Ok… I understand the principle of what the experiment tells us. Particles act like waves.
Fire single electrons / photons through a barrier…
Single Slit = Single line result pattern
Double Slit = Multi-line wave interference pattern
Now, the full claim for which the experiment was even performed was that… If the particles are “measured”, meaning a detector is setup to determine which slit the particle travelled through, then the resulting wave pattern no longer emerges.
Fire single electrons / photons through a barrier WHILE monitoring the slits…
Single Slit = Single line result pattern
Double Slit = Double line result pattern… NOT multi-line wave-interference pattern
As far as I can tell… THAT “Confirmation Experiment” has not actually been performed.
History milestones… As far as I can find…
1803 - First proposed by Thomas Young.
1961 - Double-slit performed with electrons
1989 - Double-slit performed with electrons, but with only firing ONE at a time
Thru Present - Single Particle experiments have confirmed what I call the “Control Experiment” many times, with a variety of particles.
BUT, I cannot find any mention of an experiment that matches what I call the Confirmation Experiment, in which the wave-interference pattern goes away when the slits are being monitored…
Am I missing something??? I’ve heard the “claims” that the experiment was performed… but I can’t find any data that would suggest that has been replicated, or the data was recorded in any manner in which we aren’t just “taking somebody’s word for it”....
But at this point, hasn’t that whacked-out theory been debunked? I think it has, but maybe I’m just an optimist.
Debunked??? To my knowledge… No. That’s what I’m trying to find out. I assume you are talking about the “Confirmation Experiment”... The “Control Experiment” has been confirmed. Particles do indeed follow directional patterns of movement that are similar to waves.
And… I understand where the thought experiment comes from about “measuring” a particle, and what we measure being different than what it does.
For those who haven’t really understood that concept, I’ll explain as best I can… for those who get it already, just skip this part.
Basically… for anything that is in motion… we can either know exactly where it is (at least, in relation to some other point of reference), or we can know how fast it’s moving, but we cannot know both at the same time. At least, not when collecting a single point of data. There is a “car analogy” that is commonly used to explain this, though, imho I don’t think it is ever explain very well… so I will try to do it better.
—Imagine standing near a road and watching a car pass by, very fast. You can either:
—1. Know how fast it is going by measuring the amount of distance it travels in a particular amount of time.
—2. You can take a high speed picture to capture the car’s position at any given moment as it travels along that path.
Obviously, we can argue that we can “see” the car on the road, look at the speedometer, use the frame speed of the camera to determine the speed by comparing two of the frames… etc etc etc… but that’s missing the point. It’s only an example. In terms of measure “Particles”... the tools we have currently don’t allow for such elements. We can either know how fast a particle is moving, or we can [kind of] know / estimate it’s spacial position. We are talking about collecting an isolated data point. So in terms of the “car”, we can examine the single high-speed photo in which there appears to be no blurred movement, and from that we can say something like, “the car is a mile marker 1.256…. of the track”. But that picture does not tell us how fast it’s going. Remember, single point of data… Or, we can watch a video of the car and measure it’s speed by using the reference of time for the car to pass through the frame of the video (assuming we have previously determined the distance observed in the video frame). But, the analysis of motion will exclude any exact point of location.
It’s relevant because the Double-Slit experiment is always referenced as “proof” of that. And the “proof” is in reference to the Confirmation Experiment (as labeled in my OP). But again I say, where’s the data showing that the “Confirmation Experiment” has actually been performed, AND confirmed?? Or, is that part still just a thought experiment that everybody accepts??
Now we’re way above my sorry head. Burt? . . .