The future of Creationism and mankind's intellectual evolution.

The idea of an extended thing sitting in a three-dimensional space, waiting for us to discover it, is revealed as another human projection, a limited image of reality, more of an echo of the way our minds work than of reality itself. According to Bohr, nature reveals this to us by showing that we can have only complementary views of reality. If we set up an experimental arrangement to view subatomic phenomena as particles, then that is what we will observe. According to Heisenberg, another major contributor to the Copenhagen Interpretation, what we observe in our experiments is not nature itself but nature exposed to our methods of questioning nature. In short, an electron is not a thing until we observe it!

Bohr's view was decidedly mystical: according to him,the mathematics of quantum theory implied that particles of light and matter have no real existence until they are observed.

The astronomers choice of how to observe photons from the quasar here in the present apparently determines whether each photon took both paths or just one path around the gravitational lens-billions of years ago. As they approached the galactic beam splitter the photons must have had something like a premonition telling them how to behave in order to satisfy a choice to be made by unborn beings on a still nonexistent planet.
The fallacy giving rise to such speculations,Wheeler explains, is the assumption that a photon had some physical form before the astronomer observed it. Either it was a wave or a particle; either it went both ways around the quasar or only one way. Actually Wheeler says quantum phenomena are neither waves nor particles but are intrinsically undefined until the moment they are measured.

Instead their goal is to lay bare the curious reality of the quantum realm. "For me, the main purpose of doing experiments is to show people how strange quantum physics is," says Anton Zeilinger of the University of Innsbruck, who is both a theorist and experimentalist ."Most physicists are very naive; most still believe in real waves or particles."

Yet even this deliberately abstract language contains some misleading implications. One is that measurement requires direct physical intervention. Physicists often explain the uncertainty principle in this way:in measuring the position of a quantum entity, one inevitably blocks it off its course, losing information about its direction and about its phase, the relative position of its crests and troughs.Most experiments do in fact involve intrusive measurements. For example, blocking one path or the other or moving detectors close to the slits obviously disturbs the photons passage in the two-slit experiment as does placing a detector along one route of the delayed-choice experiment. But an experiment done last year by Mandel's team at the University of Rochester shows that a photon can be forced to switch from wavelike to particlelike behaviour by something much more subtle than direct intervention....
Now comes the odd part. The signal photons and the idler photons, once emitted by the down-converters, never again cross paths; they proceed to their respective detectors independently of each other. Nevertheless, simply by blocking the path of one set of idler photons, the researchers destroy the interference pattern of the signal photons. What has changed?
The answer is that the observer's potential knowledge has changed. He can now determine which route the signal photons took to their detector by comparing their arrival times with those of the remaining, unblocked idlers. The original photon can no longer go both ways at the beam splitter, like a wave, but must either bounce off or pass through like a particle.The comparison of arrival times need not actually be performed to destroy the interference pattern. The mere "threat" of obtaining information about which way the photon travelled, Mandel explains, forces it to travel only one route. "The quantum state reflects not only what we know about the system but what is in principle knowable," Mandel says.

Clearly the two slit experiments, for the first time in physics, indicates that there is a much deeper relationship between the observer and the phenomenon, at least at the subatomic level. This is an extreme break from the idea of an objective reality or one where the laws of Nature have a special, Platonic existence.