• Cethin@lemmy.zip
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    8 hours ago

    I have to comment this every time people post it, because they don’t actually understand it. They only understand the mystical view of quantum mechanics, which isn’t real.

    Observation, in the case of this experiment, has nothing to do with humans looking at it. It has to do with the particle/wave interacting with something, which causes the waveform to collapse into a single particle. The reason this happens is because any interaction requires the information to be known, so it can’t be wave-like anymore. It has nothing to do with consciousness or anything like that. It only has to do with an interaction that requires information to be discrete.

    • Ziglin (it/they)@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      People keep explaining like it’s a huge surprise.

      I think I am technically a physicist so this could be a case of xkcd 2501 but it seems obvious enough.

      Surely nobody actually believes that is how it works. I think I understood it that way and was mind blown for like 5min before being sceptical and asking for clarification and still being mind blown by how it was actually meant. I was a child when that happened.

      All the adults I’ve spoken to about it learned about it school and understood straight away. That is of course completely biased though.

      • davetortoise@reddthat.com
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        1 hour ago

        It’s probably (hopefully) not a majority, but a disturbing number of people really do believe it works like that. I’ve once had someone, whose intelligence I used to respect, calmly explain to me that telekinesis is possible because “QM proves that the mind can influence matter”.

    • FiskFisk33@startrek.website
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      5 hours ago

      Yeah its about quantum systems interacting, not sentient beings watching.

      still pretty mystical though in my book!