Nah, man, it’s literally how it works (for all we know). The wave function doesn’t collapse until the data is read. You can’t prove otherwise, so people are free to believe it.
This was a joke. This is a joke community. I was being facetious when I said “literally”.
However, there’s truth in what I said. How do you know that the entire experimental setup is not in a superposition right up until you observe the result. I mean, you obviously have to look at the result of the experiment before you know what happened in the experiment, and until you do, the entire experiment could be in a superposition of [interference pattern] and [no interference pattern].
However, this is not really what the meme is saying, so I guess my joke was dumb, and I deserve the downvotes.
Haha, no I haven’t. I don’t believe in magic. I watch mainstream YouTube science channels, and not any “mystical” ones. PBS Spacetime, Dr Ben Miles, Quanta Magazine, Sabine Hossenfelder, etc.
So, I ask you: please design an experiment that proves the outcome is determined precisely when the detector detects the particle going through the slit, and not when a person observes the screen or a recording the detector made. You can’t. You can’t prove that the detector detected something until you look at the result, and until you do, for all you know, it’s in a superposition. That’s all I’m saying. You know, shorting your scat. Everyone knows the shorting your scat experiement.
So uhh…sorry for this comment being as long as it is. I was initially basically just going to leave the first paragraph and then link to two or three videos demonstrating the claims. But then I wanted it to be of value even if you don’t spend the time watching the videos. And so I had to rewatch the videos myself to summarise salient points. And that led me to finding and rewatching yet more videos. And then I had to summarise those. And the comment just blew out.
The first paragraph should serve as a TL;DR if the rest is too much or not worth the time. And jump to the last paragraph for other recs.
Sabine Hossenfelder
Hey, just be very careful about her. She knew her stuff with astrophysics, but has since become very jaded even within what was once her own field, and she has a nasty habit of speaking with great authority about matters outside her expertise, and getting it wildly wrong. And often doubling down rather than adapting when corrected. And also of spreading a message that emboldens and encourages science deniers, despite not being a science denier herself.
Here’s a video about it from a former ABC journalist who I think is being overly generous to Hossenfelder at times (in particular regarding Hossenfelder’s take on trans people), but which nonetheless does a good job of laying out the problematic way she presents certain views.
And here are a few more videos that take a more directly critical approach. Professor Dave Explains’ first video. This is probably the strongest, because it makes every effort to present things from Hossenfelder’s point of view and assume she means well. One key thing this video does is point out that the fact that she comments on fields outside her expertise is not a problem. The problem comes when she refuses to properly update her beliefs (and retract claims) when she gets corrected, and she often does not sufficiently caveat her views with her lack of expertise in this subject.
eigenchris explains why she’s wrong about trans teens. In short, Hossenfelder plays the bothsidesism game to appear as reasonable, but to do so ignores significant amounts of evidence in favour of trans affirming care, and ignores significant problems with the limited evidence in favour of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (i.e., the idea that people think they’re trans even though they aren’t purely because it’s “socially popular”) in order to present it as a reasonable view.
Rebecca Watson (Skepchick) also does a much shorter video about this trans misinformation. She also points out that Hossenfelder hides her citations behind the Patreon paywall, making it impossible for most viewers to do basic fact checking. Watson also follows up about how Hossenfelder is wrong about capitalism. The video links over to this much longer video by Unlearning Economics (a creator I have watched before and enjoyed, but I have not seen this particular video recently enough to recall it), but spends most of its runtime explaining the many ways Hossenfelder was wrong about penicillin, by falsely claiming it only took off thanks to capitalism, despite the Australian Government being one of the biggest drivers of its uptake by producing enough to use for the Australian Army during WWII (with enough leftover for civilian use), and despite numerous capitalists from the UK and US actively choosing not to invest in producing penicillin until promises of significant tax breaks for aiding in their own war effort.
