Originally Posted by SpecialInterests
Ah yes its becoming more clear now. I suppose considering the we can only predict the position of the electron by probability, there is no telling the forces magnitude and direction exerted on it... until we detect where it went. But if we detect where it went we changed the experiment.
Am I getting warmer?
yea, observation has an effect on electrons. When an electron is not observed, it behaves like a wave. A wave is a disturbance in some type of substance - i.e. water, air. Only when observed will a particle snap into a definite position. Just as relativity forced people to change their views of time and distance, quantum physics is forcing people to come to grips with a new concept of space, that on small scales is very different than what we intuitively grasp from our experiences.
In the experiment, when the display screen is off (i.e. the thing that the observers look at) but the detectors are still in place and everything else is the same, the interference pattern remains. When they turn the screen on again (and change nothing else), it collapses. See this guy's lecture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OWQildwjKQ
Consciousness is the cause of why this happens. Ancient civilizations like the Mayans knew about consciousness thousands of years ago. They actually mapped the evolution of consciousness and have been correct for thousands of years even to this very day.
Consciousness cannot be proved, or tested or any of that, because it is subjective(mind). Anyone who considers the issue philosophically at all will have to admit this fact: there is no such thing as one of a pair of opposites without the other of the pair. So there is no such thing as objectivity without subjectivity that is equally real and irreducible. And scientists want to reduce the entire universe to objective matter or processes; through its history science has assumed that subjectivity is not real. Just considering it in this very simple light we can see that cannot possibly be true.
The Western world is stuck in this perspective, that the mind isn't really real. And that is because the Western mind has become split in two--the left-brain, objective, rational, logical side, and the right-brain, subjective, feeling, intuitive side. And we are stuck in the left-brain side, so we can only really experience the objective aspect of ourselves and the world. And thus scientists, who are for the most part even more left-brained then the average person, start with the assumption that the mind, the subjective aspect of life, is not real. And it IS an assumption--even though science is supposed to be assumptionless.
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