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
The act of observation is *anything* that turns “possible” into “actual”.
Any comparison between quantum scale and common human scales is littered with absurdity, but here goes.
Say I’ve got one perfectly weighted dice in a black box, that I vigorously shake the box and wonder what number faces up on the dice. *Anything* that turns possibilities (a number from 1 to 6) into something actual (a 3 and nothing else) *is* an observation. Could be someone peeking inside the box. Could be a camera inside the box. Could be X-rays. From the moment it happens, it’s not a possibility anymore, it’s actual; even if it’s someone else looking, and I don’t know the value yet, it’s a definite 3.
As mentioned, this sounds like a trivial and pointless philosophical discussion (just like “If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around, does it make a sound?”), but in quantum physics (such as the double-slit experiment) this has important implications; the [Quantum Zeno effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Zeno_effect) is a good illustration of observation greatly influencing an experiment.
Latest Answers