Comment on Did the premise of an entity approaching you only when it's not being viewed originate with Doctor Who's Weeping Angels?

MrJameGumb@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• hperrin@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  “Observation” in quantum mechanics doesn’t mean a person looking at them, it means taking a measurement, which involves interacting with the particles somehow. It’s that interaction that causes the particles to behave differently. In other words, photons behave as a wave (moving according to a wave function) until another particle interacts with them, at which point they behave as a particle (moving in a straight line). See the various different double slit experiments for evidence of this.

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  • DarkGamer@kbin.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I thought the delayed choice quantum erasure
    experiment showed it wasn't the act of measurement that collapses the wave, but rather whether the information was retrievable or not.

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    • hperrin@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yeah, I guess in my statement I should have said “unless” instead of “until”, because it’s not time dependent. But it’s still the act of measurement, not the act of a conscious person looking at that measurement, that causes the collapse of the wave function.

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      • DarkGamer@kbin.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        it’s still the act of measurement, not the act of a conscious person looking at that measurement, that causes the collapse of the wave function.

        That's not the case here; when particles are measured but the information erased/nonrecoverable it remains a wave:

        what makes this experiment possibly astonishing is that, unlike in the classic double-slit experiment, the choice of whether to preserve or erase the which-path information of the idler was not made until 8 ns after the position of the signal photon had already been measured by D0.

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  • MrJameGumb@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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