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Observer (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] cynar 71 points 1 week ago (34 children)

This sort of comic always bugs me. Observation in QM is not the same as observation in layman terms.

Best think of it as hit it and watch the pieces fly. When you get small enough, you can't approximate out the impacts. It's akin to studying road traffic by sending an overloaded freight truck the wrong way and counting tires that hit the verge. It might also affect the current traffic's motion.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 week ago (8 children)

This is something that I noticed is hard to understand to most people. My SO got served a video of the double slit experiment and thought it was like magic, until I tried to explain to him that at this scale, "observing" doesn't just mean looking at it. Observation makes you part of the system and causes the system to change.

[–] systemglitch 0 points 1 week ago (2 children)

There is a magic to perception nothing else can replicate. I'm pretty sure awareness is existence, so it's attention has to change reality.

[–] cynar 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Perception and observation are different things. Air molecules can be "observers" when looking at electrons etc.

[–] andros_rex 0 points 1 week ago

I think we need to build a time machine to go back to Atlantis, to kill Ramtha and make sure that What the Bleep? never gets made.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

"Observation" in a QM sense has nothing to do with sapience of anything like that. It literally just means that something needed the information and it collapses the waveform. It's any time it influences another particle. It doesn't matter what that particle is. If it needs to know the state or the particle we care about then it "observed" it. Humans or animals need not be involved.

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