I think the meme is just poking fun at the physics behind the whole thing, but in case anyone doesn’t know:
It’s called the observer effect, and it happens because:
This is often the result of utilizing instruments that, by necessity, alter the state of what they measure in some manner.
And particularly in the double-slit experiment:
Physicists have found that observation of quantum phenomena by a detector or an instrument can change the measured results of this experiment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)
So for anyone who wants to have a surface understanding of the observer effect, the wiki does a fair job of the basic explanation.
Yep, the observer it is not only observing, it is interacting in order to measure.
The meme is not about the observer effect or wavefunction collapse
Yeah it is. From that wiki article:
A notable example of the observer effect occurs in quantum mechanics, as demonstrated by the double-slit experiment"
The meme is not about the double slit experiment
Look, I’m not gonna keep quoting Wikipedia at you until you get it, so believe what you want I guess
Edit: see also the title of the post
Super curious, and promise not to argue. What, in your summation, is the meme about?
Petulant electrons, I guess.
This meme is about the difference in scales. When your electron’s delocalization is much greater than other scales in your system, the electron behaves like a wave. Otherwise if the electron’s delocalization is the smallest scale, it behaves like a particle.
If you can look at the setup of an experiment with your bare eyes, the electron behaves like a particle. If you cannot - it may behave like a wave.
You can see wave properties from a double slit setup with your bare eyes. Here’s someone who did it with a cardboard box.
https://youtu.be/Iuv6hY6zsd0?si=TIlEJa4AJQhh8da4
If you setup a detector that measures which path the particles took, the interference pattern disappears- again something you can see with your bare eyes.
For electrons you can’t do it. Either way the interference is not a quantum effect and the detector that you are talking about is a simple reemiting device that detects the wave vector and creates the wave in the same direction. Now live with that.
For electrons you can’t do it.
Why are you giving me a theoretical paper? It doesn’t even have sizes, but I assume that the distance between two holes is about 1um, which you cannot see with your bare eyes
In short
😐 = Electron if you look
= Electron if you don’t lookI’d read a piece that even just having a camera present has the same effect.
That’s not really it. You need something that measures the state of the electron. Merely looking in the direction is not enough. It has to be something that interacts with the electron.
A camera alone isn’t enough. But light (eg photons) with enough energy should be enough. But then that energy will manipulate the electron. If you had a completely dark room and pointed a camera at the experiment it wouldn’t change anything.
It’s kind of like having your cake and eating it too.
It isn’t “looking” that is meant by “observation”. “Observation” is meant to convey the idea that something (not necessarily sentient) is in some way interacting with an object in question such that the state(s) of the object affects the state(s) of the “observer” (and vice versa).
The word is rather misleading in that it might give the impression of a unidirectional type of interaction when it really is the establishment of a bidirectional relationship. The reason one says “I observe the electron” rather than “I am observed by the electron” is that we don’t typically attribute agency to electrons the way we do humans (for good reasons), but they are equally true.
Edit: a way of putting it is that the electron can only be said to be in a particular state if it matters in any way to the state of whomever says it. If I want to know what state an electon is in, it must appear to me in some state in order for me to get an answer. If I never interact with it, I can’t possibly get such an answer and the electron then behaves as if it was actually in more than one state at once, and all those states interfere with each other, and that looks like wavelike patterns in certain measurements.
Edit 2: just to be clear, I used an electron as an example, but it’s exactly the same for anything else we know of. Photons, bicycles, protons, and elephants are all like this, too. It’s just that the more fundamental particles you involve and the more you already know about many of them, the fewer the possible answers are for any measurement you could make.
*Photon
Maybe consciousness is fundamental and matter and spacetime are derived from it
edit: this comment is a bit controversial to people just want to say why not explore this idea we spent over 50 years on string theory where has that gotten us
Donald Hoffman Ted talk on consciousness
Please just take the time to learn more before you come at me lol
Please keep cooking until we unlock magical abilities
What is magic dude Fucking biobots man
You need to qualify that statement somehow, or maybe give a citation or source that supports such an idea
Sure firstly id like to say these are theories just as anything in science starts as. I am not saying this is fact by any means and could be totally wrong. here are some sources:
Thanks for sharing, I’ll take a look when I get a chance!
