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 having the particle interact with something (and hopefully detecting the interaction). In the double slit experiment, the detector may be as simple as a screen that the particle hits, leaving a mark. When the particle interacts with (hits) the screen, the wavefunction collapses, and the particle “chooses” a spot to hit.
Tl;dr: observation = interaction with something external
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