Did We End The Universe Prematurely By Observing It?
by Dave Price
Short answer: no, this is just technobabble.
Less short answer: outside of sci-fi, quantum "observations" have nothing to do with whether a human brain perceives them, and humans are very unlikely to have produced any kind of particle/force interaction so novel to the universe that it creates a species of quantum wavefunction collapse that hasn't happened trillions of times before.
There's about a million fictional allusions to this idea, perhaps best exemplified by a line from an Aeon Flux episode: "Light, in the absence of eyes, illuminates nothing." It's fun idea and a great plot device, but unserious.
Here's the classic "quantum observation" experiment. Note that the results have nothing to do with whether a human happens to be standing there watching it.
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