I Layperson's Question -- The wave function requires observation to collapse?

Se7enthSon
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If wave function requires observation to collapse, who or what may have been the observer during the billions of years before the emergence of life?
If wave function requires observation to collapse, who or what may have been the observer during the billions of years before the emergence of life?
 
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Answer: The observation does not require a conscious observer to have the collapse.
 
Moderator's note: Thread level changed to "I".
 
It depends in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. In some interpretations there is not even a collapse.
 
Se7enthSon said:
TL;DR Summary: If wave function requires observation to collapse, who or what may have been the observer during the billions of years before the emergence of life?

If wave function requires observation to collapse, who or what may have been the observer during the billions of years before the emergence of life?
You might want to try David Lindley's layman-friendly book "Where does the weirdness go?". It won't quite answer your question, but it will explain more about how we think about wave function collapse these days.

You might also google for "quantum decoherence", but most of what you find will be less layman-friendly.
 
I would like to know the validity of the following criticism of one of Zeilinger's latest papers https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2507.07756 "violation of bell inequality with unentangled photons" The review is by Francis Villatoro, in Spanish, https://francis.naukas.com/2025/07/26/sin-entrelazamiento-no-se-pueden-incumplir-las-desigualdades-de-bell/ I will translate and summarize the criticism as follows: -It is true that a Bell inequality is violated, but not a CHSH inequality. The...
I understand that the world of interpretations of quantum mechanics is very complex, as experimental data hasn't completely falsified the main deterministic interpretations (such as Everett), vs non-deterministc ones, however, I read in online sources that Objective Collapse theories are being increasingly challenged. Does this mean that deterministic interpretations are more likely to be true? I always understood that the "collapse" or "measurement problem" was how we phrased the fact that...
This is not, strictly speaking, a discussion of interpretations per se. We often see discussions based on QM as it was understood during the early days and the famous Einstein-Bohr debates. The problem with this is that things in QM have advanced tremendously since then, and the 'weirdness' that puzzles those attempting to understand QM has changed. I recently came across a synopsis of these advances, allowing those interested in interpretational issues to understand the modern view...
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