They didn't teach us the double slit experiment in high school. It's too mind-blowing.
When you shoot ping pong balls through a slit, they bounce off the back wall in a shape that resembles a slit (of course)
Two slits, two shapes
- When you do this experiment with ELECTRONS, they instead land spread out in what scientists call an "interference pattern", suggesting that electrons (pieces of MATTER) behave like waves rather than particles .. which didn't really make sense
Mathematically, the electron goes through both slits AND it goes through neither (it exists as a probability of going through one of the two, and then interferes with itself to create this pattern) .. so physicists decided to put a measuring device against the slits to see which one it really goes through
And when they do this, IT NOW BEHAVES LIKE A PARTICLE, like the ping pong balls landing in two shapes
Matter behaves differently based on whether it's observed. Wat??
How is that realistic? Like, how does it even know it's observed? lol. But that's what the experiment shows.
The implications of this are staggering to me: Are there actually people in China right now? Are my neighbors concretely doing something inside their house? Or it's all just a probability and only binds to something certain when I observe it?
Would I even have written this post if you hadn't clicked to read it??? :p
I feel like either everybody you know is just a range of probabilities while you're not with them OR we as a whole must constantly be under some kind of measurement by some sort of 3rd party.
Right? Would it have to be one or the other? I'm curious how other people parse the double-slit experiment with, like, what it means for your assumptions about the world around you.