Zurek, Wojciech

Wojciech is a Laboratory Fellow in the Theory Division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and a former leader of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group, where he focuses on foundations of quantum theory, especially decoherence, and quantum and classical information (with potential benefit to the emerging fields of quantum computing). He believes that an objective universe does exist, as long as an environment is there to act as a witness. In this manner, he disagrees with two of the founders of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, who suggested that until quantum particles are observed they exist as “wave functions” that can contain a superposition of many properties. But when an observer makes a measurement, the wave function “collapses,” yielding a particle that behaves classically. Wojciech and colleagues have formulated a mechanism that eliminates the role of the observer and thus avoids the always uncomfortable question of whether anything exists when nobody is looking at it. They call the theory “quantum Darwinism” because the environment decides which quantum properties are the “fittest” and will ultimately survive to be viewed by observers. The environment is what enables us to measure reality.