Recent content by marky3

If this collapse only happens whenever the interaction enables you to determine which slit the particle went through then what physical mechanism is at play. Is this one of the aspects of quantum mechanics that is not properly understood or am i missing something. It is not obvious to me how the...

In the two slit experiment there is an interference pattern generated whenever there are no detectors at the slits. This must mean that the wavefunction associated with the particles have not decohered. But the wavefunction must have interacted in some way with the barrier in order to produce...

Thanks for your reply alxm. Thats exactly what i was trying to verify. Sorry for my very basic questions. I'm not an expert in this field and still trying to get around the very basic features of QM. It is made more difficult sometimes because it seems that in a minority of articles and...

What i am getting at is whether there is any real dispute that superposition, rather than being an issue of interpretation is regarded as an experimenally confirmed fact. For instance violation of bells inequality transcends any specific interpretation, and disregarding an extreme minority of...

When you say observed do you mean directly observed rather than inferred from the behaviour in the experiments. I was under the impression from the reply from my original post that superpositions were never directly observed. Is this in fact the case and if so my original query still stands. How...

Strictly speaking the superpostition wasn't directly observed, since that would be impossible. What i am referring to is the more recent experiments which have demonstrated (albeit without direct observation) superposition states, such as the oscillation/non-oscillation of tiny strips of metal...

Since there have now been directly observed superpositions in laboratory experiments, meaning of course that superposition is not an interpretative issue but an observed aspect of nature, does this have any consequences for certain interpretations of QM? I particurlarly had in mind hidden...

The violation of Bell's inequality is often said to imply that either there exists non-locality or there are no hidden variables. In actual experiments it is consistenly found that the inequality is violated by precisely the amount predicted by quantum theory. But quantum theory denies both...

Is this process something that physicists understand or is it one of the still unsolved mysteries of QM? I'm assuming this is now understood in terms of decoherence but I'm trying to figure out exactly what decoherence explains. I understand that decoherence now provides a more illuminating...

Is it correct to say that a measurement occurs whenever a wavefunction interacts with a macroscopic object? If this is the case why does the wavefunction make a distinction between a photon detector and say a half silvered mirror used in quantum experiments. Both are macroscopic objects but in...

From my understanding decoherence occurs whenever a quantum object interacts with a macroscopic sized object. So for instance a measurement involving a photographic plate registering a particle will cause decoherence of the wavefunction, which appears to us as the wavefunction collapsing...

Physicists are enabling increasingly large quantum systems to go into a superposition state, now reaching a stage involving many thousands of particles. From what i understand they seem confident they can carry on this trend indefinitely. However doesn't decoherence impose some limitation on how...