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.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 4 days 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 4 days 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.