Quantum Theory Through Systemic Functional Linguistics [14]

Gribbin (1989: xiv-xv):

The metaphysician who wonders whether a tree, or a house, has any real existence when nobody is looking at it, is seen by most of us lesser mortals as something of a joke.  But the joke is on us, for the twentieth-century discoveries of physics, that most hard-nosed and objective of sciences, have led inexorably to the conclusion that at the fundamental level of subatomic particles such as electrons and protons, things really don't have and "real" existence when they are not being monitored.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, it is not that 'things really don't have and "real" existence when they are not being monitored', but that there is no construal of experience as meaning — e.g. as things, as real, as existing — when no observations are being made.