There are two things creating some buzz at the moment on ScienceBlogs that I don’t intend to write about because I’ve already commented on them. They’re oddly similar, too, though they’re being approached in different ways.
One is this op-ed by Paul Davies, which is basically a shorter and more contentiously worded version of one of the arguments in Cosmic Jackpot. I reviewed the book back in January, and I really don’t have anything to say about this Cliff’s Notes version that I didn’t say then.
The other is this silliness from the Telegraph about shortening the life of the Universe by observing dark energy. This appears to start with a paper by Lawrence Krauss (among others), which led to a press release, which led to a New Scientist article, which led to the Telegraph piece, and with a pedigree like that, you just know it has to be good.
The argument, as I understand it, is an attempt to apply a variant of the Quantum Zeno Effect to the entire universe, and say that observing the state of the early universe causes it to collapse into some particular quantum state, which might not be the one we’d really like it to be in, in some metaphysical sort of sense. The results are predictably daft.
Anyway, since Rob Knop poked me to say something about this, let me just point to this old post about “counterfactual computing,” which contains an explanation of the Quantum Zeno Effect. I made complete hash of the numbers in that post, but the basic idea is explained there. If you want a more detailed explanation, with correct figures, you’ll need to wait for the book.