The easiest way to understand this is in terms of mutual information.
If we both flip a coin independently of one another, then both coins have a 50%/50% chance of being heads/tails and the distributions are independent of one another and thus uncorrelated, but imagine the two coins are initially attached to one another, flipped, and then we separate them. Now they’re both still 50%/50% for heads/tails but are perfectly correlated, so they are guaranteed to have the same value, and so if you know one, you know the other. In this case, the coins are said to have mutual information on one another.
It turns out in the physical world that mutual information, or more specifically quantum mutual information (QMI), plays a very important role. The marginal statistics on the behavior of a system can depend upon whether or not it shares mutual information with something else. You see this in the double-slit experiment because if you record the which-way information of a particle, then necessarily it must have interacted with something to record its state, and thus whatever measured it must possess QMI between itself and the particle, and thus the particle’s marginal statistical behavior will change.
This is in no way unique to human observers or human measurement devices. You can introduce just a single other particle into the experiment that interacts with the particle such that they become statistically correlated and it will have the same effect.
QMI is rather counterintuitive because you can establish QMI in ways that you would intuitively think would not impact the system being measured. For example, you can have an entirely passive interaction whereby only the measuring device’s state is altered and not the particle in order to establish QMI between them.
You can also establish QMI without an interaction at all, such as, imagine that the measuring device is only placed on 1 of the 2 slits and you only fire a single photon and that photon is not detected. If it’s not detected, you still know where it is, because it must have traversed the slit the measuring device was not on. Hence, the non-detection of something can still be a detection and thus can still establish QMI.
Intuitively, you would think a passive measurement, or a measurement that does not even involve an interaction at all, should not alter the system’s behavior. But the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics is such that the system’s marginal stochastic behavior is genuinely statistically dependent upon the quantity of QMI, and so things you would intuitively believe should not affect the system do, in fact, affect the system.
In the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, the photon can take two possible intermediate paths, we’ll call them A1 and A2, but both end up at the same place. Then, at the end of the experiment, it can take two possible paths again, B1 and B2, with a detector placed on both paths. You find, in practice, that there is a 100% chance the photon will show up on B1 and 0% on B2, unless you block either A1 or A2 with your hand, then it will have a 25% chance of showing up on B1, 25% chance of showing up on B2, and 50% chance of not showing up at all (because it was blocked by your hand).
The reason this is interesting is because, without your hand blocking an intermediate path, there is a 0% chance it will show up on B2, but with your hand blocking one, it changes to 25%. Thus, if you measure a photon on path B2, you know with certainty that someone’s hand must be blocking A1 or A2, yet, clearly the photon did not traverse the path of the hand or else it would have been absorbed by the hand and you would have detected nothing. You thus can deduce the presence/absence of the hand from a particle’s behavior that never (locally) interacted with it, and so logically speaking, the hand must be having a non-local influence on the statistical behavior of the particle.
This influence is due to the fact that if the particle interacts with the hand, it will be absorbed into it and slightly will alter the states of the particles in the hand, and if it does not interact with the hand, it will not do this. Thus, you could in principle look very closely at the particles that make up the hand and deduce whether or not the particle took the path the hand is on based on whether or not this alteration occurs, and thus there is QMI between the hand and the particle’s path, regardless of whether or not the particle actually interacts with the hand. The mere presence or absence of this QMI changes the particle’s behavior.
Nah, man, it’s literally how it works (for all we know). The wave function doesn’t collapse until the data is read. You can’t prove otherwise, so people are free to believe it.
This was a joke. This is a joke community. I was being facetious when I said “literally”.
However, there’s truth in what I said. How do you know that the entire experimental setup is not in a superposition right up until you observe the result. I mean, you obviously have to look at the result of the experiment before you know what happened in the experiment, and until you do, the entire experiment could be in a superposition of [interference pattern] and [no interference pattern].
However, this is not really what the meme is saying, so I guess my joke was dumb, and I deserve the downvotes.
Haha, no I haven’t. I don’t believe in magic. I watch mainstream YouTube science channels, and not any “mystical” ones. PBS Spacetime, Dr Ben Miles, Quanta Magazine, Sabine Hossenfelder, etc.
