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bosco
@selentelechia
oh my god I'm a moron "it changes when we measure ('observe') it bc we *have to interact with it* to do so" this never occurred to me, I just read the popsci explanations like "ha ha well I don't understand that at all, guess I'm never going to think about it again"
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Sterling Crispin 🕊️
@sterlingcrispin
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I'm going to be that guy: the monkey should be a light beam, everyone confuses consciousness interfering with the particle-wave duality. But to observe it we have to measure it with a photon, which causes a physical interaction, it's not consciousness doing it its a particle
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bosco
@selentelechia
pendants on twitter hopping out from behind a bush with good intuitive explanations that don't trigger any of my "lol this is too hard" defenses: bless you
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bosco
@selentelechia
"by observe, we mean 'measure,' and by 'measure,' we mean 'physically interact with,' and perhaps you can understand why it is hard to do this without kinda fucking with the thing you are measuring" nobody ever just said this to me
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
so, this is true and relevant, but it’s not a complete explanation of the uncertainty principle (which i assume is the topic under discussion), because it’s not intrinsically quantum i am not aware of a really satisfying intuitive explanation of the uncertainty principle
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
importantly, the uncertainty principle is not about measurement - a quantum particle cannot exist in a state with both perfectly definite momentum and perfectly definite position, even if no instrument ever measures it, e.g. even if the rest of the universe is empty
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QC (in Berlin 7/29-??? w/ COVID 😷)
@QiaochuYuan
yeah maybe the wording was not ideal; more precisely, we don’t need instruments capable of measurement. we can talk about whether a quantum particle hanging out in space is in a position or momentum eigenstate as a purely mathematical fact about its quantum state
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purple square #41
@purplesquare41
so far i hav see this 1. when smol, there is no particle anymore, there is only probability distributions of particles, which exist as waves in that these distributions evolve over time n space 2. a 'certain' position means the spatial distribution i.e. wavelength of ur wave is
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