If the experiment was performed and then all human life was suddenly wiped out would the meaning of the experiment any longer have any meaning? I can't persuade myself that it would.
If one accepts that in this scenario the meaning is lost, would you re-establish the meaning in the future if beings capable of interpreting the meaning evolved and found the experimental results?
If reality depends on consciousness, do we say that reality is suspended during this interim period, or that reality continues because, somehow, the cosmos "knows" that the necessary level of consciousness will re-emerge?
Impossible to say Bill, and if I gave an answer I would just be speculating.
Now, the Large Hadron Collider is up and running and, in time, might produce some results of experiments that provide information about various aspects of the universe. If this information is useful it might, one day, allow science to make great strides into gaining a much deeper insight into nature and reality but let us pretend that the LHC was never built, OK?
In this scenario science would not be able to progress because science needs to do experiments in order to gain knowledge. So, assuming at some point in the future (and I realize this is just an assumption) the whole nature of human civilization had been changed by the discoveries of the LHC in ways we can only speculate about would this not represent an alternate reality to the one in the scenario where the LHC never existed? In fact, it might be a drastically different alternate reality to the one without the LHC, not just more or less the same!