So, I ask you: please design an experiment that proves the outcome is determined precisely when the detector detects the particle going through the slit, and not when a person observes the screen or a recording the detector made. You can’t. You can’t prove that the detector detected something until you look at the result, and until you do, for all you know, it’s in a superposition. That’s all I’m saying. You know, shorting your scat. Everyone knows the shorting your scat experiement.
So uhh…sorry for this comment being as long as it is. I was initially basically just going to leave the first paragraph and then link to two or three videos demonstrating the claims. But then I wanted it to be of value even if you don’t spend the time watching the videos. And so I had to rewatch the videos myself to summarise salient points. And that led me to finding and rewatching yet more videos. And then I had to summarise those. And the comment just blew out.
The first paragraph should serve as a TL;DR if the rest is too much or not worth the time. And jump to the last paragraph for other recs.
Sabine Hossenfelder
Hey, just be very careful about her. She knew her stuff with astrophysics, but has since become very jaded even within what was once her own field, and she has a nasty habit of speaking with great authority about matters outside her expertise, and getting it wildly wrong. And often doubling down rather than adapting when corrected. And also of spreading a message that emboldens and encourages science deniers, despite not being a science denier herself.
Here’s a video about it from a former ABC journalist who I think is being overly generous to Hossenfelder at times (in particular regarding Hossenfelder’s take on trans people), but which nonetheless does a good job of laying out the problematic way she presents certain views.
And here are a few more videos that take a more directly critical approach. Professor Dave Explains’ first video. This is probably the strongest, because it makes every effort to present things from Hossenfelder’s point of view and assume she means well. One key thing this video does is point out that the fact that she comments on fields outside her expertise is not a problem. The problem comes when she refuses to properly update her beliefs (and retract claims) when she gets corrected, and she often does not sufficiently caveat her views with her lack of expertise in this subject.
eigenchris explains why she’s wrong about trans teens. In short, Hossenfelder plays the bothsidesism game to appear as reasonable, but to do so ignores significant amounts of evidence in favour of trans affirming care, and ignores significant problems with the limited evidence in favour of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (i.e., the idea that people think they’re trans even though they aren’t purely because it’s “socially popular”) in order to present it as a reasonable view.
Rebecca Watson (Skepchick) also does a much shorter video about this trans misinformation. She also points out that Hossenfelder hides her citations behind the Patreon paywall, making it impossible for most viewers to do basic fact checking. Watson also follows up about how Hossenfelder is wrong about capitalism. The video links over to this much longer video by Unlearning Economics (a creator I have watched before and enjoyed, but I have not seen this particular video recently enough to recall it), but spends most of its runtime explaining the many ways Hossenfelder was wrong about penicillin, by falsely claiming it only took off thanks to capitalism, despite the Australian Government being one of the biggest drivers of its uptake by producing enough to use for the Australian Army during WWII (with enough leftover for civilian use), and despite numerous capitalists from the UK and US actively choosing not to invest in producing penicillin until promises of significant tax breaks for aiding in their own war effort.
Now, I’ve got my own separate problems with Watson that have led me to stop watching her. (Namely: that she seems more interested in dunking on people than actually spreading good information. The Adam Conover video was an awful hit piece, and the pinned comment was nothing but anti-union propaganda. And she refused any update, not even pinning someone else’s comment pointing out the update, after Conover put out a complete retraction of the thing Watson was dunking on him for. Not to mention the significant amount of time in that video spent dealing with style issues rather than the actual substance. Just gross.) But in these two videos she does a really good job of laying out the facts and deferring to experts who can demonstrate why Hossenfelder is problematic.
Dave has a third video. It’s much longer and might be worth watching if you’re still on the fence. It shows some of the more recent claims from Hossenfelder of her getting more and more extreme in her anti-scientific institutions takes, and then does interviews with current scientists about what they do and how it conflicts with Hossenfelder’s warped explanations.
For former academic astrophysicists who occasionally make videos about the problems with academic science or with the popular response to science, I would highly recommend Angela Collier and Dr. Fatima. Though neither are exactly the same niche that Hossenfelder purports to be in, since they don’t typically do science news reporting.
Damn, that’s quite the write-up! I actually haven’t watched any of her videos in over a year, but I used to watch them a lot, so I figured I’d give her credit for part of my education. Her takes did seem a little odd at times, but it was refreshing to watch a science curmudgeon sometimes. I simply got sick of her schtick after a while, and did read a little controversy about her. I had no idea about the trans stuff.
