No. of Recommendations: 4
Just to be certain, vacuum fluctuations don't really require a vacuum. That's just their name. Also called "quantum fluctuations". It's rare that I find someone who knows what those are, so I'm being pedantic to assure we're on the same page. Not being condescending. Those arise out of quantum chromodynamics (which I didn't study specifically, but we got a bit of exposure in grad school).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_fluctuationIt's really a fluctuation in a quantum field, not a vacuum. Simplistically, they are allowed because of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which allows energy to "pop" into existence for a time that satisfies (delta)E*(delta)t < h(bar). That energy generally manifests as a particle and antiparticle. As a side note, if that happens near a black hole event horizon, one of the pair of particles may fall into the black hole leaving the other particle existing in real space-time, which results in Hawking Radiation. Yeah, over-simplified a bit, but we don't want to get too far into the weeds.
So, while we humans observe all this, I don't believe we influence it to any significant degree. We just discover it, as an other sentient species in the universe might do. Clearly, we view it through our filters (e.g. eyes that can only see about 350nm to 650nm), but we also build instrumentation that make up for our lack of sensitivity. There still is a modicum of interpretation, but the scientific method tends to clean that up by forcing us to discard faulty interpretations for more accurate (i.e. conforming to reality) ones.
I did used to watch a sci-fi show where one of the races espoused the philosophy we were the universal consciousness made manifest, trying to figure itself out. I have no evidence that there even is a universal consciousness, but it was an interesting notion. They also got a LOT of the physics correct, which is always a plus for me.