Thanks for being open minded and at least looking at the data before you draw your conclusion
Both these figures are embarrassingly bad.
Hoffman confuses function for perception and constantly uses arguments demonstrating things can interpret reality incorrectly (which is purely a question of function) in order to argue they cannot perceive reality “as it is.,” which is a huge non-sequitur. He keeps going around promoting his “theorem” which supposedly “proves” this yet if you read his book where he explains his theorem it is again clearly about function as his theorem only shows that limitations in cognitive and sensory capabilities can lead something to interpret reality incorrectly yet he draws a wild conclusion which he never justifies that this means they do not perceive reality “as it is” at all.
Kastrup is also just incredibly boring because he never reads books so he is convinced the only two philosophical schools in the universe are his personal idealism and metaphysical realism, which the latter he constantly incorrectly calls “materialism” when not all materialist schools of thought are even metaphysically realist. Unless you are yourself a metaphysical realist, nothing Kastrup has ever written is interesting at all, because he just pretends you don’t exist.
Metaphysical realism is just a popular worldview in the west that most Laymen tend to naturally take on unwittingly. If you’re a person who has ever read books in your life, then you’d quickly notice that attacking metaphysical realism doesn’t get you to idealism, at best it gets you to metaphysical realism being not a coherent worldview… which that is the only thing I agree with Kastrup with.
Consciousness has literally nothing to do with it. In fact, the experiment as demonstrated in this emem would not replicate the double slit results. What has to happen is something along the path has to interfere with the photon (aka observe, which has nothing to do with consciousness, rather just an interaction), which causes the waveform to collapse. Basically, if something needs to know the state, the state collapses into one result. It doesn’t matter what that thing is.
Idk that would depend on what you believe is fundamental Fringe science baby!
Yeah, except we can do this experiment without ant consciousness aware of it even and it gets the same results. The only thing that matters is if the particle has to interact with something, because when it does it becomes a specific particle rather than a waveform. What that interaction is with does not effect the experiment in the slightest. A consciousness does not have any effect on the results of the experiment so there’s no reason to expect that the universe cares about consciousness. To the universe, consciousness is yet just another series of interaction of things that behave the same as anything else, except it happens in a pattern that we think of as thought.
Ok but how do you actually remove consciousness from the experiment? Seriously curious because from my point of view no matter what a conscience agent has to check the results
Use a computer? I guess you could say it all collapses when an actual consciousness checks what state things are at, but that’d be a rediculous claim to make. This is where Occam’s Razor is useful. Why introduce a concept of a consciousness being required when it would function identically but be significantly stranger and more complex?
What is consciousness to the universe anyway? It’s nothing but a system of electrical impulses, and there no reason to think there’s anything physically special about it. It’s just an interesting phenomenon that happened, but fundamentally it isn’t anything special.
I guess you could say it all collapses when an actual consciousness checks what state things are at, but that’d be a rediculous claim to make.
Would it? We now know with the recent experiments with Bell’s inequality that quantum mechanics can’t be reduced to a local hidden-variable theory, doesn’t that at least in theory leave space for consciousness? Sure you could go with superdeterminism but currently that seems equally unfalsifiable as a consciousness-based theory.
Sure, it leaves space for anything. It leaves space for (any) God. It doesn’t make it useful to consider it though. There are literally an infinite number of things we could make up to explain it, but that doesn’t make them equally likely. The most likely is the one that doesn’t require strange assumptions, like the universe caring about consciousness, or that particles are conscious like another person said, or the hand of God literally reaching in to set the states exactly himself. Some hypotheses shouldn’t be entertained because they require so many strange assumptions they’re essentially useless and just a waste of time.
Perhaps the particle is simply moving so fast that it appears as a wave but once it smacks into something it slows down enough to be observed
Btw I do not know any significances about this subject
Nope. That isn’t it. My understanding is it essentially has to do with the position being required for an interaction to happen. It exists as a waveform until some interaction (any interaction) requires the position to be finite for the interaction to take place. That collapses the waveform (aka, the likelihood for all possible positions collapses into just one possibility) and the interaction happens. It has nothing to do with speed, only the need of the position to be known to perform an interaction.
Can’t blame you electron, me too
Me who’s not a physicist
