Motherboard

First, understand that Darwinian evolution is a concept that, until very recently, wasn’t thought to extend past biology. As in, it explains pretty well why we living things are bogglingly complicated, imperfectly functional, and incomprehensibly varied. On the other hand, all of the rest of the universe—the pre- or unliving universe—more looks like a load of chaos and luck, with no selection involved. Our physical laws, those vital parameters that allow biological life to come into being, themselves came into being without that same kind of rhyme and reason that produced us thinking beings. Or maybe not.

In 2003, Wojciech Zurek proposed the idea of quantum Darwinism, which suggests a selection method for quantum states—e.g the indeterminate, probabilistic, and extremely tiny mess such as might be found in the very early Universe—evolving into a classical state, e.g. a physical state governed by relativity and all of the safe measurable laws that we see in the Universe today. Recently, a team of researchers from Arizona State University and the Naval Research Laboratory have uncovered further, likely firm evidence for this selection process in the form of a quantum structure known as “scarring.”

Scarring has something to do with quantum waveform interference patterns but, rather than try and foist what that means on you, just understand that quantum scars (see image) appear to have the ability to “reproduce”—in terms of information/pattern—in relation to their environment, something demonstrated in recent weeks in the computing structure known as a “quantum dot.”

So, like, say, a mutant fish-with-legs surviving and reproducing over its legless brother, the favorable scar state persists until it becomes (“collapses”) into a classical physical state (a “pointer state”) that follows the comfortable rules of classical physics. To reduce it way down: our world made up of the kind of predictable, firm science you probably learned in high school makes sense—but it came from the quantum world, which is highly uncertain and based on probability. What Zurek and company are doing is defining that border territory (second image above), how quantum information turned into classical information. Order from chaos, in a sense.