Hi Robert, I copy here my reply to your last comment, because I took so long to answer (sorry about that), that you won't notice it in my entry. Sure, *time* is at the bottom of everything, I wish I had a clearer image of it...
> all of that would be useless if not for observers who can process such information to make sense of the universe.
Yes, this is one way to answer your question about the measurement problem, and is tightly related to the question "If a tree falls, and nobody hears it, does it make a noise?".
There is, however, still a more fundamental level in which your question strikes me. In quantum mechanics observers actually change the story of the world. It's not just that they give relevance to the world, they actually build it. Ok, in the many world interpretation, there are many observers. But as long as we follow a single observer, there is no such thing as the objective physical world, because what happens depends on which observer we follow. As far as I know, not such thing happens in relativity: although different observers see different things (for example, they have different notions of simultaneity), all views are compatible with a single external reality. Up to what degree do observers of thermodynamic processes influence the so-called external reality? I am not sure about this question. Naively, I would answer: they change nothing. There are experiments, however, that show that the amount of information that we have about a system (an amount that depends on the observer) can be transformed into energy, see for example http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v6/n12/full/nphys1821.html So the natural question is: can different observers extract different amounts of energy from a system only because they have different amounts of information about it? The answer seems to be yes...
This is not to say that thermodynamics is as weird as the many-world interpretation of quantum mechanics, nor anything of the sort. I may well not have understood the relation between information and thermodynamics quite right (I need to dedicate more time to the topic!). But I just want to mention this other level in which to interpret your question, because it goes to the heart of ontology. Hopefully in a little while I may have an answer for it!
best!
inés.
