I just saw a comment that linked to an article explaining how Nobel prize winners recently discovered the universe is not locally real. My brain isn’t functioning properly today, so can someone please help me understand what this means?
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Look at all the random objects around you. Are they “real”? Meaning do they have properties like position, mass, velocity etc. that are fixed regardless of who, if anyone, is observing them? Or did they just only come into existence when you asked that question and looked at them? If you rewind time and check again, could these properties now be completely different than the first time?
From the perspective of classical physics the answer is that they are all real and have fixed properties. Moreover these properties are only determined by the environment around them and not some other magical force. This is called local realism. This also implies that given a list of all the particles in the universe and all of their properties at any given point in time, you can perfectly simulate the universe indefinitely into the future or the past.
All of this holds for large objects, but when you go down to the quantum scale the rules go out the window and things get weird.
A quantum particle, say an electron, does *not* have a fixed position, momentum, spin etc. Each of these properties only exists as a probability distribution. So the answer to “where is this electron” is really “3% chance at position A, 5% chance at position B, 1% chance at position C…” The electron is nowhere and everywhere at once. And this is the case for every property of every particle in the universe. The property only becomes “real” the moment you observe it, and if you rewind time and observe again you may get a different answer.
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