Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Physics Forum Double Slit Ex Explained

I was quite surprised to find this excellent explanation of the famous 'Double Split Experiment' on Youtube.
Colourful, and well worth looking at.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEzRdZGYNvA
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It's excellent. I downloaded that last year and have watched it a few times since. A simple explanation of an experiment that shows how strange the universe actually is. It's been voted 'the best experiment of all time'! Despite the fact that it must surely have been repeated thousands of times since Young's original experiment 200 yrs ago - and the phenomenon of superposition has been employed in simple qubit computations - it seems that there are still many non-scientific people who reject the whole idea. Can't blame them really, I suppose. This kind of thing could give reality a bad name

It's nice animation, but it's just a description of experiment - it doesn't explain, why it occurs by the described way. Nevertheless, the true explanation of double slit experiment cannot be so difficult, because its mechanical analogy exists already and it means, the principle of experiment can be explained by Newtonian mechanics. The Aether Wave Theory explains this mechanism in detail by concept of the foam, forming the vacuum:

Every massive object moving through environment will generate wave, which is perpendicular to object motion direction, like duck or fish swimming beneath the water surface. This wave is called the de-Broglie wave by its inventor. This wave makes the vacuum more dense like each shaking of foam, because it accumulates so called relativistic mass of fast moving objects. The particles are tiny objects, but their de-Broglie wave isn't. It spreads around particle by the speed of light and it advances its motion. When the particle is approaching double slit, its de-Broglie wave interferes with double slit under formation of flabelliform patterns, well known from Young's experiments. The vacuum foam becomes more dense at the places of additive interference and because the motion of object follows these more dense places, the particle motion will prefer certain places at the target, corresponding the interference patterns.

Yes, quite right, Zaphir, it explains the experiment, but not the phenomenon. Yet the experiment doesn't necessarily demonstrate that particles even have a wave nature, nor the viability of the Aether Wave Theory. The 'many worlds' theory offers a logical alternative explanation.

The only problem is, 'many worlds' concept itself isn't so intuitive as nobody did saw some many worlds yet. The AWT doesn't uses such ad-hoced counterintuitive concepts at all. It just considers, every piece of observable reality is composed of many other pieces. BTW The AWT can explain it too.
How the explanation of phenomenon differs from the explanation of experiment, demonstrating such phenomenon?
But it can serve as an indicia, because we are observing a wave interference patterns in it. Of course it's not the final proof of such nature, but here many others experiments, which are demonstrating the wave nature of particles too.

If some theory can explain some phenomenon by more simple way by using fewer ad-hoced assumptions/postulates then the others, it makes it more viable then the others by Occam's razor criterion. This is simply how the scientific method is working.

Zaphir: "How the explanation of phenomenon differs from the explanation of experiment, demonstrating such phenomenon?"

- Because the experiment is not the phenomenon. The apparatus and procedure is known with certainty, but the cause of the phenomenon is not known with certainty.

Zaphir: "because we are observing a wave interference patterns in it"

- Yes, but are these the result of the wave nature of a particle, or of the probability 'wave' described in the 'many worlds'? Who, at this time, can say for certain? No one.

Zaphir: "it makes it more viable then the others by Occam's razor criterion"

- I have no argument with that, but it does not constitute a proof, and each hypothesis remains a possible description of reality.

I'm not talking about experiment, but about the phenomenon observed in experiment. The experimental arrangement needs no explanation in general.

This doesn't change the fact, some explanations are better then others.

I didn't talk about proof, just about evidence. If some theory proposes an easy explanation of phenomenon without postulates, it makes it MORE viable - or not?

Ok, we've established those points then, so I guess we can avoid further gratuitous argument. The fact remains that the little video, about which this topic centers, brings to the attention of the general public, in a very clear way, an utterly bizarre phenomenon. It doesn't explain it? Well, of course it doesn't. By all means let us regurgitate the 'canned' interpretations, but let's not pretend to know what's going on when the 'wave function' collapses, whatever our personal views of the probabilities inferred by occam's razer.

The video discussed just describes the experiment, it's purpose is not to cover its weirdness - on the contrary.

The explanation of wave function collapse is hidden in my explanation, though. It's related to entanglement phenomena, which I'll try to explain by using of my broken English.

Try to imagine, you're a sailor, who is staying on the end of floating wharf, to which some boat is attached. Because the sea is stormy, everything (both sailor, wharf and boat) are wobbling up and down, but in different phases. From the perspective of sailor the boat sways randomly.

The observation of electron in double slit experiment is analogous to situation, when sailor touches the boat for a moment, thus exchanging some kinetic energy with it. What will happen, after then? The wharf and boat will start to oscillate at phase. It means, the sailor will keep his relative position with respect to boat, so he cannot detect any boat wobbling anymore, because he moves by the same way. The wave function of boat has collapsed from perspective of that sailor.

Did you understood this mechanical analogy? If so, how it's related to AWT and double slit experiment? Well, by AWT both electron, both the particles of observer are formed by dense clusters of another undulating particles, recursively. At the moment, electron exchanges some energy with particles of observer during process of observation, the undulations of both systems aren't independent anymore: their internal fluctuations will undulate at phase, too. Briefly speaking, the observer will get entangled with the electron observed. As the electron isn't undulating independently, its internal undulations will disappear from observer perspective, because the internal motion of both systems has been synchronized.

This is what we are calling a collapse of (electron) wave function. The observer and electron are now undulating like single body - the common center of mass of both objects is forming a private reference frame, a sort of independent island of reality inside of wave ocean - from this idea the concept of many worlds follows.

Was this explanation clear for you at least a bit? As you can see, it's surprisingly simple, if not trivial.

Yes, that's a very clear analogy, thank you, Zaphir.

I don't think I need to waste your time any further, having just scanned 1000 posts in your thread on SciForums (under the heading of pseudoscience). I think i can find the answers to any further questions there.

http://www.sciforums.com/printthread.php?t=74593&pp=20

and here:

http://www.physforum.com/index.php?act=Print&client=printer&f=16&t=2787

and here:

http://physicsmathforums.com/showthread.php?t=416

and here:

http://www.bautforum.com/against-mainstream/76599-aether-wave-theory.html

It does, in fact. When you're locating an electron with respect to the double slit apparatus (for example by laser), the deBroglie wave wobling gets synchronized with respect of the experimental setup, including the double slit, so it becomes deterministic in part. The role of observer person isn't significant here at all - for example, you can store the experimental results on HDD and check them a few years later without changing the actual results.

These questions were disputed extensivelly on physorg forum, so you can find a detailed answer here. You can use a full text search - for example all my notes regarding the double slit experiment you can find here. Of course, all these forums are indexed by Google, so you can use a Google search as well.