This is a really high quality edit, I’m genuinely impressed. Probably not too much work mechanically but the attention to detail is great and someone who’s never seen it would probably think it was original. If I were a meme edit rater it would rank very high on my list. I don’t know how to make this comment not sound sarcastic or boomer-y but I actually really love this edit and will send it to people. They won’t understand it but that’s fine.
I’d read a piece that even just having a camera present has the same effect.
That’s not really it. You need something that measures the state of the electron. Merely looking in the direction is not enough. It has to be something that interacts with the electron.
A camera alone isn’t enough. But light (eg photons) with enough energy should be enough. But then that energy will manipulate the electron. If you had a completely dark room and pointed a camera at the experiment it wouldn’t change anything.
It’s kind of like having your cake and eating it too.
So if we didn’t need light to see it then it would continue doing whatever it does?
I wonder how the universe would look if we didn’t need light to see 🤔
It isn’t “looking” that is meant by “observation”. “Observation” is meant to convey the idea that something (not necessarily sentient) is in some way interacting with an object in question such that the state(s) of the object affects the state(s) of the “observer” (and vice versa).
The word is rather misleading in that it might give the impression of a unidirectional type of interaction when it really is the establishment of a bidirectional relationship. The reason one says “I observe the electron” rather than “I am observed by the electron” is that we don’t typically attribute agency to electrons the way we do humans (for good reasons), but they are equally true.
Edit: a way of putting it is that the electron can only be said to be in a particular state if it matters in any way to the state of whomever says it. If I want to know what state an electon is in, it must appear to me in some state in order for me to get an answer. If I never interact with it, I can’t possibly get such an answer and the electron then behaves as if it was actually in more than one state at once, and all those states interfere with each other, and that looks like wavelike patterns in certain measurements.
Edit 2: just to be clear, I used an electron as an example, but it’s exactly the same for anything else we know of. Photons, bicycles, protons, and elephants are all like this, too. It’s just that the more fundamental particles you involve and the more you already know about many of them, the fewer the possible answers are for any measurement you could make.
No, the electron only understands sentient thoughts, if a camera or an animal looks at it, it won’t work.
Well that’s not right
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 (versus merely existent, as in a unicellular microorganism) 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.[4][5][6]>
Not just sentient, but intelligent thought. I proved it in university. When I setup the lab, I got no interference pattern. When my more intelligent labmate did the setup there were fringes.
Wait! That means I was the sentient one! I was cheated! (Or maybe I just sucked at lab.)
Me who’s not a physicist
Can’t blame you electron, me too
It’s really frustrating that people who don’t understand this experiment have insanely taken into assume that a magic particle spell understands if a human being is watching or not.
Perhaps it would be better to explain why instead of attempting a mic drop based on your superior knowledge?
It’s called the observer effect, and it happens because:
This is often the result of utilizing instruments that, by necessity, alter the state of what they measure in some manner.
And particularly in 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)
So for anyone who wants to have a surface understanding of the observer effect, the wiki does a fair job of the basic explanation.
I think the issue is that quantum mechanics is hard to popularize without leading people into wrong conclusions, pop science clickbaits make this worse.
I find it easier to understand if you say that observing necessarily means there’s an interaction energy (for example a photon), otherwise no information can be retrieved, and however small that information retrieval energy is, quantum systems are so sensitive, that it is enough to modify their behavior.
Agreed completely, especially about the clickbait-y titles that are at best half-truths. Quantum mechanics are difficult to grasp even on a surface level for sure.
The interference disappearing from measurement is not really because the instrument alters the state. Or, at least, putting it like that occludes the more fundamental reason.
Fundamentally, measurements are subject to the uncertainty principle, which dictates that one can not define precisely the values of two complementary observables at the same time. Position and momentum of any quantum object are such complementary observables, so measuring one – for example position – requires that the other (momentum) becomes less defined.
When the position of a particle is narrowed down to a pixel on a detector screen, its momentum becomes very uncertain and we must talk about all the possible paths for it to have arrived at that point.
The probability of a particle being measured at any given pixel is given by the probability of all possible paths combined[1], with this important quirk: when combining possible quantum states, they interfere with each other, constructively or destructively. Repeated measurements of positions give you what appears to be wave-like interference due to the way the probabilities of all paths interfere.
By checking which slit a particle passes through, you exclude all the possible paths through the other slit and end up not observing the same pattern because the two slits simply do not interfere.
To be more precise, by “combining” I mean state vector addition. Probability is magnitude squared of a quantum state vector. So for a given position, you take all possible paths there, sum their state vectors, then square the resulting vector’s norm (magnitude) to get its probability. The sum of all positions’ individual probabilities will be exactly one - meaning that it will always be somewhere. ↩︎
