this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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Science Memes

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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

The problem with how you are describing it is that it's not that the physical mechanics of measurement are necessarily causing collapse as if you end up erasing the persistent information about the measurement it reverses the collapse, such as if you add a polarizer to the other slit as well or add a polarizer downstream that untags the initial measurement.

So in your example, if you simultaneously shoot a bunch of BBs at empty space next to the pile of glass cards where they could have been, or discard the BBs which reflected measuring the cards in the first place, suddenly the pile of glass cards reassemble themselves.

Attempts to try and dismiss the 'weirdness' of the measurement problem or QM behavior IMO ultimately do the reader more of a disservice than a service.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I'm massively simplifying, and a lot of the interesting stuff gets lost with that. Unfortunately, when you try and maintain that, the analogy gets so convoluted that it's useless.

The actual answer for understanding quantum mechanics is to chunk the maths, again, and again... and again. It also involves working almost entirely in the wave dominant domains. Trying to simplify that down to a quick comment is basically impossible.