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by gus_massa
2619 days ago
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There are two walls. One wall has two slits, the other wall is where the particles/waves/balls/whatever colide and form the interference pattern (or not). You don't need someone observing the second wall to get the interference patters. You can replace the person with a photographic plate, a CCD sensor of a camera, or other equipment. All off them are more precise, reliable and even cheaper than a graduate student with paper and pencil. The problem is if you try to add some type of equipment to first wall to collect information about how the particles/waves/balls/whatever passed thru it. Whatever equipment you add it will disturb the flow and it will kill the interference pattern. This is not a technological problem. It is how the universe work. If you propose to use some particular method (like using light to detect the balls) you will sooner or later find that there is something that gets broken (see the former comment). An important detail is that if you use a macroscopic object like a basketball, the slits size and the slits separation must be tiny (less than a millionth of the size of the nucleus of an atom, probably much less). So you intuition about how thinks work in the macroscopic level is not a good guide to how thinks work in the microscopic level. In the macroscopic level you can approximate the basketball as a perfect classic solid. It's just an approximation, a very good approximation. |
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what confuses me in various explanations like this is that the whole 'act of observing affects what you observe' thing seems to be rather particular in that it turns the wave-like behavior into particle-like behavior, which strikes me as rather weird/counter-intuitive. Why don't we just get slightly different interference patterns? Or some spectrum of effect between wave-like and particle-like?
Is my confusion mostly a result of the limits of the analogies presented to me as a layman?