Darwin revisited in quantum theory

Quantum mechanics is without a doubt one of the milestones of scientific though in all of its history. It has lead to major discoveries in our understanding of nature, but it has had also a huge practical impact in our industrial societies, since. for one of the many examples, quantum mechanics is at the core of modern computers (I remember that at some point I read that the 20% of the American Brute Inner Product was based on products which would have never been possible without the advent of quantum mechanics).

I was reading in the plane today the French magazine Courier International when I spotted an article describing recent work by leading quantum mechanics theorist Wolfgang Zurek and collaborators which addresses one of the foundational problems of quantum mechanics, which is that in its standard formulation quantum mechanics requires the presence of observers to yield well-definite predictions. Obviously this is not consistent with a realist conception of reality, that is, that reality exist out there and does not depend on whether we men are looking or not. Let me note that this is a conceptual problem, and that for practical computations it is not an issue, since we have a well definite set of rules to perform any prediction that we want (which have been verified with an impressible degree on accuracy in all cases).

The proposal of Zurek et al. is that actually it is the environment that solves the apparent inconsistency of the theory in favor of a realist view of reality. Just as in darwinist evolution the environment selects the most adapted animals, in the quantum world the environment, like thermal noise, selects which of the many possible solutions of the quantum equations we will observe in the experiment.

I cannot go into more details until I read the original works, but it really looks a promising approach that should lead us to a much better understanding of quantum theory and the quantum world (which obviously was out there and working fine before there were even humans on earth to invent the world quantum!).