Comment on Literally exactly how it works, too.
Beacon@fedia.io 3 days agoNothing 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.
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?
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.
So at what point in human evolution was one human conscious enough to have the first observation and therefore spring quantum mechanics into existence in the universe?
What if both human evolution and “other humans” follow the same unfolding? You’d create all of that in every moment. Even the memories and logistics needed for that. That would mean that there is only now and reality has been creating itself over and over again infinitely.
Obviously any living creature can become entangled with the quantum experiment if you build the right apparatus. Build a machine that kills a cat if an atom decays, and you’ve made cats into quantum observers. When the cat observes the experiment by not dying, it collapses from the cat’s point of view. When you observe the cat, it collapses from your point of view.
Someone gets it
That’s not “litterally” how it works then, just “figuratively”.
jwiggler@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
I was curious, so I went to Wikipedia, as one does.
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.