If we were to replace the measuring/observing tool that effects the characteristics of the electrons with a measuring/observing tool that was completely random if it would turn on or off right before the experiment (with no conscious mind on earth knowing the random result) would the electrons always know whether the observing tool turned on or off and make a real time decision? Or what if our observing tool was measuring the experiment and turned off mid experiment? I'm not even sure we can power something on and off so fast, but if we could I'm curious what would happen to the results.

For those who don't know about the double slit experiment here is a dummy version

This kind of reminds me of the delayed choice experiment.

Electrons don't "know" s**t. If they're not observed they do what they do, if they are observed they do otherwise, the observation changes it, so whatever funny system you set up to randomize the observations is pointless...

It seems to me OP is trying to understand the 'why' of the matter and afaik that's not been answered definitively. I imagine that shutting off the detecting device exactly mid experiment would yield a wish-mash on the screen, half particle impact, half wave effect.

We've basically already done this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dela...quantum_eraser

Basically, the photons act exactly as expected as if they know if their path was observed or not, even though the observation occurs after they have hit the detector/screen where the interference pattern happens or not.

Anything else would be deeply inefficient. Just imagine trying to design a universe - much easier to keep track of the calculations (waves) and do the adding up (particles) when it matters ratther than keep adding everything up even though nothing depends on it.

That's not suggesting or implying that the universe is designed. Just that considering what's efficient seems to work very well for physics.

This shyt just boggles the mind. Looks a lot like a glitch in the matrix if you ask me. Where's masque? I thought he was back. I'd probably finish reading all his posts on this subject.

Personally i like these sentences by Wheeler;

"The surprising implications of the original delayed-choice experiment led Wheeler to the conclusion that "no phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon", which is a very radical position. Wheeler famously said that the "past has no existence except as recorded in the present", and that the Universe does not "exist, out there independent of all acts of observation". "

see also the original delayed choice experiment reference in

http://what-buddha-said.net/library/...ithout_law.pdf

and review again the wikipedia link also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheele...ice_experiment and the quantum eraser example that was suggested in earlier posts in how to recover things (eg interference again or partial destruction of interference).

However before seeing any of these one must review well the double slit experiment in general to have a proper order and understanding of things;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment (follow all its history)

In there you will see Feynman's position too;

" Richard Feynman called it "a phenomenon which is impossible […] to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery [of quantum mechanics]."[3] Feynman was fond of saying that all of quantum mechanics can be gleaned from carefully thinking through the implications of this single experiment.[16] Richard Feynman also proposed (as a thought experiment) that if detectors were placed before each slit, the interference pattern would disappear.[17]"

See also his character of physical law series lecture on it regarding electrons;




Basically we are not conditioned to have intuition for these things because we have a classical upbringing as animals/civilization (and until recently as philosophers too).

When you know your friend is coming to see you and he is using his car to travel you may not know his car's color but you can imagine it is right now in some traffic light waiting to move again and it has some color, say red, and you just dont know it yet but the others around, that can see it, realize it is red and you are going to find out too once it gets to your place. It is undeniable that there is some objective reality to the color of the car.


An elementary particle with a spin however entangled with another particle (say sum is zero each has 1/2 or -1/2 in some axis but you need to measure to see which is which and it is 50-50 what is observed and the other is instantly fixed once you observe one) doesn't behave that way. It doesn't "know" what spin it has before you measure it.

In the end our convictions about things being there independent of us observing them relies on the statistical nature of that statement. The car "has" a red color because countless of experiments and observers exist around it that have verified that statement statistically by receiving trillions and trillions of photons from it. With quantum particles in the absence of interactions that kind of objective reality is missing. Our classical world is a statistical convergence basically. A stone will "always" fall in the ground even if the particles that make it are far less predictable in their individual path under certain conditions. But a stone is made of order 10^25 number of small "particles" (no longer correct to call them particles even). Yes one electron in some atom in principle can be found in the moon (or 1 meter away or even 1 mm away) if you did an experiment but what is the chance all will be found there and not just nearby the classical trajectory when you let it fall to the ground (so as to see a fantastically unlikely outcome)? Go to smaller systems and you start seeing that a probability smaller than 1 emerges for certain things previously seen as "certainties" for the larger object.

Quantum mechanics questions our notion of objective reality ie that something is something well defined before it is observed waiting for us to observe it.

