Well but this meme is accurate because it said monitoring the situation. So when you start monitoring which slit the particle goes through, you changed the outcome.
Comment on Gottem
Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
I have to comment this every time people post it, because they don’t actually understand it. They only understand the mystical view of quantum mechanics, which isn’t real.
Observation, in the case of this experiment, has nothing to do with humans looking at it. It has to do with the particle/wave interacting with something, which causes the waveform to collapse into a single particle. The reason this happens is because any interaction requires the information to be known, so it can’t be wave-like anymore. It has nothing to do with consciousness or anything like that. It only has to do with an interaction that requires information to be discrete.
mexicancartel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
It is. I just always feel the need to comment this on these posts because the mystical understanding annoys me, and is surprisingly common. This meme doesn’t do that exactly, and it even has an accurate experiment setup.
Smaile@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Maybe you shouldn’t have been refering to it as OBSERVATION then poindexters, then you wouldn’t confuseinh the laymen and getting annoyed.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I totally agree. “Observe” was a bad choice of words, but it stuck. It should have been “interacted with”, or “measured”, or something like that.
bss03@infosec.pub 1 day ago
BTW, before a detector aparatus can be created, many physics results were (are?) identified through observation, which might include a measurement or might be qualitative.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
The point is that you can’t observe anything without some kind of interaction. Even just looking at something requires bouncing light off of it.
We’re used to our observations seeming passive because light is often hitting the things anyways, but the double slit experiment forces the point because the subjects of the experiment are so small that even just using ways of observing them affects the outcome of the experiment.
Smoogs@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Is the thing you’re indicating that it’s interacting with was the slits ?
Or are you referring to something else?
Can you explain further?
Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
No, not the slits. How the “observation” is done is you measure what goes through the slit with a detector just on the other side. The detector has to interact with the photons, so it collapses the waveform, making it behave like a particle, only passing through one slit. If you remove the detector then it has wave-like behavior, as the waveform only collapses once it hits the surface on the far end.
The waveform collapses any time it interacts with something. The experiment just takes advantage of this by making it collapse in a way that creates a different result than if we don’t collapse it until later, where the waves can interact.
Smoogs@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Ok so technically there are 2 to 3 ways it’s interacting to dissolve here?
1 - the slits 2 - the surface at the far end on which the particles land 3 - whatever method is being used to read it on the other side of the slits?
Just clarifying as the experiment has more than one interaction so when you said interaction I need to clarify which interaction.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Yes, that’s correct! Interacting with the barrier that creates the splits we don’t care about, but yes, that collapses it too.
Interacting with the surface we’re measuring in all the experiments. It doesn’t change, so it shouldn’t be effecting the results. It does collapse the waveform though, which is how we measure it.
Detecting it at the slit is the part that changes. If we don’t do this, we get wave-like behavior, because there’s no interaction until it hits the surface at the end. The wave can pass through both slits without any interaction. If we put in a detector, then it must interact with that to pass through, so it collapses the waveform and behaves like a particle at that point. This means it must be at one slit or the other, and not both.
vivalapivo@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Went here to write this
NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This is /c/science_memes, not /c/exactly_correct_science_memes
Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
I’m aware. I just hate the mystical way things like this are treated, and there’s a lot of uninformed people. I don’t care that the meme is wrong. I care that people believe it the experiment says something other than what it says, which is already really cool.
Ziglin@lemmy.world 2 days ago
People keep explaining like it’s a huge surprise.
I think I am technically a physicist so this could be a case of xkcd 2501 but it seems obvious enough.
Surely nobody actually believes that is how it works. I think I understood it that way and was mind blown for like 5min before being sceptical and asking for clarification and still being mind blown by how it was actually meant. I was a child when that happened.
All the adults I’ve spoken to about it learned about it school and understood straight away. That is of course completely biased though.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
There are entire new age movements based on the misunderstanding of quantum mechanics.
Off the top of my head: What the Bleep do we Know? And The Secret are two that come to mind.
davetortoise@reddthat.com 2 days ago
It’s probably (hopefully) not a majority, but a disturbing number of people really do believe it works like that. I’ve once had someone, whose intelligence I used to respect, calmly explain to me that telekinesis is possible because “QM proves that the mind can influence matter”.
Sylvartas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I wouldn’t be so sure. There’s a disturbingly high amount of people (including adults) out there who take Schrödinger’s cat literally.
FundMECFS@piefed.zip 2 days ago
A lot of people do believe it unfortunately.
Danquebec@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I may not have been paying attention in school. Once adult, I read about it but wondered what it means “when observed”. Couldn’t find anywherw that explained it clearly. Figured it was surely related to a physical process necessary to get signals, but I couldn’t know what exactly. Now, I know.