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
It’s less mysterious than it sounds.
Perhaps a crude analogy will help: you want to know if a ball goes through hole A or hole B but you’re in the dark so you have to use some object for that, relying on touch instead of sight.
A very light object, a piece of yarn or a strip of paper, won’t deflect the ball very much but will give poor position information. Something more sturdy like a stick will definitely locate the ball but will also send it in an unknown direction.
Same goes for the particle and the slits. To know what it does there you have to shine some kind of light on it. Low-energy, reddish, soft light won’t perturb the particle much but will have poor resolution. Making the light bluer, more energetic, you’ll get better position information but the particle will be sent on a new trajectory and you’ll loose the interferences behind the slits.
Reframing the touch analogy, the light particles (photons) behave either like big, fluffy cotton balls when low-energy or hard heavy marbles when high-energy. In the first case you get low resolution (the image is blurry), in the second a sharp image but you knock the particle you want to observe into an unknown state.
So it’s not a matter of being observed / not being observed, it’s a matter of how precisely you want to observe.
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