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
Observe means interaction with the system that the observer is a part of. The observer can be anything.
Also there is a myth going around that observation requires disturbing or touching the particle and that’s why it collapses. The quantum eraser experiment showed this to be false.
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