Science Memes

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Don't look now (lemmy.zip)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Thanks! I’ve never fully grasped the concept and this really helps.

I’ve always heard it that observing was actually “measuring” and still wasn’t sure why that would impact anything but chalked it up to the quantum world being other-worldly.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Honestly physicists don't actually know what measuring is either. We don't know when exactly the system is considered "measured" in the chain of entanglement, this is called the Measurement Problem.

Answers range from "shut up don't think about it" to "there's an infinite amount of universes split from each other for each quantum event!".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

We know how it works, we just don't yet understand what is going on under the hood.

In short, quantum effects can be very obvious with small systems. The effects generally get averaged out over larger systems. A measurement inherently entangled your small system with a much larger system diluting the effect.

The blind spot is that we don't know what a quantum state IS. We know the maths behind it, but not the underlying physics model. It's likely to fall out when we unify quantum mechanics with general relativity, but we've been chipping at that for over 70 years now, with limited success.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

To be honest I still chalk it up to that.