Now for the first time, a team led by researchers at the MIT LIGO Laboratory has measured the effects of quantum fluctuations on objects at the human scale, collapsing the boundary between the random uncertainty of the quantum world, where particles spring into and out of existence, and the orderly certainty of the classical world, where we humans live, see, and measure.
“If some conspiracy is happening to simulate quantum mechanics by a mechanism that is actually classical, that mechanism would have had to begin its operations—somehow knowing exactly when, where, and how this experiment was going to be done—at least 7.8 billion years ago. That seems incredibly implausible, so we have very strong evidence that quantum mechanics is the right explanation,” says co-author Alan Guth, the Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics at MIT.
