Re: Flat earth and two slit experiment

Posted by Dale on Mar 26, 2002 at 10:20
(204.212.212.104)

Re: Flat earth and two slit experiment (dogrock)

I guess I don't have as sensitive a detector as you do between "hard" reasoning and "magic". To me the two slit experiment is no more mysterious than that a ship can be upside down. They are both reality. The ship floats upside down because of gravity and the two slits create a pattern because of the dual nature of photons. Both gravity and quantum mechanics are known only by their effects. What "really" causes electrostatic attraction? We can talk about like and dislike charges but what does that mean? What is gravity? Why do photons appear like waves in one experiment and particles in another? We rationalize the ship traveling upside down due to gravity but just what does the force of gravity look like on a subatomic
scale?

The answer is it doesn't "look" like anything. It just is. We define how it works through a warping of space/time. Based on that understanding we make predictions of how it will work in experiments and then we perform the experiment and see if our prediction was right. Columbus predicted he could sail to China while others predicted he would fall off the edge or die of starvation before he got there. He didn't die but he also didn't know where he was. That's why he called them Indians. But he took the observations he had, combined them with some extrapolative thought, and made a prediction that showed that at least the earth wasn't flat. The two slit experiment only shows that light acts like a wave. Is it REALLY a wave? Sure looks like one just as the earth sure looks flat. We have to live in the reality we are given until we see another. Until we see the shadow of the sun striking the bottom of a well in Egypt and not in Greece we use the "fact" that the earth is flat to predict that Columbus will fall off the edge just as we observe all ships traveling far from shore sinking as they go off the edge and we know they must since most which go out that far never return.

Now if you have a different idea on the two slit experiment and especially if you have in mind an experiment which would predict a different result from "classical" quantum mechanics, then we would all be eager to hear it. Until then, quantum mechanics is reality and it is not magic - it is just the way things really work.

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