Physics has something to say about reality. It would not have survived as an approach to the world for so many centuries if that wasn’t the case. Yet we have to be careful. Physics has bought its success by narrowing its focus and developing a specific approach. We shouldn’t think of it as a ‘catch-all,’ capable of accounting for everything that we experience.
That’s a hard lesson for a physicist to learn.
The title Fringe Physics is intended in a double sense. It reflects both the unconventional status of the consciousness-collapse hypothesis and the fact that many of the relevant experiments involve interference fringes in quantum-optical systems. In this talk, I review known experimental efforts that have explicitly or implicitly tested observer-dependent collapse, including optical double-slit studies. Although the range of experiments differ widely in methods and interpretations, they collectively form a small but coherent body of empirical work that has not been widely known outside specialized communities.Â