The car is red, the electron isn't. Furthermore the car is not really red, it is statistically red (statistically in a totally astronomical sense in terms of probability to see a different color if you did an observation).

(watch Feynman's lecture and see an analogy he makes with baseball balls and the different way electrons behave when illuminated with photons)

PS: To better offer comments of particular setups that we introduce different late choices one must know exactly what is being done in that system (ie a clean not vague description of it) . The way i understand the original OP description is that what you choose to observe in the end is changed at the very last fraction of time, well "after" the quantum object "must" have gone through (classical thinking) as a wave or particle from the slits. Basically regarding photons now (but electrons are similar);
"The delayed choice quantum eraser experiment investigates a paradox. If a photon manifests itself as though it had come by a single path to the detector, then "common sense" (which Wheeler and others challenge) says it must have entered the double-slit device as a particle. If a photon manifests itself as though it had come by two indistinguishable paths, then it must have entered the double-slit device as a wave. If the experimental apparatus is changed while the photon is in mid‑flight, then the photon should reverse its original "decision" as to whether to be a wave or a particle. Wheeler pointed out that when these assumptions are applied to a device of interstellar dimensions, a last-minute decision made on earth on how to observe a photon could alter a decision made millions or even billions of years ago."

I have seen this experiment used as the major argument for simulation theory.

To me this is instead an argument for us not having the proper framework of physics in terms of spacetime geometry (action principle, symmetries etc) . In fact i dare claim that interactions give rise to spacetime itself (can you have time without change, can you have change without interactions and so GR is an effective theory connecting partially interactions with spacetime geometry because you cant have interactions without matter/energy). But as classical beings we perceived spacetime the way it effectively behaves at classical levels as classical continuous manifold. The decoupling is not obvious but it is inevitable at the extremes and as a bonus the weird behavior of quantum mechanics persists even in non extremes. Only QM is not really weird, it becomes weird only if we try to describe it using the effective way spacetime appears to us...

I have been thinking about time lately and I wonder this: Is time a thing in itself or is it created by processes w/i physics in order to allow themselves to unfold?

Is there any place in the math that would allow for this?

I have been thinking about time a lot lately too. What really fascinates me is if we someday develop technology to harness space resources and have an unlimited amount of energy, we could theoretically travel 99% to the speed of the light with technology advancements. This would be mean, i could go on a mission and have a 1000 years pass by on earth while the time span for me was realistically nothing. Humans could never live 1000 years with modern health systems, so how could i massively outlive the average lifespan by just traveling? Time is very mysterious.

I think it's bec your bodily functions slow down when you move that fast. IOW, you're not aging as fast as those you've left behind.

Its the same for anything, idk why people get so worked up about it when its light. Take sound or heat, for instance. By measuring heat with a thermometer the thermometer takes up some of the heat. You cant measure it without changing the amount of heat there is (lowering it). That exact heat that you measured is now out of the system and in ur thermometer so you could say you destroyed it by measuring it, or at least this is how someone is using it if they say you cant measure light without destroying it.

Let me know if I'm wrong here.

Also, you can do the double split experiment yourself if you buy a small laser pointer. We did it in lab last year.

edit: nevermind actually, I didn't watch the vid and apparently didnt read the title. U are talking about electrons, I think I was talking about photons.

Either way, photons or electrons, the issue isn't that the measurement interacts with them, it's how that measurement effects them that is so mysterious.

So,

1) It's super strange that a single electron (or photon), when not directly observed, will apparently pass through both slits and interact with itself to produce the interference pattern of a wave.

2) It's also strange that the act of observing (measuring) it will cause it to pass through only one slit, producting a pattern of a particle instead of an interference pattern (collapse the wave function).

Nobody can explain either of those phenomena in classical terms.

I would think this would be explained pretty easily in "classical terms"... when you do x, a happens, but when you do y, b happens. This seems like pretty standard stuff... I don't see what is going on here unless you think its more likely that an inanimate object is reacting to you than it is that you are effecting an inanimate object... in which case I think that is pretty silly.

edit:
I'm not saying that's what people in this thread are thinking, but if it is, I have to say it reminds me of the god of the gaps. This kind of silly stuff only seems to happen on the topics which are just out of reach of our current understanding--stuff which in 100 years will be quite well explained. But since it currently isn't, there's room for people to come up with statements such as they think it "more likely that an inanimate object is reacting to you than it is that you are effecting an inanimate object." You don't see this kind of weird stuff happening on things we learned 100 years ago. I imagine that 100 years from now people will be doing the same sort of thing on those topics which are, at that time, just beyond their understanding.

