EDIT: Let’s cool it with the downvotes, dudes. We’re not out to cut funding to your black hole detection chamber or revoke the degrees of chiropractors just because a couple of us don’t believe in it, okay? Chill out, participate with the prompt and continue with having a nice day. I’m sure almost everybody has something to add.

  • doctordevice@lemm.ee
    181·
    1 year ago

    On your second point, that’s what the science actually says. “Observer” or “observation” is used in a scientific sense and was probably a poor word choice. Science journalism gets carried away with anything that has the word “quantum” in it and it drives us mad.

    You’re absolutely right that the mechanism that’s causing the wave function to collapse is the presence of whatever piece of equipment the particle is hitting. Whether that collapse happens at the two slits or the back wall changes the pattern, and that change is what shows wave-particle duality.

    Also: physics doesn’t claim to know that the Big Bang only happened once. That’s just as far back as we can rewind with our current models. This is again something that science journalism takes a lot of liberty with.

      • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
        1·
        1 year ago

        the leading approaches suggest that the wave function doesn’t collapse at all, it just appears to when our brains become entangled with the experiment.

        Aren’t you just moving the point of the wave collapse from the experiment to inside the brain? I mean if the wave function never collapsed, shouldn’t we see all superpositions at once? But instead, the brain seems to collapse to one possibility, i.e. still collapsing the wave function.

          • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
            1·
            1 year ago

            Importantly, the super position doesn’t contain a portion for ‘the observer measures both outcomes at the same time’, so there’s no way for us to see all superposition’s at once.

            I feel like here you’re just moving the goal post again, if you’ll excuse the expression :)

            Even if there is no superposition in which an observer sees both outcomes, there must be some point in space and/or time that decides which of the two superpositions we see. Whether that is in the experiment, in the brain or in consciousness or whatever. I mean we only see one superposition, so there must be something that “decides” (randomly as far as we know) which one it is. And that decision is a kind of collapse of the wave function, no?

            I am not a physicist though so this is just me rambling from my limited understanding.