Amanda Gefter on John Wheeler and Scientific Reality

See also Amanda Gefter on John Wheeler and Peter Putnam.

Some of her slides:






























1:11:30 "Any world that all observers agree on is essentially independent of any one particular observer." But if any one particular observer had not been a participant in that world then it is hard to see how the world that the others observe would be the same as that one they all agree upon: for example it would not contain that putative missing observer! This is the essence of holism, I think. We (as scientists) only know the world by slicing it up (with laboratory apparatus) and discussing our observations in some language through which process we attempt to achieve coherent descriptions of these different ways of slicing the one whole world into pieces. In quantum mechanics the language we use does not allow us to describe that process of slicing itself, only the resulting phenomena we experience.

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