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
You have an electron gun, and you repeatedly fire it at a wall. Each time a single electron shoots out and hits the wall. If you put a hole in the wall, then the electrons that pass through the hole hit the wall behind it.
Make two different holes, and you’d expect an electron that passed through either hole to land behind that hole. Electrons will diffract a bit, so instead of directly behind the hole you get a spread of them landing vaguely behind the hole.
But if you open two holes at once, you’ll actually notice that even single electrons will land in places that don’t make sense for one hole or the other. The “shadow” created by the two holes won’t be the same as the shadow for each hole added together. The two holes seem to be both interacting with the electron somehow.
So you set up a device that measures which hole an electron goes through. The shadow changes – now the holes don’t seem to both interact at all. The shadow of this looks just like the shadow of two holes added together.
The fact that we observe which hole the electron goes through changes how it acts.
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