Now, I’ve got my own separate problems with Watson that have led me to stop watching her. (Namely: that she seems more interested in dunking on people than actually spreading good information. The Adam Conover video was an awful hit piece, and the pinned comment was nothing but anti-union propaganda. And she refused any update, not even pinning someone else’s comment pointing out the update, after Conover put out a complete retraction of the thing Watson was dunking on him for. Not to mention the significant amount of time in that video spent dealing with style issues rather than the actual substance. Just gross.) But in these two videos she does a really good job of laying out the facts and deferring to experts who can demonstrate why Hossenfelder is problematic.
Dave has a third video. It’s much longer and might be worth watching if you’re still on the fence. It shows some of the more recent claims from Hossenfelder of her getting more and more extreme in her anti-scientific institutions takes, and then does interviews with current scientists about what they do and how it conflicts with Hossenfelder’s warped explanations.
For former academic astrophysicists who occasionally make videos about the problems with academic science or with the popular response to science, I would highly recommend Angela Collier and Dr. Fatima. Though neither are exactly the same niche that Hossenfelder purports to be in, since they don’t typically do science news reporting.
Damn, that’s quite the write-up! I actually haven’t watched any of her videos in over a year, but I used to watch them a lot, so I figured I’d give her credit for part of my education. Her takes did seem a little odd at times, but it was refreshing to watch a science curmudgeon sometimes. I simply got sick of her schtick after a while, and did read a little controversy about her. I had no idea about the trans stuff.
I mentioned my sources of science news specifically because you accused me of being misled by… somebody. So fuck off with your mockery of me for trying to disuade you of that notion.
This started as a joke, and you’re just being an ass.
Does the result of the experiment change if there’s a sensor active that records data to a hard drive that no one ever looks at and it just gets deleted? Does the result change again if someone decides that if they get a wave pattern, they will interrupt the deletion process and look at the data?
Does the result of the experiment change if there’s a sensor active that records data to a hard drive that no one ever looks at and it just gets deleted
Yes. It collapses the wave function. There is no need for something ‘conscious’ to count as an ‘observer’.
Your second question is moot, because the first part counted as an observation.
The wave pattern is on the photo plate, the data that never gets looked at is from a sensor on one or both slits that measures whether the projectile passed through that slit.
Well, if you look at the plate, then you’ve collapsed the wave function, and the data on the hard drive is then determine, and can’t contradict the result on the plate.
One of the claims of the more psuedoscience “quantum mechanics” is that the future can affect the past. So the intent to check the data if there is a wave pattern would cause there to not be a wave pattern on its own, otherwise there would be a contradiction.
But, as the other commenter mentioned, it’s a moot point because it’s the sensor is the “observer”, and it’s not “being observed” that affects the outcome, but “interacting with the wave/particle to generate the data that may or may not be observed by a conscious”.
The profoundness of this, if it were the case, would be to imply that there’s something special, different about consciousness vs all the other non-conscious interactions out there, that this existence is for us rather than us just being here in this existence. But quantum mechanics doesn’t actually say anything about consciousness, at least not at this point, and probably not any time soon because it isn’t even really looking at that problem.
it’s a moot point because it’s the sensor is the “observer”, and it’s not “being observed” that affects the outcome.
Thing is, that’s an assumption. You dont know that for sure. Just like you can’t prove the speed of light isn’t different in different directions. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be free to believe that, but you must admit it’s an assumption.
I’m not a really mystical person, but I don’t discount the possibility. That would be arrogant. Simply being conscious is rather bizarre. How does the universe even support that? What is it? Is there a consciousness field? Why does a blob of fat, protein, and sodium ions give rise to consciousness? Surely, life could have evolved and thrived without experiencing life. I can easily imagine mindless, robotic life just doing it’s thing.
Since no one can currently explain any of that, and no one can know for sure a wavefunction has collapsed until you’ve lookef at the results, I also don’t discount that consciousness might play a role. I remain agnostic about it.
imply that there’s something special, different about consciousness.
If you don’t think there’s something special and unusual about consciousness, I don’t know what to say. 😄 I don’t believe in a soul, but at least I admit that consciousness is special, and that the universe is weird because of that.