I mentioned my sources of science news specifically because you accused me of being misled by… somebody. So fuck off with your mockery of me for trying to disuade you of that notion.
This started as a joke, and you’re just being an ass.
Does 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?
Does 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
Yes. It collapses the wave function. There is no need for something ‘conscious’ to count as an ‘observer’.
Your second question is moot, because the first part counted as an observation.
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.
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.
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.
Well, no. Not if you put a detector in one of the slits. It collapses the wave function, and the interference pattern disappears. The meme is a joke that your eyeballs are the detector, which is not true.
I was making a bit of a joke myself to get people to think about when the collapse actually happens. It could occur as late as when you look at the screen, and you can’t prove otherwise. You know… like, “is the moon still there when you’re not looking at it?” Except for real.
Nothing 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 was curious, so I went to Wikipedia, as one does.
A notable example of the observer effect occurs in quantum mechanics, as demonstrated by the double-slit experiment. Physicists have found that observation of quantum phenomena by a detector or an instrument can change the measured results of this experiment. Despite the “observer effect” in the double-slit experiment being caused by the presence of an electronic detector, the experiment’s results have been interpreted by some to suggest that a conscious mind can directly affect reality.[3] However, the need for the “observer” to be conscious is not supported by scientific research, and has been pointed out as a misconception rooted in a poor understanding of the quantum wave function ψ and the quantum measurement process
Edit: erhm. this isnt an ad for Wikipedia. the words just shook out that way. lol
If anybody still doesn’t understand, when the wave function collapses, that is called observation. Again, from Wikipedia:
In various interpretations of quantum mechanics, wave function collapse, also called reduction of the state vector, occurs when a wave function—initially in a superposition of several eigenstates—reduces to a single eigenstate due to interaction with the external world. This interaction is called an observation and is the essence of a measurement in quantum mechanics, which connects the wave function with classical observables such as position and momentum.
Physics has this problem with naming things. They use words like “particle”, “observation”, and “spin”, among others, which are words that every English speaker knows, but then they use those words to describe stuff that’s actually only similar to the words everybody knows. This makes physics a lot more approachable for people who know nothing, but then completely confuses people with only a little knowledge.
In general, I agree, but spin is quite surprising in how much like angular momentum and dynamos it behaves. Either way, we don’t know enough about it yet, and it’s at best a coincidence.
Shout-out to floatheadphysics (Mahesh) for his video on spin. The way he steps through the learning process like it’s a conversation with the giants that gave us the knowledge (based on their writings) and how he presents it with all the excitement of “getting it” is cathartic.
There isn’t a scientific definition for “observation.” In the Copenhagen interpretation, it really is treated just as vaguely as the colloquial definition, something the physicist John Bell complained about in his article “Against ‘Measurement’”, that the textbook axioms of quantum mechanics are inherently vague because they refer to “observation” or “measurement” which is not itself defined in the axioms. Saying that observation is just “when the wavefunction collapses” is a circular definition and doesn’t answer anything, because then we can just ask, “when does the wavefunction collapse?” and the only answer the textbook axioms give is “when you observe/measure it.”
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.
So only scientists capable of observing create the entire universe from moment to moment? People who are extraordinarily stupid or just sleeping don’t independently exist?
Being aware is literally observing. So we could all be creating it as a whole. Or it could be pure solipsism, and the sense of self (or the ego) is split into 8 billion different pieces all unfolding reality around each other. Infinity allows this. It’s even possible that it’s pure solipsism and everybody else is in superposition and you unfold literal human lives as you go.
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.
Observation in quantum mechanics isn’t like everyday observation. There is no passive observation, you have to interact with a particle to observe it. It’s like putting your hand in front of the hose to see if it’s on. You can see from the spray pattern that when the hose is “observed” the pattern changes.
and in this case, seeing the spray pattern is interfering the system not because it is “aware” of you seeing it, but in order to see it there must be light reflecting off it which certainly would have an effect for bombarding it and bouncing off it.
It doesn’t work like this, popular misconception. It is cool in sci-fi though.
The easiest way to understand this is in terms of mutual information.
