Disproportionate energy expediture. Little effort for magic mans big effort for science mans. I’d love to move earth around me effortlessly and I only occasionally like flinging dirt around with a shovel.
So it turns out the original meme was kind of right? It just didn’t illustrate what it was talking about very well. According to @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone:
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.
In this experiment, they didn’t even bother measuring which slit each photon passes through. The 3D glasses don’t measure or observe the photons, they merely polarize them (although they do block 50% of light). The detector D_S doesn’t measure which-path information either. The researchers could have placed a circular polarizer in front of D_S, and when they get a hit they could have said with confidence “this photon came through the top slit!” but they didn’t even bother doing it this time. The fact that the 3D glasses alter the light in a manner which makes the which-path information theoretically measurable (even if not actually measured), alone is sufficient to destroy the interference pattern.
The original meme is definitely correct, idk why so many people were having conniption fits over it. In the double slit experiment’s simplest form, not measuring the photons leads to the wave interaction pattern and measuring the photons leads to the two bars as you’d expect from particles.
And since physicists decided to use the stupidest term possible to describe that measurement, the monkey “observing” the experiment is a play on what the actual experiment is doing
It’s clear he’s observing something, but all too easy for the viewer to think the monkey is merely observing the pattern on the screen at the end. It also doesn’t help that there are a bunch of slight variations on the double slit experiment, like those listed in this post.
If the monkey was at 90 degrees to the experiment, looking at the slits only side on, then it might be clearer - though I’m not sure how you could draw that lol.
As someone who enjoys quantum mechanics, but papers are too far over my head; and has struggled with a nagging sense that something about all the explanations just wasn’t making sense, thank you for this beautifully clear explanation of how these conclusions were reached.
Why is this whole post about photons? I always thought that the double slit experiment was interesting because this happened with electrons, even individual electrons would still generate the interference pattern, and I guess I always thought that you could detect which slit the election went through by detecting an induced current or something
They talk about how it was never actually possible to do this before, because it requires very fine “electron optics” and manufacturing of components, like slits and shutters, with nanometer precision. So while the thought experiment with electrons itself was proposed by Feynman in 1963 (which is probably what inspired the monkey meme and the like), it was not actually realized until 2019. I’m also now guessing that the electron quantum eraser paper from 2014 doesn’t use a double slit but some other electronic quantum circuit that is easier to work with.
The two-stripe photo to match the monkey meme, with electrons and measuring which-way information, probably doesn’t exist yet. So that’s why!
Yes, double slit interference happens with both photons and electrons, and even with C60 buckyballs and organic fluorescent dye molecules (arxiv.org/abs/1402.1867)! This post is more so about the quantum eraser, as a counterpoint to the 12 posts about it that @kromem wrote in the other thread. The first experimental quantum eraser paper from 2001 uses photons, so that’s the figures I used here. There might be newer papers that use electrons, like this one doi.org/10.1126/science.1248459 from 2014, but I don’t have access to it. I presume detecting the electron there using induced current or whatever would disturb its wavefunction to the same severity as using the polarizer filter does here.
Holy smokes! I always thought it just showed that electrons and photons aren’t ‘really’ particles, I had no idea it also worked for atoms and even molecules.
Sadly, Magic is once again missing from the world.
Btw, please don’t use Anti-Asian phrases created by a literal Pedophile in your debunks (Woo Woo)
All else I have to say is, knowing that amount of things you have to do to even measure this wave in the first place… There’s no great mystery here, it’s just “The ways we have to measure this thing are insanely shitty.”
Btw, please don’t use Anti-Asian phrases created by a literal Pedophile in your debunks (Woo Woo)
Wut? I’m pretty sure this has been a derogatory term for pseudoscience since at least the early 90s. I dunno what you think the origins of the word are, but the only relation to Asian people or culture I can find are in the form of it being used to mock charlatans peddling vaguely Asian-sounding spiritual beliefs.
It was made up by James Randi, a crazy man who claimed he debunked meditation and climate change… Sure he’s also the reason no one takes Uri Geller seriously, but that’s like the ONE good thing he did…
James claimed it was based on music in sci-fi films, but the suspicious similarity to the asian phrase “Wu”, and his own contempt for Eastern Religious Practices are noteworthy.
Nobody should be taking Uri Geller seriously, so that’s good.
The “Randi is a pedo” is from a very obviously take smear campaign that is about as real as any of the fraudsters randi debunked.
As for mediation, a massive number of the claims about it ARE fake. Randi has some very clear YouTube videos about his opinion on meditation.
It really sounds like you have a personal grudge against the guy. So now I’m wondering which of your beloved ideas he debunked, or if you simply didn’t spend the 40 minutes requires to research these claims.
Randi tried to explain this away as a sting operation he performed with police, but… That makes no sense since if teenagers are calling him for sex, that makes Randi look suspicious, not them, I mean how they’d even get the number.
He also served as the primary science advisor on the False Memory Foundation, which was debunked as a kiddie diddling organization and disbanded shortly after in 2019
Edit: Or none depending on how you see it. No atoms were formed directly at the Big Bang because too hot, but all atoms’ existence is a pretty direct consequence of it
If that’s the case I would say none then. The constitute parts aren’t the item. (How many ships are produced by a forest? None, we use the wood to make the ships.)
All of them? At what point do we consider new atom formation to not be a part of the big bang? Isn’t it still ongoing, at least until expansion and atomic formation stops?
We need to avoid all candy! It’s proven fact that 100% of people that consume candy eventually die, even those that were only exposed to 2nd hand candy!
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