this little piece of quantum science has baffled me since i first heard about it...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc

the 'double-slit' experiment shows, in the most layman's terms, that the mere act of observation can alter the potential of electrons. it demonstrates with an eery degree of certainty that a 5th dimension's 'multitude of paths' can be somewhat experienced in our 3rd dimension reality.

....although it does manage to bake our noodles in our attempts to fully grasp it's profound meaning! hell- there's even some dude offering $1,000,000 to anyone who can truly explain it!!

to understand more about the 5th dimension, watch this little blurb first:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA

with the deepest love and gratitude!!

I think a speaker I heard put it best, 'You think you understand quantum mechanics and then it shows you how odd it really is'

From my understanding, we cannot actually locate an electron. We can just calculate the probability that it will be in a certain place at a certain time. Observing it actually causes it to snap back into existence and take a physical form.

''What the hell do we know about rabbit hole'' god i watched it twice and still did'nt understand it.

quantum mechnics and physics will always be intriguing but complex to follow

Those videos are really flimsy from a scientific perspective... I think the main point it broke down is when the guy put an eyeball in front of the slits and says the electron basically knows it is being watched. This ignores the nature of observation and causes confusions. Basically, the video takes for granted that you can "see" things and that the visual world that exists at a human scale and erroneously applies that idea to a small scale. When you "see" a room, it is because the matter in the room is vibrating and emitting light, and that light falls on your eyes which are essentially photon detectors. A single electron is not necessarily always emitting light, in fact it takes energy away from the electron to emit light and this changes the way the electron is behaving. The mystery is really more along the lines of "how does and electron behave when its not emitting light, so it is invisible to observers". These "paradoxes" are usually due to people applying their everyday experience to a single electron, which is foolish. QM is still very strange, but nature does what is easy and what is easy for an electron to do is not easy for a person who is built out of 10^26 or so electrons to understand.

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

One good possible explanation I heard regarding this went something like this...

All particle move through an unseen fluid that surrounds and is the scaffolding for everything in existence. Some call it the membrane, but in essense it would be similar to a fish moving through water, not realizing that they are living within a fluid environment.

When a particle moves though this hyperdimensional "fluid" it leaves a wake, very much like a boat. When there is only one slit open in the experiment only the particle goes through, but when both slits are open the "wake" the particle creates goes through the second slit and creates the pattern we see in the experiment.

Interesting theory and conceptually makes sense in my mind.

"If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics"

Richard Feynman

gotta love that quote

That was it. It's funny listening to some strung out hippie babble on about string theory and how quantum mechanics proves everything he's been saying since he took acid for the first time in 67'. Kind of have to roll your eyes at them

http://home.earthlink.net/~herm/id21.html

I think we cannot explain. Only guess.
My guess would be that particle's are actually waves that sometimes just happen to behave like particles. Or to put it in a different way: like this world we live in happens to be made out of particles when you look at it on a smaller scale, the world of particles is made out of yet another sort of thing that could be seen as a particle, on an even smaller scale of a simmilar magnitude of smallness related to the particle world as the particle world is to our world.

because of it's immense smallness we would never be able to probe into that scale: Any particle that we could manipulate or detect would be still too large to interact with anything on that small scale.

The only way to prove that it exists would be by mathematical deviations from the current model, seen on extremely large scales.

This actually has been done. A flash of light from a supernova at billions of lightyears away has been detected by a satelite. The high energy photons arrived significantly later than the low energy photons sugesting that photons with extremely high levels of energy travel at a slightly lower speed than photons with lower levels of energy.
The deviation in the speed of light is so immensely small that on normal distances it is impossible to measure.

Yet a deviation in the speed of light, a thing that in our current way of understanding is supposed to be constant, has been detected.

The only thing is that there has been no mathematical model yet, that could incorporate this deviation in such a way that it could lead to a coherent new model.

The way the experiment is really run is to place detectors at the slits. They then shoot electrons one at a time all the while determining which slit the electron passes through. With detectors they can determine the electrons go thrown hole A or hole B, but not both. When this experiment is run the electrons do indeed behave like particles and form lines. Remove the detectors at the slits and they go back to behaving like waves and form interference patterns. The video is somewhat misleading, but not really. I'm comfortable extrapolating detectors to awareness. It is us that is aware of the detectors output, thus making us conscious of the electrons action...to which it has obviously changed it's behavior in response.

There is no such thing as a good day. There is no such thing as a bad day. The only difference between yesterday and today is your perception. Our perception is everything. Without our perception there is nothing. No science, no vision, no hearing, no anything. Just random food for thought.

Saldin, The amazing part is that the electron's action changes based on our observation. If we measure the electrons passing through the slits it will act like a particles and form lines with two slits. If we don't measure them they act like waves and for interference patterns with two slits

The rabbit hole is deep.

Good point. Poor electrons. Even they are victims of animism.

So one must conclude there is no such thing as "our perception". In the end it is all about a single guy in the whole universe called Perception. Even the universe is a matter of Perception. And the Perception? It is a matter of what?!

This is because we cannot measure them without having some kind of interaction with them. By interacting with them we force them into a certain pattern of behaviour.

An electron has a wave function that describes it's possible states. Any kind of interaction by definition causes a form of interference with this wave function.

If you desperately want to see the electron as a particle, like a tennisball, than you'd have to admit that if the wave function determines it's possible place, direction, etc. Having another particle bumping into it causes it to firstly alter it's course and secondly determines where within the space of it's possibility's it actually is. This is why the wave function has to collapse just by interacting with something else.

Concluding that the electron knows it's being watched is therefore a mistake.

i love the minds that live on this forum. i swear i have grown and learned more in my few years on the nexus than in the whole of my time at university....

keep the wisdom flowing my friends!!

L&G

It's called the collapse of the wave function and you pretty much summed up the current running theory as to why. The double slit experiement is but one of the neat things in Quantum physics. Look into electron tunneling and quantum entanglement it's even odder than the double slit. By the way the movie that video came from is total BS. The video clip is accurate but it's about the only thing in the movie what the bleep... do we know that is. The rest is just crap that isnt in any way true. Quantum effects are rarely if ever seen beyond the nano scale. The only one I know of is the bose enstein condensate.

Oh, honestly i didn't watch the video's. The words 'double slit' said enough and i expected that these innevitable discussions on new-age interpretations of QM experiments (what the bleep do we know, etc)would be wasted on me anyway.

To explore whether modern science has a spiritual dimension to it, or opens up a room for spiritual views depends on a different question, wich is whether our understanding of physic's allows for speculations on a realm outside of physics that can co-exist with it. Not on whether we could detect the hand of god inside the realm of physic's itself.

All attempts in that direction are doomed: Have you seen that movie 'ghost'? How can patrick swayze walk on the streets and yet at the same time have difficulty with moving some material stuff? You ALWAYS get that sort of impossible entanglements if you try to incorporate god into the physical world: once the influence of god is detectable within the material world, than god himself must be detectable and than he aint god no-more because he'd have to obey the same laws of nature as everything else: if patrick swayze can walk through walls because he's not of this world anymore, than he cannot touch anything in this world either. It's one way or the other, and that won't ever change.

If electrons are absolutely everywhere at once, then the potential for simultaneous realities they can form seems to be infinite. So then, we're looking at the particles of infinity here; the material foundation of all things at once. The electron seems to imply every possible world imaginable. So obviously the only limit is one's perspective.