I mean how does it know I’m looking at it or not? Does it have conciousness?
In: Chemistry
It doesn’t know you’re looking. Particles aren’t sentient.
Looking is not a passive action. For you to look at the moon. Photons from the sun have to first hit the moon. Some reflect off the surface and then travel to earth. Some find your eyes and the back of your retina and then you “see” the moon. Particles, photons in this case had to hit both an atom on the moons surface and an atom on your retina for you to see anything.
So now you want to see a single particle pass through a double slit. Well in order to see anything, a moon or a single particle, you have to bounce something off of it.
What we think happens is quantum particles exist as a wave. But when they interact with another particle, say a photon you shot at it to “look” at which door it will take, the wave collapses and the particle becomes, well a particle. A fixed point in space.
Left without being bounced on, particles aren’t points in space but a collection of probabilities of points in space we describe as a wave. And this wave can interact with itself.
Thus when we look, by beaming particles with other particles. A double slit experiment produces a double slit. But when we don’t look, and thus don’t interact with the particle, a double slip experiment produced an interference pattern.
But all you have to remember is the particle doesn’t know it’s being watched. It just interacts with space differently when something is bouncing off of it. What we call “looking” is just our brain interpretation of particles bouncing off of each other.
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