You should know better, Scientific American.

Three months ago I told Cerebrophage that a tree falling in a forest with no one around might not make a sound. Turns out I was correct! The universe is not real and objects don’t have definite properties independent of observation. You can’t deny the science!

all science has it's day, it's run, but in the end all theories can be replaced

you take me back to the one F i got in college. i had a C going into the final exam, and thought i did okay on it, but the posted final grade was F. i never went to talk to the prof about it, of course, so i'll never know for sure how or even *that* it was so. the prof went on to win a Nobel Prize several years later. so happy for him...

I have dyslexia and my professor deducted 1/3 of a grade from our papers for each spelling mistake. My first paper was a B but with 5 spelling mistakes my paper was graded down to a D+. After getting a D+ on the first paper and a D- on the second paper I didn’t bother taking the final.

ouch! ) :

So basically until a theory becomes a law such as gravity then it's anyone's guess as to whether it's true?

well, theories (such as Newton's "law" of gravity) *never* become laws because it's always possible that some wise-acre like Einstein will come along 300 years later and show that it's not quite right, not just in accuracy but even in essence. so we always take the skeptical view of every theory, if we're being properly scientific, because to not do so would miss opportunities to correct our theories and advance the field. i sometimes put a blank piece of paper on the screen and tell my class Here's a list of all scientific theories we know to be complete and correct.

it's amazing how the renowned scientists in any field will cling to the currently accepted theory rather than take a new contender seriously. we're supposed to be continuously skeptical of all theories and continuously open-minded about the new, but i see a hard preference for the theories we've been taught and that we teach to the young. there's popular saying, Science advances one funeral at a time.

Interesting, I guess that's true, we can't know anything definitively since our minds are so finite and we're constantly learning and growing as a species much like a person learns new facets of what he thought was true from infancy to old age.

all very true. i think that our minds are capable of understanding much more than we have so far. but another aspect of the issue is that science, unlike math, is an open system. it's harder (seemingly impossible) to prove any theory when we don't know all the rules.

Is that because sound waves must hit the ear drum to be heard so that if no creature having ears was around or only deaf creatures the tree would not make a sound? I bet if you put a recording device there and ran off moments before a tree fell it would still pick up a sound. I'm intrigued, did our tax dollars actually pay for this to be a study?

If you put a recorder then the recorder counts as an observer so that wouldn’t prove anything. I was just joking with my comment. The article is not talking about anything as large as a tree it is talking about subatomic particles.

What does this headline even mean? The Universe is not locally real? So we're living in a figment of our imaginations? Please explain. This could be a game changer for me, I'll just explain to my husband that the pile of dishes and laundry isn't actually there. 😉

physics as a field, in my opinion, lost their sense of reason a while ago. perhaps just for the fame, i don't know, they propagate ideas like parallel universes, dark matter, dark energy, and the idea that our reality is simply a "projection" rather than made of real physical entities, all with minimal data to support the proposals. i try to be open-minded about these things, but it looks like a love affair with the absurd. it looks like they idolize creative interpretation over the goal of sticking to the simplest explanation that fits available hard facts.

remember my earlier post about a Harvard physicist opining that physics needs another Einstein to clear up some of these messes? they do need an Einstein, but only in the sense that Einstein knew the utter value of staying rational during analysis. the field has forgotten that. thanks for listening to my rant ( :

It sounds more like they're dabbling in philosophy than physics. Kinda what Plato believed, experience of the physical is only an illusion. By breaking free of the bonds of empirical knowledge man can gain true knowledge of the mind beyond what we perceive with the senses. I would think physics is pretty empirical though, being based on the physical.