If we both flip a coin independently of one another, then both coins have a 50%/50% chance of being heads/tails and the distributions are independent of one another and thus uncorrelated, but imagine the two coins are initially attached to one another, flipped, and then we separate them. Now they’re both still 50%/50% for heads/tails but are perfectly correlated, so they are guaranteed to have the same value, and so if you know one, you know the other. In this case, the coins are said to have mutual information on one another.
It turns out in the physical world that mutual information, or more specifically quantum mutual information (QMI), plays a very important role. The marginal statistics on the behavior of a system can depend upon whether or not it shares mutual information with something else. You see this in the double-slit experiment because if you record the which-way information of a particle, then necessarily it must have interacted with something to record its state, and thus whatever measured it must possess QMI between itself and the particle, and thus the particle’s marginal statistical behavior will change.
This is in no way unique to human observers or human measurement devices. You can introduce just a single other particle into the experiment that interacts with the particle such that they become statistically correlated and it will have the same effect.
QMI is rather counterintuitive because you can establish QMI in ways that you would intuitively think would not impact the system being measured. For example, you can have an entirely passive interaction whereby only the measuring device’s state is altered and not the particle in order to establish QMI between them.
You can also establish QMI without an interaction at all, such as, imagine that the measuring device is only placed on 1 of the 2 slits and you only fire a single photon and that photon is not detected. If it’s not detected, you still know where it is, because it must have traversed the slit the measuring device was not on. Hence, the non-detection of something can still be a detection and thus can still establish QMI.
Intuitively, you would think a passive measurement, or a measurement that does not even involve an interaction at all, should not alter the system’s behavior. But the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics is such that the system’s marginal stochastic behavior is genuinely statistically dependent upon the quantity of QMI, and so things you would intuitively believe should not affect the system do, in fact, affect the system.
You can even use this effect to detect the presence or absence of something without ever (locally) interacting with it.
In the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, the photon can take two possible intermediate paths, we’ll call them A1 and A2, but both end up at the same place. Then, at the end of the experiment, it can take two possible paths again, B1 and B2, with a detector placed on both paths. You find, in practice, that there is a 100% chance the photon will show up on B1 and 0% on B2, unless you block either A1 or A2 with your hand, then it will have a 25% chance of showing up on B1, 25% chance of showing up on B2, and 50% chance of not showing up at all (because it was blocked by your hand).
The reason this is interesting is because, without your hand blocking an intermediate path, there is a 0% chance it will show up on B2, but with your hand blocking one, it changes to 25%. Thus, if you measure a photon on path B2, you know with certainty that someone’s hand must be blocking A1 or A2, yet, clearly the photon did not traverse the path of the hand or else it would have been absorbed by the hand and you would have detected nothing. You thus can deduce the presence/absence of the hand from a particle’s behavior that never (locally) interacted with it, and so logically speaking, the hand must be having a non-local influence on the statistical behavior of the particle.
This influence is due to the fact that if the particle interacts with the hand, it will be absorbed into it and slightly will alter the states of the particles in the hand, and if it does not interact with the hand, it will not do this. Thus, you could in principle look very closely at the particles that make up the hand and deduce whether or not the particle took the path the hand is on based on whether or not this alteration occurs, and thus there is QMI between the hand and the particle’s path, regardless of whether or not the particle actually interacts with the hand. The mere presence or absence of this QMI changes the particle’s behavior.
Nah, man, it’s literally how it works (for all we know). The wave function doesn’t collapse until the data is read. You can’t prove otherwise, so people are free to believe it.This was a joke. This is a joke community. I was being facetious when I said “literally”.
However, there’s truth in what I said. How do you know that the entire experimental setup is not in a superposition right up until you observe the result. I mean, you obviously have to look at the result of the experiment before you know what happened in the experiment, and until you do, the entire experiment could be in a superposition of [interference pattern] and [no interference pattern].
However, this is not really what the meme is saying, so I guess my joke was dumb, and I deserve the downvotes.
