness isn't just allowed,
it's required, because if the universe doesn't finalize its path
until something looks, if decisions made now can ribble backward
across space time, then maybe, just maybe, the whole cosmos

(48:39):
is watching itself through us. And that's a name that
I've used before, a term some physicists whispered and philosophers
have written in the margins, and I have done a
show on the cosmic observer, not necessarily a deity in robes,

(49:03):
not a being who necessarily judges, but a kind of
ultimate witness, embedded into the fabric of space time, an
awareness that spans the multiverse, not above the rules, but
written into them. If the double slit experiment tells us anything,
it's this. To observe is to create. And if there

(49:25):
is a cosmic observer, then the act of observation isn't
just a scientific mechanism. It's a sacred function. Every time
you choose to look, to answer a question, to shine
the light into the shaddows you've become part of the function,
a spark, a sliver of witness, a contributor to the

(49:47):
script that never fully settles until someone presses play. So
maybe we weren't just here to see the universe. Maybe
we were here to the universe could see itself. So

(50:10):
thank you for traveling with me tonight, for stepping into
this weird episode with all the winding and the uncertainty
that I find wonderful. This was ITC sixty seven, the
delayed choice experiment where we found that time is beendable,

(50:30):
reality is reactive, and nothing is quite what it seems
until you decide. But next time we're gonna take this
a little further, a little darker, with a very very
stranger type of question. What if you never die? Not metaphorically,

(50:59):
not spiritual, but literally, in some version of reality, every
time you face death, you survive. We're coming up in
two weeks when the next ITC ITC sixty eight we
explore the quantum immortality hypothesis, where quantum mechanics collides with

(51:21):
consciousness and the stakes only really couldn't be any higher.
So until then, keep asking, keep looking, because what user
may change everything? And remember the lake doesn't know where
it's going until you decide to look. Good Night, and

(51:42):
I hope you stay curious.

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