Comment on Literally exactly how it works, too.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 3 days agoDoes 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.
Quibblekrust@thelemmy.club 3 days ago
Well, if you look at the plate, then you’ve collapsed the wave function, and the data on the hard drive is then determine, and can’t contradict the result on the plate.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 3 days ago
One of the claims of the more psuedoscience “quantum mechanics” is that the future can affect the past. So the intent to check the data if there is a wave pattern would cause there to not be a wave pattern on its own, otherwise there would be a contradiction.
But, as the other commenter mentioned, it’s a moot point because it’s the sensor is the “observer”, and it’s not “being observed” that affects the outcome, but “interacting with the wave/particle to generate the data that may or may not be observed by a conscious”.
The profoundness of this, if it were the case, would be to imply that there’s something special, different about consciousness vs all the other non-conscious interactions out there, that this existence is for us rather than us just being here in this existence. But quantum mechanics doesn’t actually say anything about consciousness, at least not at this point, and probably not any time soon because it isn’t even really looking at that problem.