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by ibic 1465 days ago
"delayed-choice quantum eraser" is so mind-boggling that I don't see any comprehensible explanations to me, a beautiful enigma that locks one of deepest secrets of our universe. And my brain simply refuses to accept any violation of causality - I consider causality possibly the most fundamental rules of physics, if it conflicts with others, I can only consider other rules to not hold.
3 comments

The Wikipedia article [0] has a fairly accessible introduction to non-physicists like me.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_erase...

Reading about these kinds of experiments always fills me with lots of little questions like "well what if we did THIS" or "what if we tweaked THAT slightly". I have the urge to try and "catch reality out", to expose the trick.

Makes me wish you could do these experiments with a laser pointer and a piece of paper instead of needing lots of very expensive machinery and a research grant. Everyone should have the chance to play around with quantum weirdness.

This one is for you then: http://www.quantenkoffer.com/en/
It certainly seems like a mind blower - Perhaps causality is not violated if the concept of causality is actually orthogonal to the concept of time. We perceive causality to be time-dependent, but could this be an illusory constraint from our frame of consciousness?
My feeling is that ultimately causality will turn out to be the same as “absence of contradiction”, and that time is just an emergent phenomenon in the causal network of all possibilities.
It all makes perfect sense in the many-worlds interpretation.