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I’ve asked this of a physicist friend of mine, and he insisted there wasn’t actually photon touching being involved. I honestly didn’t understand his explanation fully though. Photon touching makes sense to me. Whatever he said was much more confusing… yet he gets grant money to actually study lasers and put out research papers, and I don’t, so…

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AppleTea@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
“Photon touching” was a somewhat glib way of putting it on my part.

What does your friend think of this statement:

When physicists say “observe”, they actually mean “measure”. And to measure a photon of light, you have to interact with it somehow, there is no passive way to do so.

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- Iunnrais@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  No, that exact thing, interacting with the particle, is what he was saying does not happen, or at least is not required for the effect to happen. This is where his explanation lost me, because my understanding had aligned with yours, and he spent a good half hour trying to explain how I was wrong, and to be honest, it didn’t quite sink in.
  
  I remember there was a lot of math in his explanation, and multiple different interpretations and angles of understanding — but my takeaway was just that he strongly claimed no interaction with the particle whatsoever was required for uncertainty and the weird particle/wave dichotomy to take place, and that experimental evidence has been provided for this. Furthermore, that I have no fucking idea what observation means, but it doesn’t apparently mean interaction with the particle at all.
  
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