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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.

[–] VoterFrog 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

You're right. But the thing that's interesting about the double slit experiment though is that it works on only a single photon. It's as if all the traffic was created by a single car. So classically you might not think that the single car should care if the freight truck is heading down a different lane than the car but in QM it does, because the car is in a superposition of occupying several lanes.

I'm probably driving the analogy straight into the ground of course

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