What are the implications of the results in the double slit experiment?

Question

It is TERRIFYING to me, that in the double slit experiment, electrons behave differently when we LOOK at them or when they are observed. They actually behave as waves even when 1 electron is fired at a time through the double slits. BUT, if you introduce a detector to see which slit the particle went through, it KNOWS it is being watched and decides to stop acting like a wave and it hits the screen and shows up as a particle. I think this is perhaps the most amazing thing ever discovered in science (at least one of them). What are the implications of this? Neils Bohr said "anyone who is not SHOCKED by quantum mechanics does not understand it." I am shocked, but what am I to think of this? What do you think?

Answer 1

Well, I think "terrifying" is a little strong. The main thing it shows is that analogies to normal size objects just don't cut it. If you firs a baseball through a slot it will go through one or the other. Thinking of electrons as "little balls" or "waves" captures some qualities of their behavior, but either analogy is far from perfect, and in fact what quantum physics says is that we don't have good analogies in large-scale objects.

You want to keep in mind the Heisenberg uncertainly principle: it is not just that, unless we look, we do not know which slit the electron went through. It does not go through a particular slot unless we look. An electron does not have a precise location until we look at it. If you think of it like a baseball, and think that we just don't know the location until we look, the behavior is bizarre. If you change your outlook to it has no position until we look at it, it is less strange.

Of course now it is the outlook that is bizarre - how can it have no position, doesn't everything have a position in space? The answer is no, it does not. Just as relativity forced people to change their views of time and distance, quantum physics is forcing people to come to grips with a new concept of space, that on small scales is very different than what we intuitively grasp from our experiences.

Answer 2

The implications of this experiment, leading to the quantum wave-particle duality, shocked even Einstein, who insisted that there was a reasonable explanation for what seemed to be "probability waves". He insisted that quantum physics merely reflected our ignorance of all the "necessary details" (hidden variables theory), but that nevertheless everything still behaved classically. He even proposed a though experiment to prove the absurdity of quantum physics (the EPR experiments), but unfortunately quantum physics won by experiment, and Einstein lost.

With the success of quantum field theories, it's unlikely that when an electron travels through a double slit, it does so in complete absense of anything else, as if the vacuum really IS nothing at all. More likely is that the quantum vacuum is teeming with virtual particle interactions, a roiling soup of quantum information and things going forwards and backwards in time at any speed, and that ONLY certain things that have a quadratic term in either time or energy (or when eigenvalues of the quantum Hermitian operator are real) are they "real" things to us, those that have persistence in time, so that we are able to say, "hey, here's an electron here, and it went over there!' But during its transit, it's meaningless to even speak of "where it went and what was it doing". All we know is that it left the emitter, and it arrived at the detector, and during its transit, its odds of popping up anywhere was shaped by shadowy probability waves that exist more in the ghostly virtual world than in our real one. The quantum world plays as the ultimate magician, frustrating all the seemingly rational explanations with baffling sleight of hand.

Answer 3

And that's not all! If you fire one photon at a time through the slits and they strike photographic paper, you will eventually see a diffraction pattern form which means the photons know where to go too! Creepy photons.

I think the universe is not as it seems. Most people don't stop to think about the strangeness of existance and the nature of the universe in general.

Answer 4

This is a very interesting situation and one that Hawking mentions in his famous book about time. Can anyone please give an absolutely solid citation of when this experiment was performed and by whom? Where is it written up? For someone to perform an experiment with a single electron, it must have been a seriously big deal, so there must be a good reference to it. Not the theory, the actual physics experiment. With a single electron, not a shower of electrons with the results obtained by deduction or inference. A single electron. Who did it, please?

Answer 5

The electron is going by skill of both slits. in the different case it ought to't make an interference trend. taking into consideration the electron as an merchandise like a ball is the blunders you're making. that is a smear, or achieveable function in area. So it extends over a really tremendous area of area and many of the electron passes by skill of each slit. you may flow added with the equivalent of a diffraction grating. in spite of in case you in hardship-free words hearth one electron a number of it is going by skill of each line in that grating.