: Something else is going on here.
: It's either a conspiracy of God and the universe, our
: technology is too limited, or there is something very
: strange underlying the universe.
There is something very strange underlying the universe.
You want to talk about a conspiracy of God? Here's an experiment that drives me freaking nuts. I've got sensible common-sense conceptual ideas to explain and unify most of the weirndess of advanced physics, but this still just defies all logic.
Sili, feel free to fill in the details here, I only know this story in abstract.
Some scientists were performing an experiment on wave-partical duality - that is, the phenomenon Sili has been speaking of where a "particle" actually functions as a wave until you force it to present itself as a single datum of position or velocity. In this experiment, they shot a particle through two microscopic slits in a lead plate, behind which was a piece of photographic film.
The idea was, if the particle really behaves as a wave, since the slits are so tiny the "particle" will actually go through both of them, it will be like an ocean wave crashing through two gaps in a sea-wall. You get a smaller wave coming out of each gap, and the radial patterns of the waves will come to interfere with eachother, creating a criss-cross pattern, where they intersect.
So they shot the particle through the slits in the plate and got a criss-cross pattern on the film. It worked - the particle was actually a wave. Then, they decided to set up sensors over each slit, to see if they would observe two particles, one going through each slit.
And they got a dot on the film. The particle went through only one slit, and made a single dot on the film, because it was being observed.
I'm unclear on why they did this next part - maybe Sili can fill in the details. They set up the sensors to record the data in a computer, and then delete it after a period of time, before anyone looked at it.
And they got a wave again.
They set up the sensors to record the data and keep it stored, so anyone could look at it in the future.
And they got a dot.
So if they look at the data, it's a dot. If they don't look at all, they get a wave. If they store the data permanantly so that it CAN be looked at, they get a dot. If they store it and set it to be deleted before it's looked at, they get a wave.
Basically, whether or not sometime in the future a HUMAN BEING knows which slit the particle passed through, determines whether or not in the past it actually went through one slit or was just a probability wave.
