this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
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oh boy, here I go banging this drum again:
When physicists say “observe”, they actually mean “measure”. And to measure a photon of light, you have to interact with it somehow, there is no passive way to do so.
The post’s header image implies that the interference pattern goes away just by looking at it. If that were the case, we would never see the interference pattern, never know it was there in the first place! In the actual experiment, they put a sensor at one or both of the slits. But to “sense” a single photon, you have to interact with it in some way. Otherwise you wouldn’t know it was there.
Again, this is where the language trips us up. Rather than “sensor”, would really be more accurate to say they put a photon-touch-er at the slits.
So, what we actually get is “Touching the photon changes the photon’s behavior.” The universe doesn’t magically infer when we happen to be looking at it, there is no spooky action-at-a-distance!
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.