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Smacal1072
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In Young's double slit experiment, any act of observation to determine which slit the particle passes through destroys the interference pattern.
Whenever I asked my physics professors why this was, their response was always either "Your question is physically meaningless", or, "There is no generally accepted explanation why this happens, only how it happens".
Like many other physics students, this disturbed me a little. I realize that QM is basically a "Shut up and Calculate" theory, but just so I could sleep at night, I adopted the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_quantum_mechanics interpretation:
This made more sense to me - It does away with the confusing wave-function collapse, and includes the observer as just another part of the quantum system under investigation. Also, systems that may appear to have "collapsed" to an eigenstate to one observer might still appear to be in a coherent superposition of states to another observer. In this way every system is a quantum mechanical system.
What do you all think about this? As far as QM interpretations go, it seems pretty reasonable to me...
Whenever I asked my physics professors why this was, their response was always either "Your question is physically meaningless", or, "There is no generally accepted explanation why this happens, only how it happens".
Like many other physics students, this disturbed me a little. I realize that QM is basically a "Shut up and Calculate" theory, but just so I could sleep at night, I adopted the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_quantum_mechanics interpretation:
Relational quantum mechanics (RQM) is an interpretation of quantum mechanics which treats the state of a quantum system as being observer-dependent, that is, the state is the relation between the observer and the system. - Wikipedia
This made more sense to me - It does away with the confusing wave-function collapse, and includes the observer as just another part of the quantum system under investigation. Also, systems that may appear to have "collapsed" to an eigenstate to one observer might still appear to be in a coherent superposition of states to another observer. In this way every system is a quantum mechanical system.
What do you all think about this? As far as QM interpretations go, it seems pretty reasonable to me...
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