|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
68.164.6.31
In Reply to: RE: The Double-Slit experiment posted by Tre' on May 20, 2015 at 21:11:43
Tre'
Electricity creates magnetism, and magnetism creates electricity. Light is an electro-magnetic phenomena, and it can be conceptualized as an electrical wave which collapses into a magnetic wave which is at a right angle to the electrical wave, and then the magnetic wave collapses into an electrical wave which is at a right angle to the previous magnetic wave, and so forth on and on. If you are observing just the electrical aspect of the light wave, then you don't see the magnetic aspect, and the electrons will behave as particles. If you are observing the magnetic aspect of the light wave, then what is observed will appear as magnetic particles. The light we see is a combination of these electro-magnetic waves. Planck referred to the photons he was studying as "quanta", or small bundles of energy which behaved like particles. As regarding the video which the present discussion revolves around, the "sensors" are not described in any detail. It can be safely assumed (I hope) that these sensors involve some form of electromagnetic functionality, and are therefore part of the experiment when they are added to the double slit experiment. Whether the tape recorder the sensors feed is on or not is a red herring. While light can behave as a particulate phenomena, in totality it's actually a wave phenomena. The paradoxes arising from the double slit experiment are actually not all that strange compared to some of the other stuff surrounding quantum weirdness.
Paul
Follow Ups:
"Whether the tape recorder the sensors feed is on or not is a red herring. While light can behave as a particulate phenomena, in totality it's actually a wave phenomena"
I researched more than just that one video.
When the data from the sensors (which are on and functioning) is not being recorded the photons behave like a wave. When the data is being recorded the photons act like particles.
This proves that the sensors are not part of the experiment but human observation (or the possibility of human observation) is what makes the change.
At least that's the way I read it.
Tre'
Have Fun and Enjoy the Music
"Still Working the Problem"
At 3:54 in the video it's mentioned that a "measuring device" is placed "by one slit". This is a singular device not described, and it's located near just one slit. The video is entertaining, and it describes the paradoxical data the scientists were confronted with when this experiment was first done. However it is stuck with the outdated conception of the electron as an indivisible and discreet "ball of matter". If an observation could actually collapse the wave function of the experiment as it's described, then a person looking at the experiment, or not, should have the same effect in a movie of the experiment. Anyway, let's switch to still photography.
Imagine you're sitting in an arm chair, and there's a butterfly flying around the room in a circle above and in front of you. Lets's say this is an electric butterfly which is tethered to the ceiling on a string and nail, and there's enough power in the battery so that the butterfly maintains a constant speed. As the butterfly comes around you snap a photo with a camera with a slow lens and slow film. When you develop the film you see the butterfly as a blurry grey rod about one foot long, and the wing beats as a blurry wave pattern on both sides of the rod. You can tell exactly how fast the butterfly was flying by the length of the blurry rod compared to the shutter speed of the camera. However you can't tell exactly where the butterfly was located, as it was everywhere in the blurry rod.
Next you snap a photo of the butterfly with a camera with very fast lens and film. When you develop this shot you see the butterfly frozen in space time. You can tell exactly where the butterfly was in the room, but you can't tell from the photo how fast it was flying, you can only estimate it's speed by the speed of the shutter, as at a certain high rate of speed the butterfly would start to blur. An observer looking at just the photo could'nt tell if the butterfly was moving or standing still in one place, as the image is frozen in space and time. In a manner of speaking you could say that the photo with the fast film and lens had collapsed the wave function, however this is a rather one dimensional view of the event of the butterfly flying around the room.
The act of observing something creates a conceptual model of it, and this is certainly subject to change. In the 1920's Bohr and Heisenberg got together and came up with the Copenhagen Interpretation which theorized that matter propagates as waves which collapse into particles when observed. This shoved under the carpet some of the really weird stuff connected with quantum theory like the Klein-Gordon Equation which theorized backward and forward time causality! Anyway, some were attracted by the implication of the Copenhagen Interpretation that human observation creates reality, as the creator of the video suggests.
Paul
I researched beyond that video.The sensor tracks the photons to see which slit it goes through.
The photons land on the collection plate as a wave pattern when the sensor is on and recording.
The photons land on the collector plate as particles would when the sensors are on and not recording.
It's said to be not a matter of perspective but a real change to reality.
I'm not defending it or denying it.
I just want to know, assuming the above is true, why when we observe both the movement at the slit the photons and where they land, the photons stop acting as a wave (WRT where they land on the collector plate) but when we just observe where they land on the collector plate, but not the movement at the slit, they land on the collector as a wave?
Tre'
Have Fun and Enjoy the Music
"Still Working the Problem"
Edits: 05/30/15 05/30/15
The video actually refers to electrons being fired one-at-a-time at the double slit plate and wave behavior is observed. Then a sensor is placed near one of the slits and particulate behavior is observed. Electrons are very small and easily influenced by electro-magnetic fields and other electrons. Any sensor would have to be drastically larger than a single electron, and as such would become a major factor in the experiment. If you put a small magnet (which is not observing anything) in place of the sensor, it's reasonable to expect that the magnet would affect the experiment. It's not mentioned in the video whether a second sensor was placed near the other slit to see how that affected the experiment, and a scientist would be expected to explore all possibilities. The experiment really just proves the wave-like nature of the electron rather than the former conception of it as a solid ball of matter orbiting a central nucleus, which is analogous to a miniature earth and sun. There are too many holes in the experiment as it's presented in the video for it to stand up as evidence that the Copenhagen Interpretation is at work and observation is creating reality. If you substitute "measurement" for "observation", then it's easy to see why it's extremely important in science to understand how a measurement can affect the experiment.
This is not to dismiss the strangeness of the quantum world. There is also a longer 12 min. version on youtube of the 9 min. video you linked to here. In that version quantum entanglement is discussed, which Einstein referred to as "spooky action at a distance". This has been discussed on this very forum a while ago.
How does this relate to audio? After all we're in an Audio Asylum. The late Richard Heyser was an audio pioneer, and he was also interested in the quantum realm. He saw parallels between our difficulty correlating our audio measurements with what we hear, and some of the measurement paradoxes in the quantum world. Heyser's unpublished papers are now available on the Columbia College of Chicago website. They are being presided over by Doug Jones who did a very interesting presentation on Heyser at the Chicago AES meeting this May. Richard Feynman (who was a teacher of Heyser's) used to say "There are two things you have to remember with science: 1. That you have to be careful you are not fooling yourself; and 2. That you are the easiest person to fool."
Paul
I have nothing intelligent enough to add to this except that oddly I just joined The Asylum and independently was watching this video and reading about the topic, and just wondering how I got started on that and what an odd coincidence it is to be reading this here
Sort of like that "monkey" effect they spoke of back in the 80s
I personally was thinking that the quantum world may finally be elementary enough to bring into focus the stark difference between our thought processes and the actual objective functioning of reality. That just like philosophy fell into epistimology and linguistics then this too could be more a descriptor of how our thought processes are maybe hopelessly based in metaphor and versions of causality that simply do not apply to fundamental reality
And, no, I cannot clarify this further...LOL
JaroTheWise
Post a Followup:
FAQ |
Post a Message! |
Forgot Password? |
|
||||||||||||||
|
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors: