A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Anyone actually know what measurment devices are used to observe which slit the electron passes through? How do we know that a specific measuring tool isn't changing the experiment significantly enough to cause issues with outcome and that the behavior change is abnormal?
My understanding is that they use something like polarizing filters. Both slits have the same filter, they make a diffusion pattern as the waves interfere with each other. Both slits have different filters, there's no wave interference and you get two lines.
Calling it an "observer" is maybe the most damaging name in the sciences since some douchebag decided to call the orthoganal number line "imaginary"
That's actually the real lesson from the experiment. The detectors impart a small but real energy barrier and change the distribution pattern of the electron
Basically if you hold up a ruler to something human scale it doesn't effect the thing your measuring much. But when you are trying to measure a basketball with something the size of a gymnasium you have to really launch that fucking basketball to open a door and the door has a very noticeable affect on the trajectory of the ball.
It's funny until you meet someone who actually believes that human eyes change quantum results
It’s a reasonable thing to think from the way it was described in my physics class, at least. I fault people a lot less for misunderstanding something that even scientists in the field don’t really understand than for something like thinking the earth is flat.
They don't even explain it in physics class. That is kind of the schtick of the Copenhagen interpretation. You just assume as a postulate that systems are in classical states when you look at them and in quantum states when you do not, and from those two assumptions you can prove using Gleason's theorem that the only possible way the former can map onto the latter is through the Born rule. But there is no explanation given at all as to how or when or by what mechanism this transition actually takes place.
Many Worlds isn't much better because they posit that the classical world does not even exist, yet that clearly contradicts with what we directly observe in experiments, so if that is true it necessarily means that the classical world is an illusion, and so then you still have to explain how the illusion comes about, which they do not. Dropping the postulate that there is indeed a classical world also disallows you from deriving the Born rule through Gleason's theorem, and so it then becomes unclear how to do it at all without some arbitrary additional postulate, and the arbitrary nature of it means there are dozens of proposals of different postulates and no way to decide between them.
Modern physics is of the form (1) there is a quantum state, (2) you look at it, (3) a miracle happens, (4) you perceive a classical state, and then you are repeatedly gaslit into believing quantum mechanics is a complete theory of nature and it's impossible for there to ever be anything more fundamental than it and any physicist who thinks there might be, even if they are literally Albert Einstein, is a crank crackpot. They then take on the same playbook as the Christians where when you point out their explanation seems to be logically incoherent, they say, "God has no obligation to make sense to you" as an excuse to be incoherent and making no sense, but just replace "God" with "nature" and the same argument is repeated verbatim.
Its like punching a hole in folded paper to explain a wormhole. Hollywood science movies have a lot to answer for.
i fault them for doubling and tripling down when corrected, with sources, because they'd rather keep believing a fantastic lie.
In fairness, there was a whole Journey song about it
I think I've meet too many charlatans to be that forgiving about it
The book The Quantum Magician makes this mistake
The protagonist has a quantum brain and to use it they have to turn off their consciousness in order to not collapse the superposition. I face palmed whenever they mentioned it
But other then that, totally scientifically accurate.
It was trying to be hard sci-fi but... It's still a bit magical
Yeah, those dumbasses. It’s obviously a monkey.
I thought it was some cat.
gonna keep banging this drum every time this comes up:
When physicists say "observe", they actually mean "measure". And to measure a photon of light, you have to interact with it somehow, there is no passive way to do so.
The post's header image implies that the interference pattern goes away just by looking at it. If that were the case, we would never see the interference pattern, never know it was there in the first place! In the actual experiment, they put a sensor at one or both of the slits. But to "sense" a single photon, you have to interact with it in some way. Otherwise you wouldn't know it was there.
Again, this is where the language trips us up. Rather than "sensor", would really be more accurate to say they put a photon-touch-er at the slits.
So, what we actually get is "Touching the photon changes the photon's behavior." The universe doesn't magically infer when we happen to be looking at it, there is no spooky action-at-a-distance!
This guy observes.
The uncertainty principle has increased ... my uncertainty.
I'm not sure about this
It feels like a very aggressive title for this post.
I don't get it. Don't both top and bottom show interference patterns, or is this about something else?
top is interference patterns (like a wave) while bottom is as if it’s a particle (only two slits)
Oh I see I was overthinking it.
Though as far as I'm aware the patterns usually aren't that nuanced in reality.
Do you mean that they are not as noisy?
More noisy.
Huh. When looking at light interference patterns I always thought that they looked less noisy, especially when showing a spectrum.
I see what you did there...
Do you? Do you see it? The other dimensions!?
NO, IT'S IMPOSSIBLE... YOU CAN'T SEE IT.
............ (long pause) ......... (longer pause) .........
............ (even longer pause) ..... (pause for dramatic effect) ...
.... (Pause with a capital P) .... Can you?
Do you truly want to know?
Alrighty then, but don't say that I did not warn you:
...
...
...
Yes. Except after I peeked, it no longer exists. But the people - THOSE PEOPLE - they, haha, they hehe they claim that I am the ones who are (sic) crazy, the absolute fools! They refuse to know what I have seen!!
Alright, consider the slit observed then...
This reads like an order for the lemmings with the right body parts
I love this.
Marry it, then.
Nice