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?
In: 2860
It means that our universe is either local or real and cannot be both at the same time. “Local” here means that all actions happen through direct transmission of the fundamental forces, for example you kicking on earth can’t move a ball that’s located in space, the force can only be transmitted through collision and not just jump from one object to the next. “Real” in this sense is referring to a highly theoretical concept of property of quantum objects and whether they are inherent or created with observation, the following analogy is oversimplified to the point of being a bit incorrect, but that’s the best way of simply explaining it that I can think of: it’s like having an orange fruit, is it really the orange colour? If the universe was “real” in this sense the orange colour would be inherent to the fruit and always present, but if it’s not “real” then the fruit doesn’t have an actual colour and only becomes orange when you look at it and need the information about its colour. The Nobel prize was awarded for proving that within laws of quantum mechanics and when operating on quantum objects these two properties are exclusive, either our universe was local but not real, or was real but not local, but we don’t know which of the two it is yet, thus it was named “not locally real”.
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