Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you measure the exact position of an electron, the wave function collapses to a point. Note, though, that in reality you can never measure the exact position of an electron (or anything else); the best you can do is to measure that the electron is inside some finite-sized (possibly very small) region. The "exact position" measurement is an idealization that can be useful for pedagogy but can't be realized in any…
spin? things go one direction or the other in a magnetic field
A wave function does not collapse upon detection?
21–30 of 69 posts
Re: A wave function does not collapse upon detection?
#22Every time I ask this, some do-gooder will not read a word I wrote and send me a video of the basic slit experiment and think they've somehow educated me. Every time. It's amazing.
What I'm looking for is a photo or video of a real experiment showing just two groupings. There a million photos/videos of the wave pattern. I'm looking for an example with exactly two clumps of photons because the light is observed as it passes each slit. In real life, not a computer simulation.
Watch this video if you're unclear what I'm asking: https://youtu.be/Q1YqgPAtzho
Re: A wave function does not collapse upon detection?
#23"Shut up and calculate"
If "understanding the nature of reality" is your goal then engaging with various interpretations of QM is unavoidable.
(which is not to say it will be fruitful. This stuff might be genuinely beyond the reach of science. We might be hitting the brick wall of the unknowable. But that's not an excuse to stop trying. Some current formulations of the question are probably meaningless or based on false premises but philosophy, theoretical physics and experimental physics creep forward hand in hand)
Re: A wave function does not collapse upon detection?
#24You take a shoe lace. You tie a loose knot in it. Prevent the extremities of the lace to move, by placing your feet on them (or rocks, or whatever). Put your finger inside the knot and slide the knot along the rope.
You have just played with a "particle". The knot is the particle.
Pinch the rope with your left hand somewhere along the rope. Pinch the rope with your right hand somewhere along the rope. Slide your fingers along the rope to bring them together. This will progressively tighten the rope between the fingers. Alternatively you can just tighten the rope by pulling on it.
If there is knot in the region you just tighten, congratulation you have just measured your first particle. If not, try again by placing your finger at different spot, and try again you may get lucky. Quantum physics is a matter of probabilities.
Now that you have caught your particle, you have to loosen the knot, so you can explain the uncertainty principle.
Once you have played with one knot. Try adding a second knot, move them. Can you get one to go through the other ? Is the number of knots on the rope always conserved ?
Now that you have played with knots, here is a fun twist. You need to have a flat lace or a belt though. Lay the flat lace flat. Do a half twist on an extremity of the lace. And like you did with the knot before, slide the half twist along the lace between your fingers, tightening and loosening it as you like. Congratulation you have discovered another type of particle. Try adding another half-twist. How do the twist interact along the rope ? Did you succeed in making them disappear. And can you create a pair of particle out of nothing by twisting the lace in the middle ?
If it feels too easy for your 5-year old, you can now show him the belt trick to continuously rotate a cube attached by its faces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Belt_Trick.ogv and he will have a better grasp on what an electron is than 99% of high-school students.
This analogy can be extended for more complicated kind of knots, twists, elements of lie algebras... And you can also extend it from the 1d case of the rope to 2d case of a fabric (twist along one dimension, twist along the other dimension...), 3d case.
If you want to learn more about physics, don't throw the lace away, you can play with it in a ton of different ways (vibrating modes of energy...), even before needing to introduce springs; but that's a story for another day.
Re: A wave function does not collapse upon detection?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The catch is that appearance of classical objects is still unsolved problem in QM. What? Decoherence explains classical objects.
While quantum decoherence explains appearance of classical objects in simple models, predicting the results of real experiments still not possible. And given this has not changed much as far as I know for the last 20 years, I started to suspect that decoherence alone may not be enough.
Re: A wave function does not collapse upon detection?
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
The notion of the wave function collapse is very specific to Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics that tries to reconcile classical and quantum world. But everything is quantum so there is no classical measurement device, just its wave function interacting according to fully deterministic equations with the wave function of the electron. The catch is that appearance of classical objects is still unsolved pr…
> The catch is that appearance of classical objects is still unsolved problem in QM. What? Decoherence explains classical objects.
1, which is very practical, is that it doesn't explain why the wave function always decoheres in the same way. In experiments, you can always chose the basis of measurement, and get some definite results in that particular basis, while the properties in another basis remain indefinite. But, in classical reality, all objects have definite properties in the same basis (say, positions in the same Cartesian coordinate system). This is known as the preferred basis problem, and decoherence can't explain it.
2, which is somewhat more philosophical, decoherence doesn't explain the quantitative relationship between the wave function and the probability of observing a particular outcome. Indeed, in MWI it's very hard to even define probability in a coherent way, since all outcomes actually happen and there is an uncountable (in the mathematical sense) number of outcomes.
Re: A wave function does not collapse upon detection?
#27Re: A wave function does not collapse upon detection?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The catch is that appearance of classical objects is still unsolved problem in QM. What? Decoherence explains classical objects.
No, it doesn't. Decoherence explains why self-interference of a single wave-function doesn't happen after interaction with the environment. But it doesn't explain two important things. 1, which is very practical, is that it doesn't explain why the wave function always decoheres in the same way. In experiments, you can always chose the basis of measurement, and get some definite results in that particular basis, while…
Can you give some examples of such bases? Position is one, for sure. In "Quantum Mechanics 101" we are told that momentum is another, but I'm sceptical that there is a real experiment that can measure momentum without also measuring position.
Re: A wave function does not collapse upon detection?
#29The confusion with the Copenhagen interpretation comes from two main sources in my opinion: 1. What can count as a measurement? 2. Quantum ‘thing’ interacting with a classical world One of my favorite talks on this subject is by Sean Carroll and offers the ‘many worlds ‘ interpretation as an alternative, mainly for its simplicity. Recommend watching the whole thing but if you want just the “debunking”: 25:11 https://…
Interpretation is a crutch, gives nothing extra, and only obfuscates things; it should be discarded. Let's just accept that (1) we don't know the objective reality, and (2) there is something that ensures consistency of information across fairly large distances -- entanglement experiments have been done up to 1000+ km's -- maybe even across the entire universe, though the latter has never been tested.
Do you have a link to more info on that? I've never heard of such an experiment and I'd be interested how you send entangled particles 1000+ kms without disturbing them in a way that invalidates the experiment.
Re: A wave function does not collapse upon detection?
#30Does anyone have a link to a real world example of the double slit experiment where the photons are observed at the slits , causing the wave function of the light to collapse so the light acts as a particle beyond the slit, ending up in two piles on the detector screen, rather than the wave pattern. Every time I ask this, some do-gooder will not read a word I wrote and send me a video of the basic slit experiment and…