Oh yeah, don’t get me wrong, consciousness is probably the least explainable thing whose existence I’m aware of. But the gap in our knowledge doesn’t automatically mean it’s something that exists outside of the rest of the laws of physics. To scientifically show something is true, you need to disprove the other possible explanations (which is impossible because there’s always other possible explanations).
The double slit experiment does not prove consciousness is a special case in how the laws of physics works. There’s actually two results in it: how the slits interact with the particle/wave and how the particle/wave interacts with the photo-sensitive plate. We always observe the plate but only sometimes try to observe which slit(s) it travels through. The variations I mentioned above were ways to separate the conscious observer running the experiment from the non-conscious “ovserver” which is the sensor.
If it’s happening because of the consciousness being involved, then the sensor measuring but never recording shouldn’t affect the outcome and you should get a wave pattern. Similar for it it is possible to view the results but the observer decides not to, no matter the outcome. But then once they discard that conviction, then either it pops over to the particle result (if conscious observation means it has to act like a particle) or stays as a wave pattern but now you’ve been able to do what has never been done and measure which slits it traveled through and when to make that pattern. These variations are so obvious that they had to have been done, and since I’m not aware of conscious observation being proven to affect the outcome (as opposed to all observations require interaction, which can affect the outcome, no consciousness required), I assume they just got the particle result as long as the sensor was doing anything at all.
That one possibility is powerful, that deciding to do something can change how something behaves. It could be used for FTL communication and arbitrary prediction of the future, which makes me inclined to believe that it doesn’t work that way.
All that said, I do agree that it could be the case that consciousness is as important to the laws of physics as all the other things but confounds every attempt to measure it. I’d love to believe that, even, and a part of me does. But without anything definitive, the other part of me will hold on to the thought that it’s just wishful thinking.
That’s also part of the reason I pushed back. I’d love for someone to “well, actually” and prove something about consciousness or even just show me a new argument, so I’ll bring up the parts that make me skeptical or explain the way I see it. I want to believe.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. No real arguments from me. It was a mistake on my part to equate what I had in my mind with the meme above. It is really is two different things.
I just spontaneously remembered the FTL drive from the novel “Variable Star” by Spider Robinson and Robert Heinlein. The operator of the drive must hold multiple mutually contradictory thoughts in their mind at once, for hours at a time, in shifts with the other operators. Usually two at a time for redundancy. A failure to have at least one operator holding the required mental state would stall the drive and restarting it was very difficult.
It was never really explained how it works, but it’s taken totally seriously. It’s not like flying in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” where you fall and forget to hit the ground. I thought it was a clever idea. To make consciousness an explicit part of FTL travel by basically holding your mind in a superposition of thought.
Well, no. Not if you put a detector in one of the slits. It collapses the wave function, and the interference pattern disappears. The meme is a joke that your eyeballs are the detector, which is not true.
I was making a bit of a joke myself to get people to think about when the collapse actually happens. It could occur as late as when you look at the screen, and you can’t prove otherwise. You know… like, “is the moon still there when you’re not looking at it?” Except for real.
Not exactly. At least I don’t think. Einstein didn’t believe in quantum mechanics at all, or that it was inherently random until measured. Bohr said it was, but I don’t think he necessarily equated conscious observation with measurement. Einstein believed there must be hidden variables, but if there are, they’re non-local.
So, really the problem was about Einstein saying that if Bohr is right then there is information moving faster than the speed of light. Einstein wasn’t saying that he didn’t believe it, but rather if true, then it violated the speed of light in a vacuum. Bohr seemed to actually not understand what Einstein was trying to say, so he interpreted it as Einstein trying to tell him he was wrong.
Nah, man, it’s literally how it works (for all we know). The wave function doesn’t collapse until the data is read. You can’t prove otherwise, so people are free to believe it.This was a joke. This is a joke community. I was being facetious when I said “literally”.
