I hate it when people misinterpret the double slit experiment.
Look, Quantum Physics is totally unintuitive and doesn't behave like the macro world, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have rules or that it's a magic spell. It means that it has its own set of rules separate from the macro world.
If you measure things in the macro world you change the measurement by measuring it too. For example, in order to measure a temperature, you have an RTD you run current through that adds heat or a bimetallic element that takes it away. Even something non-touch like infrared requires the object's measurement to change because giving off the infrared light takes energy. This isn't because an all-knowing universe server operator steps in to fiddle with energy levels, it's because the nature of the stuff at the macro level is such that you need to add or remove energy from a system to measure that system. Sometimes like using light to detect distance of a quite large object it's a trivial amount of energy, but start bouncing photons off of something still in the relatively macro realm that is nonetheless not at the quantum level, and you'll make a real mess.
When you get down to the unintuitive quantum level, the same applies. It isn't because some mystical being is looking down going "oh, looks like a human is watching, better stop surfing twitter", it's because the nature of the stuff at that size is such that you can know how fast something is or where it is but not both, and that's that. As well, sometimes light acts like a particle and sometimes it acts like a wave, and again that's not because the server operator steps in and changes things, it follows rules we can learn even if they are unintuitive.
Some of the earliest work on quantum physics ended up applying to cat's whisker crystal radios. They had to learn a whole new discipline to understand why the crystals behaved in a certain way, and that ended up leading to semiconductors and later microchips. Quantum physics applies in every bit of a modern CPU or GPU, even if nobody's looking at the screen.
When people start saying "Quantum Physics says" and then the craziest shit in the macro world you ever heard in your life, it's the same as the rich guy in the 50s who drank radium infused water because "energy is good, radiation is energy, so load up my water with radiation, doc!" -- it's quackery of a real thing that's used every day for real things.
Look, Quantum Physics is totally unintuitive and doesn't behave like the macro world, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have rules or that it's a magic spell. It means that it has its own set of rules separate from the macro world.
If you measure things in the macro world you change the measurement by measuring it too. For example, in order to measure a temperature, you have an RTD you run current through that adds heat or a bimetallic element that takes it away. Even something non-touch like infrared requires the object's measurement to change because giving off the infrared light takes energy. This isn't because an all-knowing universe server operator steps in to fiddle with energy levels, it's because the nature of the stuff at the macro level is such that you need to add or remove energy from a system to measure that system. Sometimes like using light to detect distance of a quite large object it's a trivial amount of energy, but start bouncing photons off of something still in the relatively macro realm that is nonetheless not at the quantum level, and you'll make a real mess.
When you get down to the unintuitive quantum level, the same applies. It isn't because some mystical being is looking down going "oh, looks like a human is watching, better stop surfing twitter", it's because the nature of the stuff at that size is such that you can know how fast something is or where it is but not both, and that's that. As well, sometimes light acts like a particle and sometimes it acts like a wave, and again that's not because the server operator steps in and changes things, it follows rules we can learn even if they are unintuitive.
Some of the earliest work on quantum physics ended up applying to cat's whisker crystal radios. They had to learn a whole new discipline to understand why the crystals behaved in a certain way, and that ended up leading to semiconductors and later microchips. Quantum physics applies in every bit of a modern CPU or GPU, even if nobody's looking at the screen.
When people start saying "Quantum Physics says" and then the craziest shit in the macro world you ever heard in your life, it's the same as the rich guy in the 50s who drank radium infused water because "energy is good, radiation is energy, so load up my water with radiation, doc!" -- it's quackery of a real thing that's used every day for real things.
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@sj_zero@social.fbxl.net tl;dr, like man we create reality - quantum physics
@sj_zero@social.fbxl.net
TL:DR reading this post won't change it but tasting a cookie will change it a bite.
Here's the deeper, more technical explanation of the double-slit experiment: