this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
385 points (96.8% liked)
Asklemmy
43950 readers
990 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Observation in quantum physics isn't about a consciousness being able to see it happen, but about it interacting with the universe in a way that could potentially be measured. There doesn't need to be a physical observer, just a theoretically measurable result of it interacting with something.
Copied from my other reply because I’m curious what you might think too:
Yea I didn’t convey myself well.
Our ability to observe the effect, at this point in time, results in us disturbing the thing.
Like with Schödinger’s cat, in order to observe the outcome we have to open the box which may result in the poison being released and killing the cat. So if we open the box and the cat is dead, it may be due to our interference rather than the gas being released by the radioactive decay. In order to know the position of the cat, we’d have to be able to see through the box in a way that doesn’t impact the outcome of the experiment. Yet, the cat is either dead or alive, it’s just unknowable to us due to our inability to observe the cat without disturbing the scenario. Only the cat really knows if it’s alive.
Similarly, we largely don’t have great ways to observe quantum happenings because our technology to measure the outcomes disturbs whatever we’re observing. Yet, the thing a we’re looking at either are or are not happening the way we posit, our ability to know doesn’t change that.
Ah, I see what you mean - that the superposition is a model of our uncertainty of unobserved actions, rather than the actual state of the particle. While that was my understanding initially too (because it makes sense) our testing, things like the double slit experiment, has shown behaviours that only make sense if they do occupy both states simultaneously. Quantum computing is actually reliant on qubits being in a 0/1 superposition for it to work. It's what makes the entire thing so maddening, because experimental evidence has disproven every attempt to make it make sense.
First thing my quantum mechanics professor told us was that if you think you understand quantum mechanics you definitely do not understand quantum mechanics. He was at the time one of the world's leading experts on quantum applications, and had just proven the existence of an additional state of matter that quantum theory predicted, and straight up told us to our faces that he didn't understand it, he just knew that it works.