why is the conclusion of the double slit experiment that particles have different behavior depending on whether they are being observed and what does this mean?
In: Physics
Don’t think of Observation (or measurement) with its normal meaning, think of it as a technical term. Yeah it’s confusing that it has a familiar meaning that’s subtly wrong.
A particle is “observed” when it interacts with a sufficiently large (“macroscopically behaving”) object.
So if you leave a small thing alone for long enough it starts to behave more like a wave. (How long is long enough depends on how small it is, essentially.)
As for what it means, that’s more nuanced, but my simple answer is that the wave function is what’s physical (what’s “real”), and not something more intuitive.
The intuitive perspective only starts to emerge on “large” scales, and by that definition of large everything in our day to day life is truly gigantic.
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