Typhonis
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When you observe a particle of light it will act as a particle and only make the two slits they were permitted to go through. Unobserved light will make the wave form pattern at the target.
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Bear Ribs
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'tis the famous double slit experiment.
The experiment was intended to help determine if light was a wave or a particle, and instead revealed something so staggeringly weird it set the stage for understanding quantum physics.
As long as somebody is looking at the slits, individual photons will go through one of the two slits and form the first pattern.
As soon as they look away, the same photon will travel through both slits at the same time. This produces the second pattern. Further testing has shown that looking at the slits can retroactively alter the past and cause the slits to act as if they were observed at the time the light moved through them.
The results and implications of this experiment are, needless to say, weird beyond belief.
DarthOne
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That’s underselling it.
Zyobot
Just a time-traveling robot stranded on Earth.
Indeed, it is!
Thanks for the refresher.
Personally, I never understood how or why observation by outside parties could possibly change the behavior of photons or subatomic particles in general? Well, unless observers have some unacknowledged reality-warping powers or something, which would be a whole field of research all by itself.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Now stretch your mind wide and look at the Quantum Eraser experiment.Indeed, it is!
Thanks for the refresher.
Personally, I never understood how or why observation by outside parties could possibly change the behavior of photons? Well, unless observers have some unacknowledged reality-warping powers or something, which would be a whole field of research all by itself.
If you delete information on the slits being observed, the pattern recorded in the past changes to the unobserved one. The deleted information somehow goes back in time and alters the past.
Doomsought
Well-known member
That is actually an early misinterpretation of quantum mechanics due to the desires of positivists to have a deterministic universe. The hidden value experiments as well as experiments showing information-energy equivalency instead point to superposition with true randomness.
Morphic Tide
Well-known member
It's about whether or not one is watching the slit, hence the bit about misunderstanding superpositions in the quantum eraser. Functionally speaking, photons are particles but of such small size and low energy that superposition produces a dominantly wavelike behavior.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
I mean, wouldn't you notice if an eyeball half the size of the entire galaxy was suddenly staring at you?
One of the weirder things is that the double-slit experiment, in theory, works for everything. While originally the theory believed it was because photons were so small and low energy, but the theory should apply to all matter. The problem becomes that the larger the object, the less likely it is that nobody was able to observe it so size tends to limit behavior. This is compounded by other difficulties with having measurable particles that will behave correctly under high-energy experiments and not be destroyed by the conditions of the experiment. However, double-slit tests have been made to work with high-energy molecules containing 800 atoms each:
They believe they should eventually be able to demonstrate particle-wave duality with objects as large as a baseball, but the difficulty of actually getting up to that size when we've only hit 800 atoms is... well... it's going to be a long road.
Vyor
My influence grows!
Do note: it's less that you're looking at things and more that it's interacting with other things to allow you to see it. Effectively the light bouncing off said baseball is the "observation" and is what would cause things to change.
Effectively, the measuring equipment is what's causing things to change. We don't know exactly why the changes happen in the way they do, but we do know that it's the interaction causing it.
PsihoKekec
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Bassoe
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DarthOne
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I'd fund the hell out of that.