Why and how does observation change properties of things like in light wave particle duality or quantum states?
In: Physics
Observation has a science meaning that’s quite different than you might be thinking from the macroscopic world. For instance, if you have a baseball throwing machine that shoots baseballs at a wall, you can “observe” it quite passively. The way that works is that light from the Sun streams down and scatters off the ball, a tiny bit of that makes it into your eyes so you can see the ball. It seems like your “observation” has no effect on the flight of the ball, making QM seem weird when it says that observation collapses the wave function.
Observation in science is any interaction that might lead to detection. To further the baseball analogy (Even though we all agree a baseball is not a quantum object), when the first photon of light from the sun interacts with the ball, or the first atom of air interacts with the ball, that’s an observation. The observation might not be collected, recorded, and analyzed by a human, but that’s not the definition.
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