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this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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The Big Bang being a singular event that only happened once, as if we are so special we just happen to be at the point of time, within the spectrum of infinity where matter is in a state that can support life. (I'm not aware if that's the prevailing theory anymore)
Also the double slit experiment. We aren't a phantom observers, we are impacting the experiment. With our equipment.
We don't have to be special though. We can only exist at certain points in space time, under certain conditions. Those conditions are currently met, therfore we can exist, regardless of the infinite time/space conditions where we can't.
On your second point, that's what the science actually says. "Observer" or "observation" is used in a scientific sense and was probably a poor word choice. Science journalism gets carried away with anything that has the word "quantum" in it and it drives us mad.
You're absolutely right that the mechanism that's causing the wave function to collapse is the presence of whatever piece of equipment the particle is hitting. Whether that collapse happens at the two slits or the back wall changes the pattern, and that change is what shows wave-particle duality.
Also: physics doesn't claim to know that the Big Bang only happened once. That's just as far back as we can rewind with our current models. This is again something that science journalism takes a lot of liberty with.
Aren't you just moving the point of the wave collapse from the experiment to inside the brain? I mean if the wave function never collapsed, shouldn't we see all superpositions at once? But instead, the brain seems to collapse to one possibility, i.e. still collapsing the wave function.
I feel like here you're just moving the goal post again, if you'll excuse the expression :)
Even if there is no superposition in which an observer sees both outcomes, there must be some point in space and/or time that decides which of the two superpositions we see. Whether that is in the experiment, in the brain or in consciousness or whatever. I mean we only see one superposition, so there must be something that "decides" (randomly as far as we know) which one it is. And that decision is a kind of collapse of the wave function, no?
I am not a physicist though so this is just me rambling from my limited understanding.
I don't think a unique big bang has ever been the prevailing theory in science. If you ask science what happens before the big bang, the answer is "we don't know", and if you ask has there been other big bangs, you might get a "not that we've observed", but science has not attempted to explain what happened before the big bang because in the most literal sense, we just don't have the data to make an attempt.
Predictions do state that the future of the universe will look different from the beginning of the universe (by which I mean the universe since our big bang) and the maths suggest that before the big bang, we think there was a singularity of incredible density, but that doesn't really deal with how many other big bangs there can have been.