i wish pop science would stop misunderstanding the concept of “observer” in quantum physics.
an observer is a bit of a misnomer, really. it just means something that can measure an interaction. but you can’t measure something without also being a part of that interaction.
i mean, if a camera is picking up an object, it’s because light is hitting the object. and if you want to measure that a particle has passed through a slot, something must happen between your measurement instrument and that particle, which will affect the result.
the way it affects the result is that it causes a result to happen early. what a particle is going to end up doing isn’t exactly determined before it interacts with something. you might imagine it as the universe doing lazy rendering. it doesn’t decide until it has to.
if my memory serves me right, Schrödinger’s thought experiment with a cat in a box was meant to demonstrate the absurdity of an unobserved quantum event causing a cat to be neither dad nor alive.
in reality, the outcome would just be random, as i understand it.
i think one way of understanding the relationship between quantum level events and macroscopic objects is that of a narrowing of likely outcomes.
if it’s just a particle in a vacuum, the range of outcomes is broad, but as more particles get involved, their probability fields (wave functions?) start to overlap, creating “hot spots”, and these become more concentrated with an increasing number of particles in close proximity. the particles become “trapped” on average, i.e. they begin to act more deterministic.
bonifartius 𒂼𒄄
@thor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie%E2%80%93Bohm_theory is an interesting way of thinking about it, just found it reading the double slit page :)