The Nature of Quantum Mechanics

According to this article, astronomers are shortening the life of the universe simply by observing it. More specifically, it is the observation of dark matter that may have accelerated the future destruction of the universe. Though this idea is preposterous, it actually found its way into an article in New Scientist.[1]

This idea that the observation of a system can affect the properties of the system comes from a misunderstanding of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Basically this misunderstanding states that the properties of a quantum mechanical system have no definite value until they are measured, or "observed", in which case, the act of observation "forces" the properties of the system to assume definite values.

The problem with this way of looking at quantum mechanics deals with the context in which it is understood. If you define "observation" as the act of information being absorbed by a person's consciousness, then you really can have no effect on the state of the universe by observing it. You just became less ignorant about what's going on around you. By "observing" Dark Energy, all we have done is to measure the predetermined state of the universe (by the way, I don't believe in a local hidden variable theory).

On the other hand, measurement and observation in a quantum mechanical system are usually discussed in the context of our ability to predict what the outcome of an experiment will be. According to Quantum Mechanics, we cannot predict what an outcome will be for a single event, only the respective probabilities of the outcomes that we know are possible for that given event.[2]

Quantum mechanics, then, does not discuss how nature truly works. Otherwise, we would be able to predict precisely what would happen every time. It only concerns our ability to describe how nature works. Just because some literature on quantum mechanical theory may appear to suggest that we affect the state of a quantum mechanical system simply by observing it, we cannot say with any certainty that the simple act of observing a system changes its state. What happens to the system changes its state, and in many cases, observation is mentioned in the context of doing something to the system to get a measurement. The act of doing something in order to obtain a measurement changes the state of the system, not the measurement itself. Therefore, when we observe dark energy, we do not have any effect on the universe.

[1] New Scientist is not a peer reviewed journal, it is a pop science magazine. The fact that they are a science magazine does not mean that they can be relied on as a scientific authority. They may be the most accessible source of science information for the average person, but I have learned to take caution before citing pop science magazines like New Scientist, Popular Science, etc. If you're interested in the real science, publications in peer reviewed journals are a much better source.

[2] The probabilistic nature of quantum mechanical systems is not just some quirk of quantum mechanics, but it has actually been shown, by experimentally testing Bell's theorem, that nature is generally unpredictable outside of the probabilistic constraints that come from the theory of quantum mechanics, one of the main points of Copenhagen interpretation.

Update - I fixed the link to the new scientist article and made a few grammatical changes to clarify the post.