sophiecentaur said:
that sums it up, I think. The pattern for the monitored path would be built up with 'resolved' photons from the other slit (no interference) which dilutes the interference pattern due to unresolved photons from both slits.
I'm not sure I understand this interpretation, as it relates to the situation we were discussing (with the two slits simultaneously being partially monitored at the top of each).
It seems like you're trying to say that the monitored halves are interacting with the unmonitored halves somehow? Maybe your wording just seems vague to me.
lostprophets said:
i do here you.
i kind of imagine the photon , much like a sun and all its light/energy coming of it in every direction.this light/energy i see as the wave and the sun/photon as the particle...so to me the sun/photon is a wave and a particle at the same time.
what i then do is to imagine doing the two slit experiment with the sun.
i imagine it all to scale including the spying eye and i ask myself, would the eye be able to to some how hold the light/energy coming of the sun back from going through the slit,but the sun itself was able to penetrate this and go through.
now obviously the sun and a photon are different.but my point is the photon must be emitting something off itself and this something is being blocked by the eyes energy coming from it.like an aura..
i have a wild imagination
I was trying to think about it like that as well, with little suns gong through the slits, but since on that scale the energy measurements are unquantifiable (if they even exist.. Which I think is possible but not practically measurable right now) it seems like that metaphor is a bit stretched.
Would it be more beneficial to think about the situation like a whistle, where the quantized photon is the whistle ball, the slits are the whistle body & blowing it can represent the photon emitter/uncertainty of photon path (& maybe hypothetical further quantized energy states) through a medium?
So, we blow the whistle, and the ball vibrates within the body. The pitch of the sound we get represents the interference pattern we get (which is a combination of degrees of freedom available to the ball inside the body, and energy imparted to the ball by blowing, and as it represents light we will blow the whistle at a constant pressure :).
Now to describe the quantized photon we must either split the whistle open mid-blow and see where the ball flies, and this would subsequently destroy the interference pattern (or 'pitch' of the whistle) & the photon ball would be scattered randomly wherever its' last bounce within the body sent it;
Or, we could try being less intrusive and try to find out where the photon is without losing it. So we try blowing back into the whistle's exhaust hole and peeping through at the same time, hoping that the ball still has enough energy to sound the whistle (this would be like an 'observation field' parallel to the slits that has a percentage chance of intercepting a photon).
Now, although we can still hear the whistle, the degrees of freedom for the ball are significantly reduced. The higher energy states of freedom that were available before are taken up by our blow-back, and so the ball is more likely to vibrate at the bottom of the whistle body, so although we can hear the whistle and the pitch is the same, the volume is much lower (and so in the real experiment, there is little to no wavelike interference).
Sound ok, anyone?