Transcript

Physicists have debated the role of consciousness in quantum mechanics for more than 100 years. Some podcast episodes will soon reach that length, but I have a dentist appointment in two hours, so we'll have to wrap it up a little more quickly. Why did some physicists like von Neumann and Wigner think that consciousness is necessary to make sense of quantum mechanics, and can consciousness influence the outcome of a quantum experiment? That's what we'll talk about today.

In quantum mechanics, everything is described by a wave function. There's, for example, a wave function for a particle going left, and one for a particle going right, which sounds about as exciting as you expect physics to be. But the weird bit is that there's also a wave function for a particle that goes both left and right. This is called a superposition, according to the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics.