Agree to disagree!
Comment on Literally exactly how it works, too.
EVIL_MAN@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
It doesn’t work like this, popular misconception. It is cool in sci-fi though.
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Beacon@fedia.io 4 days ago
Nothing to agree or disagree with, you're factually incorrect. The observer effect has nothing to do with whether someone's eyes are looking toward it or not. It basically just means when a process is happening and anything external occurs to it then that will change the way the process is happening.
jwiggler@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
I was curious, so I went to Wikipedia, as one does.
A notable example of the observer effect occurs in quantum mechanics, as demonstrated by the double-slit experiment. Physicists have found that observation of quantum phenomena by a detector or an instrument can change the measured results of this experiment. Despite the “observer effect” in the double-slit experiment being caused by the presence of an electronic detector, the experiment’s results have been interpreted by some to suggest that a conscious mind can directly affect reality.[3] However, the need for the “observer” to be conscious is not supported by scientific research, and has been pointed out as a misconception rooted in a poor understanding of the quantum wave function ψ and the quantum measurement process
atx_aquarian@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The “for dummies” take-away I’ve heard is that the big mix-up is in confusion about the term “observer”. Normal people use it to mean a person’s attention, while physicists use the specific concept of an observer of a particle to mean another interacting particle.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I think we all understand the joke is that the eyes represent the endpoint of the observation apparatus. That is the first panel is isolated and the second panel has a detector measuring the path that the scientist then looks at.
So yeah, “eyes” don’t cause a waveform collapse. But how does a two panel cartoon with no words represent no interaction? First panel is blank?
x00z@lemmy.world 3 days ago
On the other hand, maybe our personal observation doesn’t just cause a waveform to collapse, but also collapses a logical path for said wave backwards into time. This would mean that even the results of the initial observation only collapse at the moment you look at them.
EVIL_MAN@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
You are wrong though.
Xavienth@lemmygrad.ml 3 days ago
Observation in quantum mechanics isn’t like everyday observation. There is no passive observation, you have to interact with a particle to observe it. It’s like putting your hand in front of the hose to see if it’s on. You can see from the spray pattern that when the hose is “observed” the pattern changes.
bountygiver@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
and in this case, seeing the spray pattern is interfering the system not because it is “aware” of you seeing it, but in order to see it there must be light reflecting off it which certainly would have an effect for bombarding it and bouncing off it.
Quibblekrust@thelemmy.club 3 days ago
Nah, man, it’s literally how it works (for all we know). The wave function doesn’t collapse until the data is read. You can’t prove otherwise, so people are free to believe it.
CovfefeKills@lemmy.world 3 days ago
[deleted]Quibblekrust@thelemmy.club 3 days ago
Haha, no I haven’t. I don’t believe in magic. I watch mainstream YouTube science channels, and not any “mystical” ones. PBS Spacetime, Dr Ben Miles, Quanta Magazine, Sabine Hossenfelder, etc.
So, I ask you: please design an experiment that proves the outcome is determined precisely when the detector detects the particle going through the slit, and not when a person observes the recording the detector made. You can’t. You can’t prove that the detector detected something until you look at the result, and until you do, for all you know, it’s in a superposition. That’s all I’m saying.
Zagorath@quokk.au 3 days ago
So uhh…sorry for this comment being as long as it is. I was initially basically just going to leave the first paragraph and then link to two or three videos demonstrating the claims. But then I wanted it to be of value even if you don’t spend the time watching the videos. And so I had to rewatch the videos myself to summarise salient points. And that led me to finding and rewatching yet more videos. And then I had to summarise those. And the comment just blew out.
The first paragraph should serve as a TL;DR if the rest is too much or not worth the time. And jump to the last paragraph for other recs.
Sabine Hossenfelder
Hey, just be very careful about her. She knew her stuff with astrophysics, but has since become very jaded even within what was once her own field, and she has a nasty habit of speaking with great authority about matters outside her expertise, and getting it wildly wrong. And often doubling down rather than adapting when corrected. And also of spreading a message that emboldens and encourages science deniers, despite not being a science denier herself.
Here’s a video about it from a former ABC journalist who I think is being overly generous to Hossenfelder at times (in particular regarding Hossenfelder’s take on trans people), but which nonetheless does a good job of laying out the problematic way she presents certain views.
And here are a few more videos that take a more directly critical approach. Professor Dave Explains’ first video. This is probably the strongest, because it makes every effort to present things from Hossenfelder’s point of view and assume she means well. One key thing this video does is point out that the fact that she comments on fields outside her expertise is not a problem. The problem comes when she refuses to properly update her beliefs (and retract claims) when she gets corrected, and she often does not sufficiently caveat her views with her lack of expertise in this subject.
Professor Dave Explains’ second video, a followup a week after the first addressing some responses to the first one.
eigenchris explains why she’s wrong about trans teens. In short, Hossenfelder plays the bothsidesism game to appear as reasonable, but to do so ignores significant amounts of evidence in favour of trans affirming care, and ignores significant problems with the limited evidence in favour of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (i.e., the idea that people think they’re trans even though they aren’t purely because it’s “socially popular") in order to present it as a reasonable view.
