Once you define what’s actually happening, it becomes a lot less mysterious why “observation” changes the results.
Yes and no.
The essence of what you’re saying is correct, but there’s still a “black box” area that we can’t measure, because if it was just a matter of a billiard ball deflecting another billiard ball, we could theoretically build finer-scale devices that could cause less interference of find ways of inferring what’s happening before waveform collapse.
This is what Heisenberg worked out that crushed physics a century ago, it’s not just a matter of making a precise enough measuring device, the nature and behavior of the particle is fundamentally unpredictable, meaning that you can even manipulate it by using information you don’t have.
Example: let’s say you want to teleport some percentage of photons across a barrier. You simply measure their velocity with greater precision, thus making their position less defined, and BAM some of them start popping into existence across the barrier. And you can do the opposite.
Uncertainty is a fundamental property of all these waves as they propagate through space.
ns1@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Whilst I’ve heard this idea said plenty of times by scientists as a way of demystifying the double slit and similar experiments, it doesn’t really do justice to the weirdness of the quantum world.
Firstly in the “default” interpretation there’s no mechanism or explanation for how an observation causes wavefunction collapse, it’s just a rule that it just does that. And the collapse doesn’t correspond to a change in momentum of a particle or any other change in classical physical state, but something else entirely.
In the double slit experiment a detector at one slit somehow seems to affect the particle as it leaves the source, before it reaches the detector (so the effect is backwards in time!) And without the detector it goes through both slits at once.
Xenny@lemmy.world 1 day ago
…sounds like an optimization technique to me