There are a number of hypotheses that have as a common element the elimination of the influence of the observer’s consciousness. Those are decoherence – very popular with builders of quantum computers, collapse by macro instruments – the followers of Bohr and Heisenberg and not very deep thinking, super selection – nature doesn’t allow anything but don’t explain why not and finally spontaneous collapse – that doesn’t seem to realize that no system in the universe is truly isolated from the rest. We are not talking about the multiverse here.
There is an experiment – based on an already almost classical experiment, the delayed quantum eraser, which should be feasible in any well-equipped optical laboratory and at a relatively low cost. That experiment will be able to show whether the state wave does indeed collapse at the measuring instrument used, so that the quantum object manifests itself there, or whether it is much more fundamentally about information. In this experiment, that measuring instrument is a photon detector. For a full description I refer you to another page – a real quantum information eraser – on this website.
Paul J. van Leeuwen graduated in applied physics in Delft TU in 1974. There was little attention to the significance of quantum physics for the view on reality at that time. However, much later in his life he discovered that there is an important and clear connection between quantum physics and consciousness.
What he learned between then and today resulted in a post academic course in quantum physics for non-physicists. A little bit later he decided to put the contents of that course, and more, in a book published in Dutch: Kwantumfysica, Informatie en Bewustzijn – and started a website on the subject. He translated the Dutch version of his book in English, titled: ‘Quantum Physics is NOT Weird’.