Rebecca Watson (Skepchick) also does a much shorter video about this trans misinformation. She also points out that Hossenfelder hides her citations behind the Patreon paywall, making it impossible for most viewers to do basic fact checking. Watson also follows up about how Hossenfelder is wrong about capitalism. The video links over to this much longer video by Unlearning Economics (a creator I have watched before and enjoyed, but I have not seen this particular video recently enough to recall it), but spends most of its runtime explaining the many ways Hossenfelder was wrong about penicillin, by falsely claiming it only took off thanks to capitalism, despite the Australian Government being one of the biggest drivers of its uptake by producing enough to use for the Australian Army during WWII (with enough leftover for civilian use), and despite numerous capitalists from the UK and US actively choosing not to invest in producing penicillin until promises of significant tax breaks for aiding in their own war effort.
Now, I’ve got my own separate problems with Watson that have led me to stop watching her. (Namely: that she seems more interested in dunking on people than actually spreading good information. The Adam Conover video was an awful hit piece, and the pinned comment was nothing but anti-union propaganda. And she refused any update, not even pinning someone else’s comment pointing out the update, after Conover put out a complete retraction of the thing Watson was dunking on him for. Not to mention the significant amount of time in that video spent dealing with style issues rather than the actual substance. Just gross.) But in these two videos she does a really good job of laying out the facts and deferring to experts who can demonstrate why Hossenfelder is problematic.
Dave has a third video. It’s much longer and might be worth watching if you’re still on the fence. It shows some of the more recent claims from Hossenfelder of her getting more and more extreme in her anti-scientific institutions takes, and then does interviews with current scientists about what they do and how it conflicts with Hossenfelder’s warped explanations.
For former academic astrophysicists who occasionally make videos about the problems with academic science or with the popular response to science, I would highly recommend Angela Collier and Dr. Fatima. Though neither are exactly the same niche that Hossenfelder purports to be in, since they don’t typically do science news reporting.
PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
Your joke was funny you just forgot the /s
lastlybutfirstly@lemmy.world 2 days ago
We need to stop putting /s after jokes. It just helps bots. Humans are able to spot satire and facetious comments.
Ziglin@lemmy.world 2 days ago
You underestimate my social ineptitude. I generally give people the benefit of the doubt though.
wholookshere@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
Autistic people who have trouble telling jokes exist.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Does the result of the experiment change if there’s a sensor active that records data to a hard drive that no one ever looks at and it just gets deleted? Does the result change again if someone decides that if they get a wave pattern, they will interrupt the deletion process and look at the data?
Quibblekrust@thelemmy.club 3 days ago
I don’t understand. How can they “get” a wave pattern if they didn’t look at the data?
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The wave pattern is on the photo plate, the data that never gets looked at is from a sensor on one or both slits that measures whether the projectile passed through that slit.
Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
But the way it works is only the top one if im not mistaken
Quibblekrust@thelemmy.club 3 days ago
Well, no. Not if you put a detector in one of the slits. It collapses the wave function, and the interference pattern disappears.
Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Well that’s basically the bohr-einstsein problem isnt it?
pcalau12i@lemmygrad.ml 3 days ago
The easiest way to understand this is in terms of mutual information.
If we both flip a coin independently of one another, then both coins have a 50%/50% chance of being heads/tails and the distributions are independent of one another and thus uncorrelated, but imagine the two coins are initially attached to one another, flipped, and then we separate them. Now they’re both still 50%/50% for heads/tails but are perfectly correlated, so they are guaranteed to have the same value, and so if you know one, you know the other. In this case, the coins are said to have mutual information on one another.
It turns out in the physical world that mutual information, or more specifically quantum mutual information (QMI) plays a very important role. The marginal statistics on the behavior of a system can depend upon whether or not it shares mutual information with something else. You see this in the double-slit experiment because if you record the which-way information of a particle, then necessarily it must have interacted with something to record its state, and thus whatever measured it must possess QMI between itself and the particle, and thus the particle’s behavior will change.
This is in no way unique to human observers or human measurement devices. You can introduce just a single other particle into the experiment that interacts with the particle such that they become statistically correlated and it will have the same effect.
QMI is rather counterintuitive because you can establish QMI in ways that you would intuitively think would not impact the system being measured. For example, you can have an entirely passive interaction whereby only the measuring device’s state is altered and not the particle in order to establish QMI between them.
You can also establish QMI without an interaction at all, such as, imagine that the measuring device is only placed on 1 of the 2 slits and you only fire a single photon and that photon is not detected. If it’s not detected, you still know where it is, because it must have traversed the slit the measuring device was not on. Hence, the non-detection of something can still be a detection and thus can still establish QMI.
Intuitively, you would think a passive measurement, or a measurement that does not even involve an interaction at all, should not alter the system’s behavior. But the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics is such that the system’s marginal stochastic behavior is genuinely statistically dependent upon the quantity of QMI, and so things you would intuitively believe should not affect the system do, in fact, affect the system.
You can even use this effect to ]detect the presence or absence of something without ever (locally) interacting with it](arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9305002).