this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2025
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So the thing is, "observe" here means that you want to look at an electron to see which path it's taking. How do you "observe" it? By hurling a photon at it, at light speed, it smashes into the electron, changing its course, and then back to you.
Once you define what's actually happening, it becomes a lot less mysterious why "observation" changes the results.
I would argue it's still mysterious. If it were simple, we wouldn't have what's called the measurement problem.
Also, there is more than one way to measure something, and not all of them require a real photon to hit some particle. In the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester, you can "measure" whether the quantum bomb's sensor is working or not without actually hitting it with a photon. Instead, you hit it with the "chance" of a photon hitting it, and that's good enough. (It'll still blow up half of the time, but you can design the tester with multiple recursive tiers to increase your tested-but-unexploded bomb yield to arbitrarily close to 100%.)
That's pretty mysterious in my mind.
It is absolutely still extremely mysterious.