this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 33 points 1 week ago (2 children)

This is something that I noticed is hard to understand to most people. My SO got served a video of the double slit experiment and thought it was like magic, until I tried to explain to him that at this scale, "observing" doesn't just mean looking at it. Observation makes you part of the system and causes the system to change.

[–] cynar@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

That is part of what bugs me.

Quantum mechanics isn't magical or unknowable. It's just an area of physics where some of our base assumptions/approximations break down. It's not even that hard to wrap your head around, it just seems most people don't want to try.

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Magic is just stuff we don't know but don't care to know :)

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social -2 points 1 week ago

No, it's not. Magic isn't real.

[–] niktemadur@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Quantum mechanics is an area of physics that leans on measurement as a central concept. What things are doing between measurements is not its' concern, and don't even stop and think about it, you'll go nuts, just shut up and calculate!

[–] systemglitch@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (2 children)

There is a magic to perception nothing else can replicate. I'm pretty sure awareness is existence, so it's attention has to change reality.

[–] cynar@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Perception and observation are different things. Air molecules can be "observers" when looking at electrons etc.

[–] andros_rex@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

I think we need to build a time machine to go back to Atlantis, to kill Ramtha and make sure that What the Bleep? never gets made.

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago

"Observation" in a QM sense has nothing to do with sapience of anything like that. It literally just means that something needed the information and it collapses the waveform. It's any time it influences another particle. It doesn't matter what that particle is. If it needs to know the state or the particle we care about then it "observed" it. Humans or animals need not be involved.