However, there’s truth in what I said. How do you know that the entire experimental setup is not in a superposition right up until you observe the result. I mean, you obviously have to look at the result of the experiment before you know what happened in the experiment, and until you do, the entire experiment could be in a superposition of [interference pattern] and [no interference pattern].
However, this is not really what the meme is saying, so I guess my joke was dumb, and I deserve the downvotes.
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Haha, no I haven’t. I don’t believe in magic. I watch mainstream YouTube science channels, and not any “mystical” ones. PBS Spacetime, Dr Ben Miles, Quanta Magazine,
Sabine Hossenfelder, etc.So, I ask you: please design an experiment that proves the outcome is determined precisely when the detector detects the particle going through the slit, and not when a person observes the screen or a recording the detector made. You can’t. You can’t prove that the detector detected something until you look at the result, and until you do, for all you know, it’s in a superposition. That’s all I’m saying. You know, shorting your scat. Everyone knows the shorting your scat experiement.
So uhh…sorry for this comment being as long as it is. I was initially basically just going to leave the first paragraph and then link to two or three videos demonstrating the claims. But then I wanted it to be of value even if you don’t spend the time watching the videos. And so I had to rewatch the videos myself to summarise salient points. And that led me to finding and rewatching yet more videos. And then I had to summarise those. And the comment just blew out.
The first paragraph should serve as a TL;DR if the rest is too much or not worth the time. And jump to the last paragraph for other recs.
Hey, just be very careful about her. She knew her stuff with astrophysics, but has since become very jaded even within what was once her own field, and she has a nasty habit of speaking with great authority about matters outside her expertise, and getting it wildly wrong. And often doubling down rather than adapting when corrected. And also of spreading a message that emboldens and encourages science deniers, despite not being a science denier herself.
Here’s a video about it from a former ABC journalist who I think is being overly generous to Hossenfelder at times (in particular regarding Hossenfelder’s take on trans people), but which nonetheless does a good job of laying out the problematic way she presents certain views.
And here are a few more videos that take a more directly critical approach. Professor Dave Explains’ first video. This is probably the strongest, because it makes every effort to present things from Hossenfelder’s point of view and assume she means well. One key thing this video does is point out that the fact that she comments on fields outside her expertise is not a problem. The problem comes when she refuses to properly update her beliefs (and retract claims) when she gets corrected, and she often does not sufficiently caveat her views with her lack of expertise in this subject.
Professor Dave Explains’ second video, a followup a week after the first addressing some responses to the first one.
eigenchris explains why she’s wrong about trans teens. In short, Hossenfelder plays the bothsidesism game to appear as reasonable, but to do so ignores significant amounts of evidence in favour of trans affirming care, and ignores significant problems with the limited evidence in favour of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (i.e., the idea that people think they’re trans even though they aren’t purely because it’s “socially popular”) in order to present it as a reasonable view.
Rebecca Watson (Skepchick) also does a much shorter video about this trans misinformation. She also points out that Hossenfelder hides her citations behind the Patreon paywall, making it impossible for most viewers to do basic fact checking. Watson also follows up about how Hossenfelder is wrong about capitalism. The video links over to this much longer video by Unlearning Economics (a creator I have watched before and enjoyed, but I have not seen this particular video recently enough to recall it), but spends most of its runtime explaining the many ways Hossenfelder was wrong about penicillin, by falsely claiming it only took off thanks to capitalism, despite the Australian Government being one of the biggest drivers of its uptake by producing enough to use for the Australian Army during WWII (with enough leftover for civilian use), and despite numerous capitalists from the UK and US actively choosing not to invest in producing penicillin until promises of significant tax breaks for aiding in their own war effort.
Now, I’ve got my own separate problems with Watson that have led me to stop watching her. (Namely: that she seems more interested in dunking on people than actually spreading good information. The Adam Conover video was an awful hit piece, and the pinned comment was nothing but anti-union propaganda. And she refused any update, not even pinning someone else’s comment pointing out the update, after Conover put out a complete retraction of the thing Watson was dunking on him for. Not to mention the significant amount of time in that video spent dealing with style issues rather than the actual substance. Just gross.) But in these two videos she does a really good job of laying out the facts and deferring to experts who can demonstrate why Hossenfelder is problematic.
