No. Whether someone looks at the result of an experiment or not is completely irrelevant to the result. You may have been misled by some of the pop-sci garbage about Schrodinger’s cat and how a conscious observer ”collapses the wave function”; your best bet is to forget all of that.lashinko said:If you perform a double slit experiment but never look at the results could we say that the experiment never actually happened?
Nugatory said:You may have been misled by some of the pop-sci garbage about Schrodinger’s cat and how a conscious observer ”collapses the wave function”; your best bet is to forget all of that.
Nonsense. Its still a valid interpretation.vanhees71 said:One should however stress that the statement that consciousness causes collapse indeed is garbage.
Basically saying a classical outcome has occured, no?Nugatory said:Instead decoherence shows how a quantum superposition will quickly evolve into a mixed state in which all the possibilities are classically reasonable; just as a classical tossed coin is heads or tails whether we look at it or not, the cat has died or not and we'll find out which it is when we open the box.
Yes, but not yet a particular classical outcome. Decoherence gets us from “the cat is in a quantum superposition of live and dead” to “the cat is either classically alive or classically dead even though we don’t know which” which addresses Schrodinger’s objection. But there’s another step to get from there, a mixed state whose density matrix is diagonal, to a classical outcome and decoherence doesn’t help with that step.StevieTNZ said:Basically saying a classical outcome has occured, no?
The double slit experiment is a classic experiment in quantum mechanics that demonstrates the wave-particle duality of matter. It involves shining a beam of particles, such as electrons, through two parallel slits and observing the resulting interference pattern on a screen. This experiment is important because it challenges our understanding of the nature of particles and the behavior of matter at a quantum level.
In the double slit experiment, the observer plays a crucial role in determining the outcome. When the particles are not observed, they behave like waves and produce an interference pattern. However, when they are observed, they behave like particles and the interference pattern disappears. This phenomenon is known as the observer effect and highlights the role of consciousness in shaping our physical reality.
The quantum eraser experiment is a variation of the double slit experiment that further illustrates the concept of wave-particle duality. It involves placing a detector at one of the slits to determine which path the particles are taking. This results in the disappearance of the interference pattern. However, by using a "quantum eraser" to erase the information about which path the particles took, the interference pattern can be restored. This experiment shows the interconnectedness of particles and the role of observation in determining their behavior.
In classical physics, causality dictates that an effect must have a cause, and that cause must precede the effect. However, in the double slit experiment, the observation of the particles at the screen seems to retroactively determine their behavior at the slits. This challenges our understanding of causality and suggests that at a quantum level, the concept of cause and effect may not apply.
The double slit and quantum eraser experiments have significant implications for our understanding of the nature of reality and the role of consciousness in shaping it. They also have practical applications in quantum technologies, such as quantum computing and cryptography, which rely on the principles of superposition and entanglement demonstrated in these experiments.