All of the science books I've read make a strict distinction between the quantum world and the classical world so would you please explain how you say what you do in this post.

I don't really know the implications of what it means for an "observer" to change the nature of a quantum particle, whether it's like the old tree falling in the forest thing or not, but it's still pretty strange that a object with mass, like an electron, can be in two places at once, passing through two slits and interacting with itself like waves do, but then that all changes when it's observed and it starts acting like a normal object. There is no mechanism within classical physics than can explain that so far, but yes, maybe in a hundred years, or tomorrow.

Edit: Also, and I get that you're saying that we must be doing something to the electron by measuring its location, but I'm not sure what that is. Maybe further reading will help, or someone like masque can address this question, but I'd assume photons are bouncing around all day and some of them are bouncing off our electron too, so I don't know why catching a few of those in a detector should influence the electron's path.

Nah, the time really is moving slower. If you had an accurate clock with you, it would show the time change you expect.

You're wrong. Temperature can be measured passively, with an infrared reader. That's not to say any kind of measurement can be taken that way, your example was just an easy one to beat.

Yeah, but scientists have to appear to know everything so they just make up stuff. I agree with you - at some point in the future they will point back at us and laugh at how stupid we were. Like the earth being flat.

It's Quantum Hokum!

My favorite variant of this problem—which I'm taking credit until otherwise discredited⸮—is based on understanding of words (and to a lessor degree, language) while invoking the infinite monkey theorem in a clever, creative, and unusual way.

The end result is that you can force the photon behavior to delineate an extremely arbitrary cutoff as to what constitutes "observer effect" and what distinctions, if any, exist between monkeys who are psychic compared to a particular barrel of 37 normal monkeys whom the psychic monkeys unanimously foresaw that every individual monkey comprised by this particular barrel of "normal monkeys" would all make at least 5000 lucky guesses regarding photon behavior as wave/particle/which slit/whatever and would all die before their luck ran out.

These lucky-guessing monkeys have same accuracy as psychic monkeys but only because they were selected from an infinite population by the psychic monkeys who could foresee the unfathomable, inevitable quantity of imminent, nascent "run-good" that the universe was waiting to deliver to and bestow upon this particular lot of 37 normal, non-psychic monkeys. Situations can be hypothetically created that might give the photons either a migraine headache or a deep, philosophical bout of existentialism as they are forced to perform tests along a dichotomous continuum whereby their causal criteria are mercilessly mocked by incrementally making infinitesimal shifts until a critical threshold is humorously revealed.

(causal criteria tipping point)

Please keep posting. I'm thoroughly confused.

What if a great majority of the world's paradoxes (e.g. this one, the 2 envelops, the unexpected hanging) are all discovered by INTJ-leaning autistic math geeks whose lack of grammar understanding, reading comprehension, and attention to verbal details all go unnoticed and allow paradoxes to seemingly manifest yet none truly exist?

Maybe there's some sort of "writer's code" that I'm not aware of where those of us who see blatant misuse of language are supposed to just laugh but say nothing when we see mathematicians, philosophers, and epistemologists trying in vain to incorporate a fatal flaw into their reasoning then make sense of a perceived incongruence later in their thought process that they then attribute to the words themselves that the paradox comprises?

To understand a language, you have to spend a few months reading books about grammar and take notes (or go to law school if you're ambitious) but for the lazyman just read the book entitled: Understanding Language Towards Post Chomskyan Linguistics then never read another strict ruleset just spend the rest of your life looking inside yourself for how grammar or language feels.

As for monkeys, I've kinda been on rage tilt all day after watching a couple African savannah documentaries on youtube and then seeing people in comments sections referring to cape buffalos (which have horns) and calling them bears. It really hurts my head how those two animals could be confused. I get lion–tiger confusion (both are hunters, both are similar to giant beastly cats) but after glancing at comments while scrolling down to see more videos, the inanity on display by a couple of comments just destroyed my triumphant feeling of satiated curiosity knowing I just watched the same damn documentary as everyone commenting and there was not one single føcking bear in what I had just watched.