NO FAIR! You changed the outcome by measuring it!
Fucking brilliant! And all of the upvotes assure me that I’m hanging out with the right bunch of nerds on the internet!
You can see all the stripes when you do this. The demonstration is about light’s property as a wave.
This is a picture of water so you can see the waves spreading out from the hole. Light does the same thing. And when you have two holes next to each other, the peaks and valleys of the wave will interact with each other.
Now imagine a vertical line where those waves are interacting to the right of the holes. If this were light and the line you imagined was a wall, the parts of the waves that are high are bright and the valleys are dark.
So how long until someone comes in here and claims that this it disproves materialism?
“But but the Double Slit!” Is my favorite pseudoscience argument
Can someone who understands science explain this to me (what im getting at is its a pregnancy test)
The double slit expiriment demonstrates the duality of the nature of a photon: that it’s both a wave and a particle.
When a photon is “observed” (or detected) it has the properties of a particle. However when it’s travelling it acts like a wave and can demonstrate interference patterns with other photons.
So when you pass photos through two tiny slits, instead of them just passing right through like a particle, they interfere with each other and when the wave pattern collapses when it is observed on the wall, you see the interference.
That being said, I don’t think this cartoon makes sense. I get what they are driving at, as they are saying it acts differently when not observed, but this is not what happens. Also this isn’t a ln experiment that deals with observation forcing an outcome, but as I noted it’s about the duality. Additionally, the wave pattern on the top is what you would you observe when looking at, so I’m not sure why that is what it would be like if you were looking away.
But maybe I’m missing something.
The double slit experiment is about observation.
When you fire photons through the double slits, one photon at a time, they cause wave interference patterns with themselves as if each photon travelled through both slits.
Yet if you set something up to measure which slit each photon passed through, they no longer interfere with themselves, and give you the two straight lines pattern, rather than the interference pattern.
When you fire photons through the double slits, one photon at a time, they cause wave interference patterns with themselves as if each photon travelled through both slits.
You’re right, I forgot about this part of it.
Thanks mate.
The meme confuses two things in quantum mechanics. One is the double slit experiment, which confirms that light behaves both as a wave and a particle. That’s what the meme is showing here.
However it’s also throwing in Schrodinger’s, which states that until you look at something it exists in all states - the classic theoretical example being the cat in a box, which is both alive and dead until you open the box. That doesn’t make much sense in the real world, but when looking at quantum particles it is provably true.
Here is another meme that more accurately explains things: https://mander.xyz/post/5143468
Just to complete the set of “principles of quantum mechanics that people know of but don’t fully understand”, there’s the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that you can either know the position of something or its momentum (ie where it’s going). The more accurately you measure one of these, the less accurate any measurement is of the other.
Edit: However there’s also what /u/Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone said below:
The double slit experiment is about observation.
When you fire photons through the double slits, one photon at a time, they cause wave interference patterns with themselves as if each photon travelled through both slits.
Yet if you set something up to measure which slit each photon passed through, they no longer interfere with themselves, and give you the two straight lines pattern, rather than the interference pattern.
So maybe the meme was referring to this variation on the double slit experiment, rather than Schrodinger.
Fyi, there’s a lot of
woo woo(edit: apparently racist term) crap out there that tries to make you believe that somehow the photons can feel that a human is watching them and they choose to behave differently as a result. This is not true. It just means that when you use a detector or some sort of probe that physically interacts with the photons they change their behavior. It’s not magic.The amount of times I’ve seen people misunderstanding this…
When you blast something with a high powered laser it behaves differently, who knew?
Thank you. I had someone sit for about 30 minutes trying to convince me our eyes, without any level of interaction, changed the behavior of photons and quantum particles simply by the fact we were gazing at them. I could not understand how but kept being reassured it was the case.
People take the word “observe” at face value (no pun intended) a bit too often
I agree but please don’t say woo woo, the term is considered offensive against Asians, plus James Randi, the guy who came up with it, was literally a climate denying pedophile who was the primary science advisor on the thoroughly debunked false memory Foundation.
The term, like this man’s legacy, needs to die.
It is a shame really, I used to be so convinced that magic had to be real, that men of science just didn’t want to hear it because it conflicted with their worldview. God I would give anything for that to be true.
What koolaid are you sipping? Woo-woo, even in the dictionaries is supposed to refer to sci-fi / ghost sounds. Give me one decent quote to say woo-woo is racist.
It’s a play on “Wu” actually
Source or gtfo
So did you even read or just copy articles where the title agrees with you? The first one is “according to google”. The only article i saw crop up on google use the term derogatory(as per the article) to describe woo-woo was on medium, talking about how it makes people who believe in the supersticious and paranormal feel bad (much like the second article you linked). If you actually read them, you would see there is only one negative implication in the first article, and it is not in the origins of the word but in the “message” of “western superiority”, because god forbid we actually ask people to back up their claims.
Where is the racist connection then? Maybe just look up the origins of the word on the dictionary and admit you are spouting bullshit?
Very clever, made me laugh
Brilliant. Do you call this quantum consciousness, quantum mind or something? At least in German its Quantenbewusstsein. After all these years i remember that photons notice you observe them and behave differently, because it’s ducking interesting.
Actually scam artist call this Quantum Consciousness and believe that it proves that quantum physics is just the old magic under a new name.
Everyone else just calls this the Dual slit experiment
Ok that’s pretty good lol
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More like double-slut lmao
