will push down wages and create a vast reserve of unemployed workers. McIlhagga, Samuel. “Gen Z Has Finally Found Its Karl Marx: The German philosopher’s “Grundrisse” is an indispensable guide to our current chaos—from AI to the rise of China,” Foreign Policy, 28 May 2023. Retrieved from: https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/05/28/marx-grundrisse-ai-artificial-intelligence-china-david-harvey/
52 Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1, “Commodities,” (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 35.
53 Sounds very similar to aspects of the Copenhagen interpretation, a collection of views related to the meaning of quantum mechanics, this take on the theory underpinning quantum mechanics says everything can be described as a possibility – until we're forced to describe it as an actuality.
Thought experience: “Imagine a small piece of matter emerging out of the darkness inside a closed box. Unseen, it exists in a blur of maybes. It has no single location in the shadows, no particular spin, no specific momentum. Importantly, any light it emits also lies on an infinite spectrum of possibility.
This particle hums with potential in a wave that theoretically spreads into infinity. It's possible to compare this spectrum of possibilities against itself in the same way a wave on the surface of a pond can split and recombine to form a recognizable pattern of interference, in fact.
Yet, every bump and nudge in this ripple as it spreads entangles it with another, limiting the range of possibilities at its disposal. Its interference pattern shifts in noticeable ways, confining its outcomes in a process physicists describe as a loss of coherence, or decoherence.
It's this process that physicists Daine Danielson, Gautam Satishchandran, and Robert Wald considered in a thought experiment that would lead to an intriguing paradox.
A physicist who peeks inside the box to detect the light emitted by the particle will inevitably entangle themselves and their environment with the hidden particle's waves, causing some degree of decoherence.
But what if there was a second person looking over their shoulder, catching the light emitted by the particle with their own eyes? Likewise, by entangling themselves with the light emitted by the particle, they would further constrain those possibilities in the particle's wave, changing it further still.
And if the second observer was standing on a distant planet, light-years away, peering at the box through a telescope? Here's where it gets weird.
In spite of the years it took for the electromagnetic ripples of light to travel out of the box, the second observer would still entangle with the particle. According to quantum theory, this should also cause a noticeable change in the particle's wave, one the first observer would see long before their colleague on a distant world even began to set up their telescope.
But what if the second observer lurked deep inside a black hole? Light from the box might easily slide across its horizon, falling into the abyss of mangled space-time, but according to the rules of general relativity, there's no way information on its entangled fate with the second observer could seep back out again.
Either what we know of quantum physics is wrong, or we have some serious problems to solve with general relativity.
Or, according to Danielson, Satishchandran, and Wald, our second observer is irrelevant. That line-of-no-return that encircles a black hole, known as the event horizon, serves as an observer itself, eventually causing the decoherence of, well, just about everything. Like a crowd of giant eyes across the cosmos, watching the Universe unfold.
Source: McCrae, Mike. “Extreme Horizons in Space Could Lure Quantum States Into Reality,” Science Alert, 27 March 2023. Retreived from: https://www.sciencealert.com/extreme-horizon
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54 Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014) 20 & 46.
55 Marx, Karl. Grundrisse, Notebook VII (Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1973).