Physicists from Switzerland claim that quantum physics, in principle, cannot consistently explain the behavior of objects in the macrocosm. This does not allow it to be used for a complete description of the universe and indicates the fallacy of all interpretations of quantum mechanics, according to an article published in the journal Nature Communications.
“Imagine walking into a quantum casino and agreeing to toss a coin in exchange for a promise to pay you 1,000 euros if it comes up tails, otherwise you will give the dealer half of that amount. Our thought experiment shows that both observers will get opposite results, which will be impossible to verify,”the scientists write.
Scientists have long been interested in why we cannot observe the phenomenon of quantum entanglement - the interconnection of the quantum states of two or more objects, in which a change in the state of one object is instantly reflected in the state of another - in the world of everyday objects.
Today physicists explain the absence of such “strange connections”, as Einstein put it, between two apples and other visible objects by the fact that they are destroyed as a result of decoherence - the interaction of such entangled objects with atoms, molecules and other manifestations of the environment and irreversible violation of the quantum state.
Thus, the larger the object, the more it will contact the environment, and the faster the quantum bond will decay. This decision gave rise to a lot of new disputes - where does quantum mechanics "begin" and where "ends", whether it influences the behavior of macro-objects and whether it is possible to find this border between the "world of Schrödinger's cat" and "Newton's apple".
Many scientists today believe that this border does not exist and that the laws of the quantum world describe well all processes in the "macro-Universe". There are also "skeptics" - back in 1967, the famous Hungarian physicist Eugene Wigner came up with a thought experiment, the so-called "friend's paradox", which first pointed to the fundamental limitations of quantum mechanics.
Renato Renner and Daniela Frauchiger of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich extended Wigner's ideas and used them to test whether quantum physics could be used to describe processes in the macro universe.
In their thought experiment, not one, but several pairs of observers participate at once, one of whom is conducting a quantum experiment, and their "friends" are trying to guess the results of these measurements, knowing one of the initial conditions of the experiments. To do this, they create "copies" of the first experimenters and their installations in their laboratories and make their own measurements on them.
Promotional video:
Having described all their interactions using formulas built according to the rules of quantum mechanics, the scientists analyzed what results such pairs of "experimenters" would get.
It turned out that such observers will always come to opposite conclusions, observing the same process or object of the macrocosm, if they use the principles of quantum mechanics to describe their experiments. This, in turn, suggests that quantum physics in its current form really cannot be used to describe macroscopic processes and the work of the entire Universe as a whole.
All these calculations, as the researchers note, can be verified in the future, when the first universal quantum computers are created. Such computing systems, as Renner and Frauchiger point out, will take on the role of such experimenters and allow scientists to know in practice whether quantum physics really has such limitations.