this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
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I’ve asked this of a physicist friend of mine, and he insisted there wasn’t actually photon touching being involved. I honestly didn’t understand his explanation fully though. Photon touching makes sense to me. Whatever he said was much more confusing… yet he gets grant money to actually study lasers and put out research papers, and I don’t, so…
"Photon touching" was a somewhat glib way of putting it on my part.
What does your friend think of this statement:
No, that exact thing, interacting with the particle, is what he was saying does not happen, or at least is not required for the effect to happen. This is where his explanation lost me, because my understanding had aligned with yours, and he spent a good half hour trying to explain how I was wrong, and to be honest, it didn’t quite sink in.
I remember there was a lot of math in his explanation, and multiple different interpretations and angles of understanding — but my takeaway was just that he strongly claimed no interaction with the particle whatsoever was required for uncertainty and the weird particle/wave dichotomy to take place, and that experimental evidence has been provided for this. Furthermore, that I have no fucking idea what observation means, but it doesn’t apparently mean interaction with the particle at all.
Huh. Maybe there is no dragging quantum up to human scale comprehension. Like, we can only really describe this stuff with math equations.
Probably gonnna keep repeating my dumbed down summary though, cus I think for us laymen it helps more than it hinders.