Your joke was funny you just forgot the /s
deleted by creator
Haha, no I haven’t. I don’t believe in magic. I watch mainstream YouTube science channels, and not any “mystical” ones. PBS Spacetime, Dr Ben Miles, Quanta Magazine,
Sabine Hossenfelder, etc.So, I ask you: please design an experiment that proves the outcome is determined precisely when the detector detects the particle going through the slit, and not when a person observes the screen or a recording the detector made. You can’t. You can’t prove that the detector detected something until you look at the result, and until you do, for all you know, it’s in a superposition. That’s all I’m saying. You know, shorting your scat. Everyone knows the shorting your scat experiement.
So uhh…sorry for this comment being as long as it is. I was initially basically just going to leave the first paragraph and then link to two or three videos demonstrating the claims. But then I wanted it to be of value even if you don’t spend the time watching the videos. And so I had to rewatch the videos myself to summarise salient points. And that led me to finding and rewatching yet more videos. And then I had to summarise those. And the comment just blew out.
The first paragraph should serve as a TL;DR if the rest is too much or not worth the time. And jump to the last paragraph for other recs.
Hey, just be very careful about her. She knew her stuff with astrophysics, but has since become very jaded even within what was once her own field, and she has a nasty habit of speaking with great authority about matters outside her expertise, and getting it wildly wrong. And often doubling down rather than adapting when corrected. And also of spreading a message that emboldens and encourages science deniers, despite not being a science denier herself.
Here’s a video about it from a former ABC journalist who I think is being overly generous to Hossenfelder at times (in particular regarding Hossenfelder’s take on trans people), but which nonetheless does a good job of laying out the problematic way she presents certain views.
And here are a few more videos that take a more directly critical approach. Professor Dave Explains’ first video. This is probably the strongest, because it makes every effort to present things from Hossenfelder’s point of view and assume she means well. One key thing this video does is point out that the fact that she comments on fields outside her expertise is not a problem. The problem comes when she refuses to properly update her beliefs (and retract claims) when she gets corrected, and she often does not sufficiently caveat her views with her lack of expertise in this subject.
Professor Dave Explains’ second video, a followup a week after the first addressing some responses to the first one.
eigenchris explains why she’s wrong about trans teens. In short, Hossenfelder plays the bothsidesism game to appear as reasonable, but to do so ignores significant amounts of evidence in favour of trans affirming care, and ignores significant problems with the limited evidence in favour of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (i.e., the idea that people think they’re trans even though they aren’t purely because it’s “socially popular”) in order to present it as a reasonable view.
Rebecca Watson (Skepchick) also does a much shorter video about this trans misinformation. She also points out that Hossenfelder hides her citations behind the Patreon paywall, making it impossible for most viewers to do basic fact checking. Watson also follows up about how Hossenfelder is wrong about capitalism. The video links over to this much longer video by Unlearning Economics (a creator I have watched before and enjoyed, but I have not seen this particular video recently enough to recall it), but spends most of its runtime explaining the many ways Hossenfelder was wrong about penicillin, by falsely claiming it only took off thanks to capitalism, despite the Australian Government being one of the biggest drivers of its uptake by producing enough to use for the Australian Army during WWII (with enough leftover for civilian use), and despite numerous capitalists from the UK and US actively choosing not to invest in producing penicillin until promises of significant tax breaks for aiding in their own war effort.
Now, I’ve got my own separate problems with Watson that have led me to stop watching her. (Namely: that she seems more interested in dunking on people than actually spreading good information. The Adam Conover video was an awful hit piece, and the pinned comment was nothing but anti-union propaganda. And she refused any update, not even pinning someone else’s comment pointing out the update, after Conover put out a complete retraction of the thing Watson was dunking on him for. Not to mention the significant amount of time in that video spent dealing with style issues rather than the actual substance. Just gross.) But in these two videos she does a really good job of laying out the facts and deferring to experts who can demonstrate why Hossenfelder is problematic.
Dave has a third video. It’s much longer and might be worth watching if you’re still on the fence. It shows some of the more recent claims from Hossenfelder of her getting more and more extreme in her anti-scientific institutions takes, and then does interviews with current scientists about what they do and how it conflicts with Hossenfelder’s warped explanations.
For former academic astrophysicists who occasionally make videos about the problems with academic science or with the popular response to science, I would highly recommend Angela Collier and Dr. Fatima. Though neither are exactly the same niche that Hossenfelder purports to be in, since they don’t typically do science news reporting.
