this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Yes, but eyes and other sensory organs are passive observers. You can only see photons if they've already been reflected in your direction, and whether you're looking has no impact on if they are reflected or not.
Feels like a kind of "if a tree falls in a forest" scenario. Whether your eyes were in the way or not makes no difference.
But experimentation says otherwise, that’s the whole fucking point mate.
I understand logically what you say sounds like it should be true. But science is not about logic and making sense. It’s experimentation.
I've done the double slit. Just looking at the slit does not cause the photons to start forming only 2 lines. Hell we did it back in high school with a class of 30 people, and got the wave pattern on the wall no matter who was looking.
It takes more than just looking at it to get the photons to change behaviour.
Can you explain this experiment as if I was an adult?
You can only see photons when they bounce off something and into your eye. So you have no way to see the photons as they travel towards and through the slit, only after they hit a wall on the other side and reflect back to you.
So there's no way for you to observe the photons with your eyes before they've gone through the slit. In order to observe them as they head to the slit you need to hit the photons with something to measure where they are, and it's this interaction that collapses the waveform and makes the light travel though a single slit of the two.
Maybe as of I was a very young adult, or a large child.
I had a physics teacher in college who explained it like this.
Imagine we see by throwing tennis balls. You know the shape of something (and he gestured at a giant whale skeleton in the lecture hall) by Knowing where the tennis ball bounces off of the shape. If we throw a lot of them, we can "observe" the shape of an object.
Now imagine the object we want to observe is another tennis ball. With the skeleton, the tennis ball, even meant of them, hitting it and bouncing off won't effect it. But if we want to use our tennis ball sight to observe a tennis ball, it's going to knock the tennis ball away, thus we've significantly effected it.
The only way to "observe" a photon is to use something that will have a significant effect on it.
This was some 15+ years ago, so I might be misremembering the details slightly, but that was more or less the gist of it.
Ohh, that makes sense.
The double slit experiment itself, or why simply looking at the double slit experiment doesn't change the outcome?
I can explain as if you were a child.
In it's most basic form observation for the double slit experiment is actually using particles to observe how other particles work, the observation is actually an interaction, not just watching.
The waveform collapses because what we're using to observe interacts with the particles, not just because a conscious entity is watching.
Is this theoretical?
Sorta yes sorta no. Why it happens it's not fully explained and as with everything in particle physics we could be super close to knowing but at the same time super duper far.