The Big Bang Never Happened

■ IMPLICATIONS ■function collapse" and the particle materialize at a single point—as a result of the observation.This idea, developed by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg,is just as bizarre as it sounds. It means that human consciousnesshas a direct impact on the electron. Until some conscious beingobserves an electron, it has no position. Observation magically—through no known law—makes the electron choose a spot to land.By no means did all the founders of quantum mechanics buyinto this astounding idea. Erwin Schrodinger, who developed thebasic equation used today in quantum mechanics—the Schrodingerequation—ridiculed the idea with the famous cat experiment.Take a cat, Schrodinger argued, and put it into a sealed chamberwith a vial of cyanide. A device breaks the vial with a hammerwhen a Geiger counter detects the decay of a given atom. Byquantum mechanics it's impossible to predict the exact momentthe atom will decay. The observer leaves and comes back thenext day, opening the box to see whether the cat has survivedthis experiment. The question is: Which observation determinesthat the nuclear wave function has collapsed, that is, if the decayoccurred? According to Bohr and Heisenberg, the atom doesn't"know" whether it has decayed until someone makes an observationwith an instrument. In Schrodinger's example, the instrumentis the cat's life or death. By this logic the cat itself is neitheralive nor dead until the observer opens the box and looks in! Orthen again, is it the "observation" by the cat of the hammer fallingthat causes the collapse of the wave function?Schrodinger devised this imaginary experiment to say in thestrongest possible terms that something is wrong with Heisenbergand Bohr's interpretation of quantum theory, or somethingis wrong with the theory itself, as Einstein strongly believed. Butmany, many books on the subject claim that there is somethingbizarre about the universe, rather than about quantum mechanicsas a theory!Dozens of scientists have concluded that this proves that consciousness,either human or feline, has a direct, occult impact onthe universe—that the universe, as John Wheeler has written,could not exist unless there was a human being to observe it.Even stranger notions have become quite popular: one, a stapleof science fiction, is that every time an electron has to "make upits mind" where to jump, a new universe splits off—in one uni-352