I consider myself at least… Minorly able to read a newspaper digest about physics. And I’ve read about the double slit experiment. You have two slits in a piece of paper, fire electrons at them and they form wave patterns. “Observe” them and they act like particles and form particle patterns.
Here’s the the thing. Every single class, teacher, physicist I have known has said the same word. “Observe”. But…. What does that *mean*? If I look at it? If I have a detector? What does the detector do? How do we know that isn’t interfering with the particle? Why does this never seem to be extrapolated on and just that one fucking word pops up everywhere? Is it just a thought experiment? This had been driving me nuts, can someone explain?
In: Physics
You can’t observe something without interfering with it. You have to bounce something off it and measure the thing you bounced. Most commonly the thing you’re bouncing is photons and you’re measuring it by catching the bounced photons with your eyeballs, the ultra-technical scientific term for that is “seeing”. But any method of measuring something is going to involve something similar.
Observation doesn’t require a conscious observer or anything magical like that, just interference.
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