Lynden Stone - The Observer Effect

Wednesday 9 April - Sunday 4 May 2025

Click here for artwork by Lynden Stone

My current body of artwork questions the unique role human observation, or consciousness, might play in collapse of quantum superposition. Through the use of metaphor and installation, I intend to disrupt viewers’ expectations of material reality.

Nobel laureate and Princeton University physicist Eugene Wigner considered that human consciousness was the active agent of collapse of quantum superposition and the answer to the measurement problem. Possibly, we may be in a participatory universe (a term coined by Physicist John Archibald Wheeler), a view that emphasises the role of the observer in creating observed phenomena.

I use the Klein bottle as a metaphor for the possible creative relationship between ourselves and the material world. The Klein bottle is a mathematical construct existing in four dimensions where it is: both open and closed; continuously one-sided; and without the need for self-penetration. I understand the four-dimensional Klein bottle to be self-referential; describing the continual creative dynamic and interplay of subject, object and space similar to our own possible creative roles as participants in the dynamic relationship between observation and creation of phenomena.

I also use marbles as a reference to Newtonian physics i.e the way we ordinarily experience material reality of "cause and effect" and also of gravity.

Newtonian physics is contrary to the way subatomic quantum "particles" behave at pre-material states of superposition where all possibilities, choices and potentials exist simultaneously. Prior to measuring a quantum system, we cannot know anything for certain about the system or the state of quanta. The objective reality of quanta particles does not exist; rather, it is expressed as the wavefunction. We can only know something specific about a quantum system after measurement or observation. Strangely, however, in measuring quantum systems in the laboratory, the choice of how and what to measure determines the outcome. This is known as the Measurement Problem or the Observer Effect.

Commenting on the Measurement Problem, physicist John Archibald Wheeler said:
The dependence of what is observed upon the choice of experimental arrangement conflicts with the view that the universe exists ‘out there’ independent of all acts of observation. 
His view was that no phenomenon is a phenomenon until observed, and in this sense, it is a participatory universe.