This always bugs me. Quantum Mechanics isn’t actually that difficult. It has some nasty maths, yes, but that’s mostly slog work, rather than an impossibility. 90% of it is the Schroedinger’s equation + boundary conditions.
The main issue is that you have to abandon the particle model of reality. This is deeply engrained into our brains. If you try and understand it as “Particles + extras”, you will fail. You have to think of it as “Waves + extras”. It then, suddenly makes logical sense.
It does have some interesting implications, however, about deeper reality however. E.g. what exactly IS decoherence, from a physical point of view. Also, what is physically happening, dimensionally, when a wave is complex, or even pure imaginary. These are beyond the scope of QM however.
DudeBro@lemm.ee 1 year ago
“observing changes the result” doesn’t mean conciousness attempting to look at it changes the result, there is nothing special about conciousness (in quantum mechanics)
“observing changes the result” means we try to measure atoms and fields but unfortunately our measurement tools are also made out of atoms and fields which interact with the atoms and fields we are trying to measure, giving us a different result than if we don’t attempt to measure it
It does bring up interesting questions about what the “real” behavior of reality is tho, since anything we observe is technically different than what it would be if left alone. We can only ever know what a slightly altered state of reality is
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Think of it like this:
You can use a tennis ball machine to measure how far away a house is by firing the tennis ball at a constant velocity, timing how long it takes the tennis ball to come back to you, multiplying that time by the velocity, and dividing by 2 (since you measured the distance for a round trip). This works pretty darn well for measuring the distance to houses.
But now try this same trick to measure the distance to another ball. When your measuring ball hits the ball you want to measure, it doesn’t stay resolutely planted in the ground like that nice friendly house. The energy from your measuring ball bounces the ball being measured off into the distance. Even if you could get your measuring ball to return, the ball you measured isn’t in the place you measured it.
Replace that tennis ball with a photon, and you have the basic picture. There’s no such thing as passive observation. Measuring something interacts with that thing. Conventional measurement is like in the case with the house, the thing being measured is so much bigger and more stable than the thing we’re measuring with that the effect is negligible. But once you start trying to measure something on the same scale as your measuring tool, the ensuing chaos makes it basically impossible to get useful measurements.
chitak166@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What happens if you try to cut a photon in half with a knife?
TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
This analogy is really well thought out. It really helps my brain understand the weirdness that goes on with measurements on the quantum scale.
dalekcaan@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Every road leads to Plato’s cave
bouh@lemmy.world 1 year ago
My teacher had a good comparison for this: observing macroscoping reality like we do microscopic reality would be like throwing a car at another car to measure its speed or position. Obviously you alter the course of events this way.
Fortunately light doesn’t do much in the macroscopic world, so we can use it to observe stuff.
ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net 1 year ago
Not quite - observability in quantum mechanics is about the event producing an interaction that could potentially be measured, regardless of whether we actually attempt to measure it. By interacting with other things the superposition is collapsed and we can determine it’s current properties, but it’s still the “real” behaviour of things, because we can only determine things behaviours from their interactions with other things - not knowing what they do when left alone isn’t just about there not being a human around to interacts with them, but about there not being any other particles - no atoms, no electrons, no quarks - for them to interact with either.
chitak166@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Great distinction.
flan@hexbear.net 1 year ago
just measure everything from the same side it’ll all get shifted in the same direction