Damn, that’s quite the write-up! I actually haven’t watched any of her videos in over a year, but I used to watch them a lot, so I figured I’d give her credit for part of my education. Her takes did seem a little odd at times, but it was refreshing to watch a science curmudgeon sometimes. I simply got sick of her schtick after a while, and did read a little controversy about her. I had no idea about the trans stuff.
deleted by creator
A reply to your edit: You need to work on your grammar, spelling, and punctuation. I can’t understand a thing you’re saying.
I’m KFC Double Downing on the double slits being doubly doubtful until you’ve observed the result.
deleted by creator
I mentioned my sources of science news specifically because you accused me of being misled by… somebody. So fuck off with your mockery of me for trying to disuade you of that notion.
This started as a joke, and you’re just being an ass.
You have a stick up your butt. I observed it.
Does 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?
Yes. It collapses the wave function. There is no need for something ‘conscious’ to count as an ‘observer’.
Your second question is moot, because the first part counted as an observation.
I don’t understand. How can they “get” a wave pattern if they didn’t look at the data?
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.
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.
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.
But the way it works is only the top one if im not mistaken
Well, no. Not if you put a detector in one of the slits. It collapses the wave function, and the interference pattern disappears. The meme is a joke that your eyeballs are the detector, which is not true.
I was making a bit of a joke myself to get people to think about when the collapse actually happens. It could occur as late as when you look at the screen, and you can’t prove otherwise. You know… like, “is the moon still there when you’re not looking at it?” Except for real.
Well that’s basically the bohr-einstsein problem isnt it?
Agree to disagree!
Nothing 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 was curious, so I went to Wikipedia, as one does.
Edit: erhm. this isnt an ad for Wikipedia. the words just shook out that way. lol
If anybody still doesn’t understand, when the wave function collapses, that is called observation. Again, from Wikipedia:
Physics has this problem with naming things. They use words like “particle”, “observation”, and “spin”, among others, which are words that every English speaker knows, but then they use those words to describe stuff that’s actually only similar to the words everybody knows. This makes physics a lot more approachable for people who know nothing, but then completely confuses people with only a little knowledge.
My favorite example of this is the use of “stress” and “strain”. In common language they’re synonyms, but in Physics they’re definitely not.
“Theory” is another bad one in all of science. That’s what leads knuckleheads from saying dumb shit like “evolution is just a theory!”
In general, I agree, but spin is quite surprising in how much like angular momentum and dynamos it behaves. Either way, we don’t know enough about it yet, and it’s at best a coincidence.
Shout-out to floatheadphysics (Mahesh) for his video on spin. The way he steps through the learning process like it’s a conversation with the giants that gave us the knowledge (based on their writings) and how he presents it with all the excitement of “getting it” is cathartic.
There isn’t a scientific definition for “observation.” In the Copenhagen interpretation, it really is treated just as vaguely as the colloquial definition, something the physicist John Bell complained about in his article “Against ‘Measurement’”, that the textbook axioms of quantum mechanics are inherently vague because they refer to “observation” or “measurement” which is not itself defined in the axioms. Saying that observation is just “when the wavefunction collapses” is a circular definition and doesn’t answer anything, because then we can just ask, “when does the wavefunction collapse?” and the only answer the textbook axioms give is “when you observe/measure it.”
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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.
So only scientists capable of observing create the entire universe from moment to moment? People who are extraordinarily stupid or just sleeping don’t independently exist?
Being aware is literally observing. So we could all be creating it as a whole. Or it could be pure solipsism, and the sense of self (or the ego) is split into 8 billion different pieces all unfolding reality around each other. Infinity allows this. It’s even possible that it’s pure solipsism and everybody else is in superposition and you unfold literal human lives as you go.
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.
If an interaction occurs it collapses for all points of view. The geiger counter is the observer.
Someone gets it
That’s not “litterally” how it works then, just “figuratively”.
You are wrong though.
Observation in quantum mechanics isn’t like everyday observation. There is no passive observation, you have to interact with a particle to observe it. It’s like putting your hand in front of the hose to see if it’s on. You can see from the spray pattern that when the hose is “observed” the pattern changes.
and in this case, seeing the spray pattern is interfering the system not because it is “aware” of you seeing it, but in order to see it there must be light reflecting off it which certainly would have an effect for bombarding it and bouncing off it.