[thedufer]

Its certainly accessible, but I'm not sure how much I trust the authors to understand what they're talking about after point 3.

> But very often the conclusion that is drawn from this observation is that our _knowledge_ about the path followed by the electron causes the interference pattern to disappear.

Although we couch the idea in terms of "knowledge", the usual meaning of that word is not what anyone thinks is actually the trigger. What exactly is meant by "knowledge" is not well-agreed upon, but no one thinks it is something particular to humans (or sentient beings, I suppose) that causes the wavefunction to collapse. It has more to do with whether the information exists - if the particle interacts with something in such a way that its position suddenly becomes deducible, then it collapses. Like I said, the specifics of this are a known hole in the Copenhagen theory - but this "knowledge" tangent is a clear strawman.

[jostylr]

That FAQ is generated by the students of a very trustworthy group. Students typically setup strawman when explaining things. Look more to the source. Also, they are trying to argue against a theory which no one wants to fully specify. So they have to come up with something definite. And as soon as they do, the other side says "Strawman!" And then proceeds, as you have just done, to refuse to give a definite theory.

As a student of that group as well, I can't say that I am all that pleased by that kind of argument.

The bottom line is that collapse is untenable. There is no good place to put it and yet it is needed by the standard theory.

[thedufer]

There is a range of possibilities of what might cause a wavefunction collapse, and the constructed strawman is nowhere near that. It would be like if we claimed the speed of light was 3.2e8 +/- 5e7 m/s and someone decided our whole theory was bunk because the speed of light is obviously faster than 100 m/s. Well yeah, it is, but there's no contradiction here.

"if the particle interacts with something in such a way that its position suddenly becomes deducible, then it collapses" would be a theory in the range of possibilities. It would be much more convincing to argue against something like that.