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
> How do we know that isn’t interfering with the particle?
You answered your own question. It is interfering with the particle, that’s why it changed. It’s impossible to observe a particle without interfering with it.
On a macroscopic scale “observe” could be go up and touch it, which will interfere. Or stand back and watch, which will not. However, this luxury doesn’t exist if you want to be really accurate at the small scale. “sight” is bouncing photons off something. Observering a monkey in biology, sight is just fine. Observering an electron, bouncing a single photon off it is going to be an issue.
With the double split experiment, you are always observing the electron at some point. You have two options though. Observe it at the screen, and see a nice interference pattern. Or observe it at the slit, and ruin the pattern later at the screen. It’s not some voodoo magic about human consciousness and the electrons knowing if we’re looking at then or not. It’s just by checking where the electron was as the slit (observing) is synonymous with altering the electron. You tighten it’s wave function down, to the point it’s not going to give you the pattern.
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