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 Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
What's that?
The behavior of matter has nothing to do with whether a person or consciousness is watching it.
Hmm, that's not how it was explained to me. Caution: Netflix-documentary style science ahead.
Imagine a solid wall. A few feet in front of it, you have another wall with two holes cut out of it. You stand in front of both walls and throw baseballs. Some of your baseballs will go through the holes in the outer wall, and hit the solid wall behind it. If we marked the points of contact, the solid wall in back would have two hole-shaped regions where it was struck by baseballs, and the rest of the wall would be untouched.
Now imagine instead of baseballs you launched something that travels in a wave, like sound, toward the walls. The sound waves would hit all over the outer wall, and some of the sound wave would make its way through the holes. Since there two holes, the sound wave is now emanating from two points on the outer wall and travelling toward the solid wall. Again, if you could mark the points of impact where the sound wave meets the solid wall, you'd have a completely different pattern than the baseball example.
So particles traveling through holes in the outer wall will only impact the solid wall in certain hole-shaped regions that align with the outer wall. Waves travelling through the holes will split up, emanate through two holes, and the two new waves will overlap each other somewhat before they hit the solid wall. And if you could mark their impacts with the solid wall, it would make a different pattern than the baseballs. Regions where the waves overlapped got double-impact, and places that only got hit by one wave had less impact. On the show it looked like vertical lines.
So what should light do?
It's not a wave, it's photons. Particles with a finite observable size and shape. Logic tells you that they should behave like the baseballs, and only make impact with the solid wall in the regions that align with the holes on the outer wall.
Except that's not what happens. Light hits the solid wall and makes a pattern as if it were a wave
So scientists saw this and said "What the fuck??" Let's slow this all down, and watch individual photons and see what they do.
So they built some kind of science-y apparatus that let's them see individual particles and they watched what happens when photons are fired through this outer wall with holes in it.
Well jiminy cricket.....when they watched the photons move through the holes, they impacted the solid wall in only specific regions. Just like baseballs.
Then they turned around and ran the experiment again, without watching, and found that the light acted like a wave again.
So they tried again, this time watching, and......baseball pattern
Close your eyes and try again......wave pattern
Now open them and do it one more time.....baseball pattern
What's up with that?
EDIT: This link explains it a little better than I did
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...ssical-world-2
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