Tête-à-Tête-Tête

I haven’t watched the vid yet, and I’m not physicist (I was majoring in it before I dropped out, but that doesn’t quite count)…

Can something really be changed simply by observing it?

The way it’s been explained to me, in order to observe something, you have to interact with it. With big objects it’s no big deal - you can bounce light off of it all day, and the light will return to you with information about the object without changing anything you care about (the subatomic particles inside the object will be affected by the light waves hitting them, but the effect is so small it doesn’t change anything you are interested in to a degree you will detect). For very small things, though, when you are looking for very precise positions & momenta, the effect from the light (or electron beam, or whatever) that you throw at it to find out about it effects the property you are measuring - it doesn’t take much to increase increase the position or momentum of an electron.

So, to me, that isn’t so weird. But there is a lot of weirdness out there. For instance, according to QM, if you have a particle/anti-particle pair flying off in different directions to great distances, observing one should (and apparently does) instantaneously effect the other. Even if they are millions of miles apart. Now, that is weird.

Something Feynman said:

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, “But how can it be like that?” because you will get “down the drain,” into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.
-The Character of Physical Law (Lecture 6: Probability and Uncertainity — the Quantum Mechanical view of Nature), about the apparent absurdities of Quantum behaviour.

I am a physicist. With a Ph.D. And I have taught QM at the college level. I have two machine down the hall from my office that can reproduce the effect that the video is talking about. Smijer has his basics right, and I like it when I see a non-physicist do a good job of describing the physics. But for a member of the general public, what should be the lesson here? The lesson is not that your mind determine’s reality, but that the way you frame your experiment determines the range of possible outcomes of the experiment. This goes a long way from the claim in the “What the Bleep” movie, which is where the cartoon comes from, that our minds determine reality (i.e. you can heal yourself merely by the power of positive thoughts. This in fact may be true on its own, but you cannot use QM to conclude this.) I recommend Bruce Rosenblum’s “Quantum Enigma” for a good lay introduction to what is really going on here. Bruce just happens to be a former professor of mine, and he is succinct in laying the problem out for someone without four years of undergraduate physics.

you will get “down the drain,” into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped.

I guess that explains my dropped jaw and glazed eyes. I spend a lot of my time in black holes.

Nobody knows how it can be like that.

But I assume the goal is still to try and find out?

I recommend Bruce Rosenblum’s “Quantum Enigma” for a good lay introduction to what is really going on here. Bruce just happens to be a former professor of mine, and he is succinct in laying the problem out for someone without four years of undergraduate physics.

Thanks Enrique. I’ll give it a try. We’ll see how good Bruce is at laying out the problem to a guy who came out of high school with a solid C average. Right in the meaty part of the curve.

But I assume the goal is still to try and find out?

Yes, and no. Yes, the idea is to find out how everything works the way it does. No, I don’t think the idea is to make it “make sense” intuitively to a brain conditioned by evolution to be able to intuitively grasp physics on a macroscopic scale.

Enrique - thanks for the tip - I’ll have to check out Rosenblum’s book, too.