Dave has a third video. It’s much longer and might be worth watching if you’re still on the fence. It shows some of the more recent claims from Hossenfelder of her getting more and more extreme in her anti-scientific institutions takes, and then does interviews with current scientists about what they do and how it conflicts with Hossenfelder’s warped explanations.
For former academic astrophysicists who occasionally make videos about the problems with academic science or with the popular response to science, I would highly recommend Angela Collier and Dr. Fatima. Though neither are exactly the same niche that Hossenfelder purports to be in, since they don’t typically do science news reporting.
Damn, that’s quite the write-up! I actually haven’t watched any of her videos in over a year, but I used to watch them a lot, so I figured I’d give her credit for part of my education. Her takes did seem a little odd at times, but it was refreshing to watch a science curmudgeon sometimes. I simply got sick of her schtick after a while, and did read a little controversy about her. I had no idea about the trans stuff.
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A reply to your edit: You need to work on your grammar, spelling, and punctuation. I can’t understand a thing you’re saying.
I’m KFC Double Downing on the double slits being doubly doubtful until you’ve observed the result.
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I mentioned my sources of science news specifically because you accused me of being misled by… somebody. So fuck off with your mockery of me for trying to disuade you of that notion.
This started as a joke, and you’re just being an ass.
You have a stick up your butt. I observed it.
Your joke was funny you just forgot the /s
We need to stop putting /s after jokes. It just helps bots. Humans are able to spot satire and facetious comments.
You underestimate my social ineptitude. I generally give people the benefit of the doubt though.
Autistic people who have trouble telling jokes exist.
Does the result of the experiment change if there’s a sensor active that records data to a hard drive that no one ever looks at and it just gets deleted? Does the result change again if someone decides that if they get a wave pattern, they will interrupt the deletion process and look at the data?
Yes. It collapses the wave function. There is no need for something ‘conscious’ to count as an ‘observer’.
Your second question is moot, because the first part counted as an observation.
I don’t understand. How can they “get” a wave pattern if they didn’t look at the data?
The wave pattern is on the photo plate, the data that never gets looked at is from a sensor on one or both slits that measures whether the projectile passed through that slit.
Well, if you look at the plate, then you’ve collapsed the wave function, and the data on the hard drive is then determine, and can’t contradict the result on the plate.
One of the claims of the more psuedoscience “quantum mechanics” is that the future can affect the past. So the intent to check the data if there is a wave pattern would cause there to not be a wave pattern on its own, otherwise there would be a contradiction.
But, as the other commenter mentioned, it’s a moot point because it’s the sensor is the “observer”, and it’s not “being observed” that affects the outcome, but “interacting with the wave/particle to generate the data that may or may not be observed by a conscious”.
The profoundness of this, if it were the case, would be to imply that there’s something special, different about consciousness vs all the other non-conscious interactions out there, that this existence is for us rather than us just being here in this existence. But quantum mechanics doesn’t actually say anything about consciousness, at least not at this point, and probably not any time soon because it isn’t even really looking at that problem.
Thing is, that’s an assumption. You dont know that for sure. Just like you can’t prove the speed of light isn’t different in different directions. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be free to believe that, but you must admit it’s an assumption.
I’m not a really mystical person, but I don’t discount the possibility. That would be arrogant. Simply being conscious is rather bizarre. How does the universe even support that? What is it? Is there a consciousness field? Why does a blob of fat, protein, and sodium ions give rise to consciousness? Surely, life could have evolved and thrived without experiencing life. I can easily imagine mindless, robotic life just doing it’s thing.
Since no one can currently explain any of that, and no one can know for sure a wavefunction has collapsed until you’ve lookef at the results, I also don’t discount that consciousness might play a role. I remain agnostic about it.
