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Author Topic:   Does What the Bleep Do We Know have any close cousins?
Percy
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Posts: 22480
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
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Message 8 of 24 (513768)
07-01-2009 2:12 PM
Reply to: Message 6 by Purpledbear
07-01-2009 1:30 PM


Re: Strange stuff
It sounds like you were getting it already, but if it helps, here's the way I see it.
Purpledbear writes:
The conclusion is all physicists agree that the electron was aware it was being watched (4:42).
The cartoon is probably great for kids but shouldn't be taken too literally. For example, when describing what happens when the 2-slit experiment is performed with a device to measure which slit the electron passes through the cartoon says, "The electron decided to act differently, as if it was aware it was begin watched." While the electron did behave differently, it was not conscious and did not make a decision. It was simply following the laws of physics.
Electrons are also not conscious and so can have no awareness of anything, certainly not that they're being watched. A more accurate way of describing what happens (but not the only one) would be to say that the electron's wave function collapses when it interacts with its environment. In other words, when the slits aren't being observed then there is insufficient information to establish which slit it passed through and the result is an intereference pattern. And when the slits are being observed, then the act of observation is equivalent to the electron interacting with its environment, and the knowledge about which slit it passed through causes the interference pattern to disappear.
hen in the final seconds the cartoon doctor says, "The observer collapsed the wave function simply by observing."
It isn't the observer that collapses the wave function. It's the mere act of interacting with its surroundings.
So it is your opinion the movie is just presenting material to fit their 'means'?
I don't know what Perdition would say, but I think it's a wonderful cartoon that clearly and in a very interesting way communicates mysterious quantum behavior for grade levels up to maybe 8th.
So you do agree that somehow the most basic building blocks of everything are somehow connected and in perfect conditions or always have the ability to communicate at infinite distances as if space did not exist? Here is the cartoon video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh8uZUzuRhk
"Communicate" is the wrong term because quantum entanglement cannot be used to communicate information. We have been able to establish that the state to which the wave functions collapse is determined for both particles at precisely the same instant in time regardless of separation distance, but this can't be used to communicate any information. For example, you can't take one of a pair of entangled particles and monitor when its wave function collapses so that you know when the other particle has been observed, because the first time your monitor looks at your entangled particle its wave function will collapse.
The speed of light as the maximum speed with which one part of the universe can affect any other part of universe is not violated by quantum entanglement, because there is no way to cause anything to actually happen at the other entangled particle. Their quantum states will remain balanced, for example have opposite spins, but which entangled particle gets which spin is random - it cannot be decided before making the observation.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 6 by Purpledbear, posted 07-01-2009 1:30 PM Purpledbear has not replied

  
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