Dear George and Banjo,

On reflection, I think the situation is that by being observed by Jane is not a part of the natural environment and Jane is an extraneous variable. I suspect the case has more to the quality of the "locus" of the experimental condition than something like making a sound or the apes smelling her. Apes in their natural state are not enjoined to spying primatologists. She has contaminated the experiment to the extent he presence means the apes are not in the wild.

I had a quick look for cite but was unsuccessful.

David,
From what I’ve heard, there are some scientists within the Vatican who are creationists.

Yuyutsu,
It’s been a pleasure chatting with you over these concepts. Though I didn’t realise I wasn’t talking to someone of the human race, only someone temporarily wearing something human. And I never did catch where you hid those verbal documents.

OUG,

"CREATED...by by definition..." - OUG

Of course, pertaining to the definition, it is a classification system. As I have said before, its like defining Pluto, as planet or a planetoid. People agree on the delimiters based on tentative knowledge of the time. It does not follow that they "created" Pluto.

Put another way, you probably would not call your cat "Spot" and your dog "Felix". There is a convention.

The author has written an extensive methodology section which would be opened to critique by peers. The paper has seemingly already passed desk review.

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Dear George,

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"I am not sure what “principle“ you are referring to"

I was wondering what justification there was for a particular phenomena that had been observed during a quantum physics experiment on "elementary particles" to be established as a general "principle" to be applied to the relationship of Jane and the apes and how its effect could be detected.

Perhaps that is a stupid question but I must confess that it was the one which my uncouth mind produced on reading your post.

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Dear Oliver,

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"I suspect the case has more to the quality of the "locus" of the experimental condition than ..."

I am afraid we are now into conjecture on this one.

Perhaps David F. can get us out of this stalemate "locus". I seem to recall that he brought our attention to the so called phenomenon of "observer dependence" in the first place.

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Dear Banjo Paterson,
>>what justification there was for a particular phenomena that had been observed during a quantum physics experiment on "elementary particles" to be established as a general "principle" to be applied to the relationship of Jane and the apes and how its effect could be detected. Perhaps that is a stupid question<<

Apparently I misunderstood you again, being misled by the particularity of Oliver’s example. As I understand you now, you are asking why the quantum theory conclusion that “observation produces the property observed”, applies to the micro-world of atoms and “smaller” particles (where it can be experimentally verified) but cannot be observed/experimentally verified in the macro-world of everyday objects.

This is anything but a stupid question; it is actually part of the quantum dilemma. Allegedly (just quoting from the book, p. 107) if you wanted to repeat the interference experiment (that in the micro-world leads to the baffling conclusion of an “observer created reality”) with a grain of sand, it would have to move slower than an atom’s length in a century!

The standard Copenhagen interpretation considers two realms: the macroscopic, classical realm of measuring instruments (and Jane and her apes) governed by Newton’s (or even Einstein’s) laws; and the microscopic, quantum realm of atoms and other small things governed by the Schrödinger equation of quantum mechanics. Until recently physicists could tacitly accept this "double standard" of physical laws since for all practical purposes it was always clear whether they were dealing with objects from the macroscopic or from the microscopic world.

However, today these artificial boundaries between macro and micro, that the Copenhagen interpretation assumes, are more and more blurred. Quantum mechanics is increasingly applied to larger and larger objects, cosmologists write a wave-function for the whole universe to study the Big Bang, etc.

So there are not only philosophical objections to the artificial dualism dividing physical reality into its micro and macro “components” with different laws.

Well, I don’t know if this helped. These are things nobody, including you and I, yet understands properly.