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.
Whilst I've heard this idea said plenty of times by scientists as a way of demystifying the double slit and similar experiments, it doesn't really do justice to the weirdness of the quantum world.
Firstly in the "default" interpretation there's no mechanism or explanation for how an observation causes wavefunction collapse, it's just a rule that it just does that. And the collapse doesn't correspond to a change in momentum of a particle or any other change in classical physical state, but something else entirely.
In the double slit experiment a detector at one slit somehow seems to affect the particle as it leaves the source, before it reaches the detector (so the effect is backwards in time!) And without the detector it goes through both slits at once.
......sounds like an optimization technique to me