• @[email protected]
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      31 year ago

      Then you are measuring something with matter still and it then affects it. Literally causing interactions to measure means altering it’s state even at a nonchalant glance.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        hmm, I can get how that might cause the measured item to say, change its velocity, but not how that would cause a wave to collapse into a single point.

        • @Feathercrown
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          11 year ago

          It’s not a physical wave. A wavefunction describes how likely something is to have different values for one of its properties. For example, an electron might have a wavefunction describing how likely it is to be in different locations. By observing if it actually is in a certain location or not, you force the electron to decide where it is concretely, “collapsing” the probability function into one value (its newly decided location).

        • @[email protected]
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          11 year ago

          Right but how do you measure the things around what you are trying to measure and get any data from it unless you expect them to also interact with the things you are measuring.

          You have to have an interaction to measure even if you are measuring the outcome and steps away from the original interaction.

          It’s like measuring dark matter where the easiest way to prove it’s existence was to wait and capture the decay of it but not the particle itself. But that means the particle was already gone when we got the measurements to prove it was there.