So over at one of those super reliable (sarcasm alert) British newspapers they have a story claiming that by making cosmological observations we may have shortened the length of the universe. I very much hope this is just bad science reporting and some physicist out there can tell me what reasonable proposal the telegraph totally butchered since the claim as stated is obviously complete bullshit, even to someone like me who left physics after their sophomore year to do mathematics.

The proposed reason is that by observing the universe we would cause it’s quantum mechanical superposition to collapse and theoretically shorten the expected lifetime of the universe. The analogy is to the (documented and uncontroversial) behavior of elementary particles whose position is repeatedly observed. By collapsing a particle repeatedly into the position basis one reduces the expected distance from it’s starting point after some fixed period of time compared to measuring it once at the end of the interval. Understood naively at this analogical level the application to the universe’s duration seems to make sense but physics isn’t part of the humanities and these analogies are merely imperfect ways of understanding the technical theories not grounds on which to base conclusions.

For starters, as the article does mention, the only way for this argument to even get off the ground is to assume that collapse is real (it’s not an artifact of our observational position as in many-worlds/many-minds type theories) and that it is caused by some aspect of conscious observation. While such theories are popular among those who want to read in support for their spiritual beliefs into quantum mechanics this interpretation of quantum mechanics only a small number of physicists (like Penrose) seem to view this as a plausible account and it’s only slightly more popular among philosophers.

Now while I wouldn’t go so far as to claim this interpretation was likely or even a strong contender I do think it deserves more attention than it is given¹. However, even granting this interpretation we still can’t support the results claimed in the article. In particular we have experimental evidence (double slit experiments) that it isn’t whether or not we actually draw the conclusions about some quantum mechanical system that matters, only whether we become entangled with it. Simplified this says that merely interacting (even indirectly) with an object is enough to collapse it’s wave function. But whether or not we actually built telescopes the radiation from remote events would still interact with us and our enviornment. In short even under the most generous interpretation of quantum mechanics our choice to observe these cosmological events wouldn’t make any difference.