More Than One Reality Exists (in Quantum Physics)

Zorro (Slashdot reader #15,797) quotes Live Science:

Can two versions of reality exist at the same time? Physicists say they can -- at the quantum level, that is.

Researchers recently conducted experiments to answer a decades-old theoretical physics question about dueling realities. This tricky thought experiment proposed that two individuals observing the same photon could arrive at different conclusions about that photon's state -- and yet both of their observations would be correct.

For the first time, scientists have replicated conditions described in the thought experiment. Their results, published Feb. 13 in the preprint journal arXiv, confirmed that even when observers described different states in the same photon, the two conflicting realities could both be true. 'You can verify both of them,' study co-author Martin Ringbauer, a postdoctoral researcher with the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, told Live Science.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.