They didn't teach us the double slit experiment in high school. It's too mind-blowing.
When you shoot ping pong balls through a slit, they bounce off the back wall in a shape that resembles a slit (of course)
Two slits, two shapes
- When you do this experiment with ELECTRONS, they instead land spread out in what scientists call an "interference pattern", suggesting that electrons (pieces of MATTER) behave like waves rather than particles .. which didn't really make sense
Mathematically, the electron goes through both slits AND it goes through neither (it exists as a probability of going through one of the two, and then interferes with itself to create this pattern) .. so physicists decided to put a measuring device against the slits to see which one it really goes through
And when they do this, IT NOW BEHAVES LIKE A PARTICLE, like the ping pong balls landing in two shapes
Matter behaves differently based on whether it's observed. Wat??
How is that realistic? Like, how does it even know it's observed? lol. But that's what the experiment shows.
The implications of this are staggering to me: Are there actually people in China right now? Are my neighbors concretely doing something inside their house? Or it's all just a probability and only binds to something certain when I observe it?
Would I even have written this post if you hadn't clicked to read it??? :p
I feel like either everybody you know is just a range of probabilities while you're not with them OR we as a whole must constantly be under some kind of measurement by some sort of 3rd party.
Right? Would it have to be one or the other? I'm curious how other people parse the double-slit experiment with, like, what it means for your assumptions about the world around you.
Quantum mechanics at work! :)
There are actually no way to derive by which split the particle has passed. Physicists have designed all over the time very sophisticated means to get an answer to that question, but without any success. As soon as you try, ciao, no more interferences.
It is so spooky lol
But it works!
Ya you can't argue it! lol
Along this rabbit hole, I suggest adding in The Mandela Effect.
Reality is not real and fixed as scientists would like. In fact, at the edges all of science breaks down.
The double slit experiment is really hard on the brain if you try to stay mechanical physics. However, if you work at it from the point of consciousness existing, and that observing... then it all works out easily.
Then you think about the web that is woven by all the people.
Then you get to a Buddhist thought, is there an I.
Good point, I think it's easier to think about philosophically than technically.
It is almost comforting to me (not sure exactly why) that there is this "mystery" to it all.
My feeling is that all the possibilities exist (technically) and we experience one of them. And then sometimes I think other people are really just the same consciousness as my own, I just am not experiencing that one right now, but maybe I do at some other point on the cosmic plane. Is that in line with the Buddhist thought at all?
It's funny how science and spirituality eventually intersect.
The first Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree and meditated. He went through all of his lives, both forwards and backwards, and found that there is no I. (This isn't something you get intellectually, this is a thing you will have to experience for yourself. And it is not an easy path.)
Science likes to cut things apart. (Science derives from the same roots as scythe, and means to cut)
To a scientist there is physics, which deals with all of the physical things, and metaphysics where all the woowoo stuff happens, and we won't ever discuss that stuff.
But, physics and metaphysics are more of a continuum. There is no nice solid break.
And so, by leaving metaphysics out of science, all of science is wrong.
So did the guy in this become a superhero after he was already old or did he age like a normal person even though he's a superhero?
<3
I think he became one after he got old, I think his advanced kindly grandfather understanding of quantum dynamics actually turned him into the superhero, so he had to be old for it.
I just say: Cat
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