Quantum Darwinism: A New SHL Flavor

The Stuff Happens Law enters
quantum physics, where it also
achieves nothing worth knowing

The Stuff Happens Law (our term for Natural Selection, Charley Darwin’s prize vacuity) is the opposite of knowledge. Any theory that explains everything explains nothing (see 26 March 2025). “Selectionism” has gotten so far out of hand, it is used on anything and everything in the universe. According to the selectionist, anything that exists has been naturally selected. The Darwinist can’t lose. Everything becomes evidence for his vacuous theory.

‘Quantum Darwinism’ may explain why we live in a shared reality (New Scientist, 7 April 2025). Reporter Karmela Padavic-Callaghan begins, “A framework inspired by evolution may demonstrate why two observers see the same non-quantum world emerge from the many fuzzy probabilities of the quantum realm.”

The quantum realm is notoriously full of uncertainties, but observers like us still manage to agree on how we experience it in very concrete ways. A quantum framework inspired by evolutionary principles may explain how such consensus is possible – and now researchers have proved it mathematically.

Proving mathematically that Stuff Happens is the easiest problem in the universe. If it exists, it must have been selected!

“Every day, when you go outside, you see things. And you see them as localised. You don’t see weird quantum features. So, the question is, how can we connect this divide between quantum and classical?” says Akram Touil at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico.

A framework called quantum Darwinism could make that connection. Proposed in 2000 by Wojciech Zurek, also at LANL, this idea uses a process similar to natural selection to show how we end up seeing a non-quantum world and agreeing on what it is like.

Wow, this is profound. Go outside and see things. They exist! They must have been naturally selected. Our understanding of the world has just skyrocketed!

There must be replication in Darwinism, so stuff happens all over the place.

When a quantum object interacts with its environment, some of its possible states are destroyed, but these special states survive by replicating themselves. Thus, when you look at an object and see it as unfuzzy, you are really seeing one in the long chain of these copies.

And thus when two humans observe something, they can agree that stuff happened. Nature selected it. We can all agree now. Whatever survives in our minds is the fittest.

“With quantum Darwinism, Zurek suggested that the states we ultimately see are somehow more robust than the rest in the cloud of possibilities – in the language of natural selection, these states are more “fit”.

Any questions? Those will be answered in the usual Darwinian way: in Futureware. Some day, we will gain the coveted Understanding.

It’s not a bug; it’s futureware.

Gerardo Adesso at the University of Nottingham in the UK says the new work adds weight to quantum Darwinism as a way of understanding how the classical world emerges from the quantum, but there is still room for adding more detail to the framework. For instance, future calculations could pinpoint not just how much observers agree on the classical world they observe, but the exact content of their observations. And the question remains whether any trace of quantumness can survive the process of reaching consensus, he says.

Touil also wants to go beyond qubits and explore how quantum Darwinism can explain the full richness of the physical world. For example, he wants to relate his team’s work to quantum states of matter, which can be created in the lab with special materials or extremely cold atoms. In this way, quantum Darwinism may be able to explain not just why we see a non-quantum world, but also why that world still contains some examples of quantumness.

That’s all, folks. Nature selects everything. Whatever exists has been naturally selected. Watch Darwin go round and round and round, until…

New event on the horizon: Darwin is getting into quantum physics.