Submitted 1 day ago by alias_qr_rainmaker@lemmy.world to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/575829db-e7b1-4c07-acea-36e9cffd1d4c.jpeg
So the thing is, “observe” here means that you want to look at an electron to see which path it’s taking. How do you “observe” it? By hurling a photon at it, at light speed, it smashes into the electron, changing its course, and then back to you.
Once you define what’s actually happening, it becomes a lot less mysterious why “observation” changes the results.
Once you define what’s actually happening, it becomes a lot less mysterious why “observation” changes the results.
Yes and no.
The essence of what you’re saying is correct, but there’s still a “black box” area that we can’t measure, because if it was just a matter of a billiard ball deflecting another billiard ball, we could theoretically build finer-scale devices that could cause less interference of find ways of inferring what’s happening before waveform collapse.
This is what Heisenberg worked out that crushed physics a century ago, it’s not just a matter of making a precise enough measuring device, the nature and behavior of the particle is fundamentally unpredictable, meaning that you can even manipulate it by using information you don’t have.
Example: let’s say you want to teleport some percentage of photons across a barrier. You simply measure their velocity with greater precision, thus making their position less defined, and BAM some of them start popping into existence across the barrier. And you can do the opposite.
Uncertainty is a fundamental property of all these waves as they propagate through space.
Whilst I’ve heard this idea said plenty of times by scientists as a way of demystifying the double slit and similar experiments, it doesn’t really do justice to the weirdness of the quantum world.
Firstly in the “default” interpretation there’s no mechanism or explanation for how an observation causes wavefunction collapse, it’s just a rule that it just does that. And the collapse doesn’t correspond to a change in momentum of a particle or any other change in classical physical state, but something else entirely.
In the double slit experiment a detector at one slit somehow seems to affect the particle as it leaves the source, before it reaches the detector (so the effect is backwards in time!) And without the detector it goes through both slits at once.
…sounds like an optimization technique to me
Well yes, however intuitively there should be photons smashing into it even if nobody is observing it.
True – its definitely a lot more complicated than that, and there are ways to “observe” without interacting, which still manage to collapse the superposition.
I once had it explained to me in a way that finally clicked:
What if beings from the 42nd dimension wanted to observe life on our planet? The problem is that they’re from the 42nd dimension, so they can’t just sit and “watch” us in our basic four-dimensional world. However, what they can do is stir up electrons in our atmosphere until they start a lightning storm. Then they can “observe” the lightning. It turns out that they can learn a lot from the lightning itself, but at the same time it may have some effect on life here on Earth.
I would argue it’s still mysterious. If it were simple, we wouldn’t have what’s called the measurement problem.
Also, there is more than one way to measure something, and not all of them require a real photon to hit some particle. In the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester, you can “measure” whether the quantum bomb’s sensor is working or not without actually hitting it with a photon. Instead, you hit it with the “chance” of a photon hitting it, and that’s good enough. (It’ll still blow up half of the time, but you can design the tester with multiple recursive tiers to increase your tested-but-unexploded bomb yield to arbitrarily close to 100%.)
That’s pretty mysterious in my mind.
It is absolutely still extremely mysterious.
I think the point of this exepirement is not to observe an electron to see its path, but the fact of obversion itself. Because without obsevation it takes both paths.
obversion
obsevation
I was hoping that by observing your comment these would collapse into the spelling “observation.”
Right, but you have to define what “observation” means when you’re talking about things that small.
I’m not very well versed in this topic but as far as I know this is only one of the explainations. There are also explanations that think observation itself, in a literal sense is what’s special and not the way we measure things.
Yeah, but you have to define “observation”.
It’s like one of my cats. When she’s doing something silly, and I grab the phone to take her pic, all I get is a picture of her butt. Because to observe something you need to interact with it, and when I interact with her she collapses into the “I wants buttslaps!” state.
And before I watch it, she’s in a superposition of states. Much like Schrödinger’s cat. However her states aren’t dead vs. alive; they’re “sleeping”, “licking her own buttocks”, and “ruining my Christmas decoration”.
Happens every time. So annoying 😒
ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Thats literally now how it works though
alias_qr_rainmaker@lemmy.world 1 day ago
you’re right, but the thing is…this is a meme. so it doesn’t have to be factual
FishFace@piefed.social 1 day ago
sir, this is science memes. Put more science in your meme or we’ll give you more teaching load next semester.
ameancow@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Since like, everyone gets all their understanding of the world from goddamn memes now, I think it’s worth pushing back on or clarifying.
ulterno@programming.dev 1 day ago
One particularly annoying thing in the SCP-verse that ends up breaking immersion.
IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
maybe because you’re observing it?