Does the Universe Exist if We're Not Looking?

http://discovermagazine.com/2002/jun/featuniverse

[...] By the time the astronomers decide which measurement to make— whether to pin down the photon to one definite route or to have it follow both paths simultaneously— the photon could have already journeyed for billions of years, long before life appeared on Earth. The measurements made now, says Wheeler, determine the photon's past.

[...] Wheeler conjectures we are part of a universe that is a work in progress; we are tiny patches of the universe looking at itself— and building itself. It's not only the future that is still undetermined but the past as well. And by peering back into time, even all the way back to the Big Bang, our present observations select one out of many possible quantum histories for the universe.

[...] Wheeler suspects that most of the universe consists of huge clouds of uncertainty that have not yet interacted either with a conscious observer or even with some lump of inanimate matter. He sees the universe as a vast arena containing realms where the past is not yet fixed.

[...] Linde believes that Wheeler's intuition of the participatory nature of reality is probably right. But he differs with Wheeler on one crucial point. Linde believes that conscious observers are an essential component of the universe and cannot be replaced by inanimate objects.

"The universe and the observer exist as a pair," Linde says. "You can say that the universe is there only when there is an observer who can say, Yes, I see the universe there..."

Proved in a lab in 2007 http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/216/4

[...] The results, reported this week in Science, prove that the photon does not decide whether to behave like a particle or a wave when it hits the first beam splitter, Roch says. Rather, the experimenter decides only later, when he decides whether to put in the second beam splitter. In a sense, at that moment, he chooses his reality.

If you want to know more
http://www.bottomlayer.com/bottom/basic_delayed_choice.htm

[...] "If what you say is true," he said (in effect), "then I may choose to know a property after the event should already have taken place." Wheeler realized that in such a situation, the observer's choice would determine the outcome of the experiment – regardless of whether the outcome should logically have been determined long ago.

[...] Yet, it seems paradoxically that our later choice of whether to obtain this information determines which side of the galaxy the light passed, so to speak, billions of years ago.

Wheeler's delayed choice experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I see this experiment somehow as a modern variation of the old question, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? or, Can something exist without being perceived?

But what do I know...?

This is wonderful stuff. A large part of my philosophical education, and also my emotional/affective orientation toward life in general, was achieved and solidified by my obsessive reading of Robert Anton Wilson's books with their frequent focus on a wild and crazy presentation of the metaphysical implications of quantum theory, and also popularizations of quantum physics and its attendant weirdness such as John Gribbin's In Search of Schrodinger's Cat. So the material you present here is great fun.

Thanks for the thought provocation, Alberto.

I cannot help but think that all these questions stem from a failure to understand the nature of the photon.

At some point in the future, the collective world of particle physics is going to slap itself on the forehead and go "Duh!".

I remember the film "time machine (2002)", the scientist, Alexander, asking: "why can you change the past?" In fact, we can't. Nobody can change the fact that I was born. What Wheeler said is that, somehow, with things where quantum effects are important, or noticeable, like the Big Bang, or atomic particles, photons for example, the past is still not determined until we, by observing it, influence on it, deciding which of the possibilities of the past we choose to be our past. The future doesn't exist now, right? But with the past, somehow, it is exactly the same. We can still create our past, the same way we do with our own future, depending on the way, we observe it.

I still can't believe it, 100 %, but being it true or false, it doesn't really matter, Wheeler could have been a very interesting TLO member, too bad he died.