If you don’t think there’s something special and unusual about consciousness, I don’t know what to say. 😄 I don’t believe in a soul, but at least I admit that consciousness is special, and that the universe is weird because of that.
Oh yeah, don’t get me wrong, consciousness is probably the least explainable thing whose existence I’m aware of. But the gap in our knowledge doesn’t automatically mean it’s something that exists outside of the rest of the laws of physics. To scientifically show something is true, you need to disprove the other possible explanations (which is impossible because there’s always other possible explanations).
The double slit experiment does not prove consciousness is a special case in how the laws of physics works. There’s actually two results in it: how the slits interact with the particle/wave and how the particle/wave interacts with the photo-sensitive plate. We always observe the plate but only sometimes try to observe which slit(s) it travels through. The variations I mentioned above were ways to separate the conscious observer running the experiment from the non-conscious “ovserver” which is the sensor.
If it’s happening because of the consciousness being involved, then the sensor measuring but never recording shouldn’t affect the outcome and you should get a wave pattern. Similar for it it is possible to view the results but the observer decides not to, no matter the outcome. But then once they discard that conviction, then either it pops over to the particle result (if conscious observation means it has to act like a particle) or stays as a wave pattern but now you’ve been able to do what has never been done and measure which slits it traveled through and when to make that pattern. These variations are so obvious that they had to have been done, and since I’m not aware of conscious observation being proven to affect the outcome (as opposed to all observations require interaction, which can affect the outcome, no consciousness required), I assume they just got the particle result as long as the sensor was doing anything at all.
That one possibility is powerful, that deciding to do something can change how something behaves. It could be used for FTL communication and arbitrary prediction of the future, which makes me inclined to believe that it doesn’t work that way.
All that said, I do agree that it could be the case that consciousness is as important to the laws of physics as all the other things but confounds every attempt to measure it. I’d love to believe that, even, and a part of me does. But without anything definitive, the other part of me will hold on to the thought that it’s just wishful thinking.
That’s also part of the reason I pushed back. I’d love for someone to “well, actually” and prove something about consciousness or even just show me a new argument, so I’ll bring up the parts that make me skeptical or explain the way I see it. I want to believe.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. No real arguments from me. It was a mistake on my part to equate what I had in my mind with the meme above. It is really is two different things.
I just spontaneously remembered the FTL drive from the novel “Variable Star” by Spider Robinson and Robert Heinlein. The operator of the drive must hold multiple mutually contradictory thoughts in their mind at once, for hours at a time, in shifts with the other operators. Usually two at a time for redundancy. A failure to have at least one operator holding the required mental state would stall the drive and restarting it was very difficult.
It was never really explained how it works, but it’s taken totally seriously. It’s not like flying in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” where you fall and forget to hit the ground. I thought it was a clever idea. To make consciousness an explicit part of FTL travel by basically holding your mind in a superposition of thought.
But the way it works is only the top one if im not mistaken
Well, no. Not if you put a detector in one of the slits. It collapses the wave function, and the interference pattern disappears. The meme is a joke that your eyeballs are the detector, which is not true.
I was making a bit of a joke myself to get people to think about when the collapse actually happens. It could occur as late as when you look at the screen, and you can’t prove otherwise. You know… like, “is the moon still there when you’re not looking at it?” Except for real.
Well that’s basically the bohr-einstsein problem isnt it?
Not exactly. At least I don’t think. Einstein didn’t believe in quantum mechanics at all, or that it was inherently random until measured. Bohr said it was, but I don’t think he necessarily equated conscious observation with measurement. Einstein believed there must be hidden variables, but if there are, they’re non-local.
So, really the problem was about Einstein saying that if Bohr is right then there is information moving faster than the speed of light. Einstein wasn’t saying that he didn’t believe it, but rather if true, then it violated the speed of light in a vacuum. Bohr seemed to actually not understand what Einstein was trying to say, so he interpreted it as Einstein trying to tell him he was wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIk_0AW5hFU
I think you’re right that Einstein’s instincts wanted QM to be wrong, but he couldn’t argue with the math and experimental results.