how do particles know when they are being observed?
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Sean Carrol’s Mindscape on YouTube is a good resource. He is a proponent of the “Many Worlds” theory in which the universe splits every time a quantum event happens (yes, thats happening an unbelievable number of times per second). But if you have some time kill, he is probably the best person to listen to as his entire career is built on quantum particles being observed and doing something because of it.
The TL;DR of these quantum theories is “fields” theories – that most particles you are talking about “act” differently when the Wave AKA Schrodinger equation gets triggered and collapses into a particle. Electrons are one of the things considered to be a wave function, not a bouncing dot. Things like photons and all sorts of things are fields of energy that, when they get observed, collapse into a particle.
That is important to understand for a few reasons:
– Some people don’t believe in fields theory to the extent that others do. There are people who believe electrons ARE particles that teleport or quantum tunnel or whatever and that they are merely seeing something ***we dont understand yet.*** (not that we understand quantum phenomena to a happy degree yet).
– Some people believe EVERYTHING is one big wave instead of a lot of small waves that move through the universe. That we are all already connected and the entire universe split before you ever looked as there were only so many ways that wave could collapse so it split into all possible version and you are just in the version where it is the way it is now. so ***you are not observing a split, it already happened***. You just feel like you observed it, but it had little to do with you.
There are mature theories out there but my amateur ass can only come up with those two as the fundamental ones. I don’t think there is any kind of wide held belief that particles “know” anything and the “Conscious brain” theory of observation isn’t a widely held one because thats super unscientific. The measuring tool one makes more sense because you are somehow interfering and this is why you’ll read about tools that measure tools and they measure different part at different time of when a particle traveled. There was an article like 2 weeks ago about a particle that would have been on one side or the other of a split and one tool measure one thing and another measured another so they wouldn’t be collapsing it into just the type of thing one or the other could measure. That shit? They just don’t know.
One of the reason’s they have a hard time with this is because of quantum entanglement. They have the rule “nothing is faster than light, including information” and when you flip a quantum state, the other one, supposedly, flips instantly and that violates everything. However, they said if you were on mars and someone on earth flipped it, theyd have to send a message to you at the speed of light to tell you what theirs was to verify that yours was indeed the opposite and you wouldn’t KNOW, FOR SURE, that it worked until you got the information it happened. So when we talk about quantum information and collapse and observation, the information being transmitted by the event needs to be taken into account and that there may be something more fundamental happening we just don’t have the ability to quantify at this point.
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