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!
Sorry but you are wrong. This is how I understood it too, but this is way weirder. Look into quantum eraser or polarization experiment. Information cause the wave collapse. You can use another set of polarization at 45° to activate the interference pattern again. It goes beyond physical perturbation and it has been demonstrated by experiment. I'm not a scientist and this is fairly new information to me so I can't explain it to you very clearly I'm sorry, but trust the science, things get weird at the quantum scale. Intuition doesn't work at this level.
I don't think it's wrong, just simplified. You don't really have to touch the photon, just affect the wave function, the statistical description of the photon's movement through space and time. Detectors and polarizers, anything that can be used to tell exactly which path the photon took through the slits will do this. Quantum eraser experiments just show that you can "undo the damage" to the wave function, so to speak. You can get the wave function back into an unaltered state but by doing so you lose the which-way information.
It really is about information and coherence and is really hard to explain and I'm not qualified to do it. For me the polarization show that it is beyond touching anything. You can use the first pass of filter to aquire information and it break the interference. But then you can use a second pass to remove this information and get an interference back. The photon was "touched" by both filter, so how come interference get back ? A photon is not the same as light (many photons) so you can't really apply electromagnetic reasoning to the quantum world. Sorry to do an appeals to authority, but it's been literally 100 years since the discovery of this science and if it was simply like space time and electromagnetic waves it wouldn't be know as this really weird and unintuitive model that works on really small scale. You can create a pair of photon and observe their linked property even kilometers apart when they collapse. It weird, but having information about the system, change it. Of course it's not literally like this meme. But again, I'm not an expert or a scientist, so if you know more, please correct me.