double slit experiment

in this double slit experiment is it the act of observing "consciousness"changing the wave to a particle or is it the detector causing some kind of interference with the wave?
please keep your answers in laymens terms or as simple as you can. I have read other responses to the same question and they go on forever losing me with scientific language i have no knowledge of

Good question dissturbbed, but you will never get a scientist to talk about consciousness affecting the photon. It is pure speculation, it can't be proved.

My personal belief is that consciousness can NOT control a photon, but the photon can be affected by consciousness.... if that makes sense. But we will never know until science can prove WHAT consciousness is and WHAT a photon is.

I will see if I can drum up some movies that others have posted on wave interference. I know there have been some very simple ones that my 12 year old understood.

Hi THEY, dissturbbed ,

The ripple tank is here.. (enjoy)
http://www.falstad.com/ripple/
I think this might be one for Alphanumeric.

Best wishes,

-C2.

didnt answer my question is it the detector or the observer causing it to turn into a particle

None from the above. The double slit experiment (DES) has nothing to do with the observer or even observer's consciousness. It's highly improbable, the behavior of whole Universe would depend on the presence of some conscious creatures, or on the fact, it's observed/perceived by somebody.

The true explanation of DSE can be a much more natural, in fact. By AWT (Aether Wave Theory) the vacuum is formed by recursive foam and the particles are moving through such foam like dense undulating blobs of this foam.



Such dense object creates a spatial undulations (so called de Broglie wave) of Aether foam by the same way, like the fish swimming beneath water surface. Such undulation makes the Aether foam even more dense at this place, by the same way, like the soap foam becomes dense during shaking in evacuated vessel.



The particle itself is pretty small, but the deBroglie wave isn't. It can interfere with the double slit by the same way, like all the other waves under formation of typical flagellum patterns, which appears as the result of wave interference phenomena during passing of each the wave by double slit. These patterns are making the foam more dense at the place, where the intensity of undulations is most pronounced.

The particle wave moves through vacuum like standing wave packet, i.e. by the same way, like each other wave and it prefers the more dense places for its spreading We can say, the more dense vacuum appears as a more conductive for particles waves. After all, this is the reason, why the particles are attracted by massive objects, which are making the vacuum neighborhood more dense and why the space appears "curved", too. Therefore, the falling of matter in the presence of gravitational field gradient can be interpreted as a sort of optical phenomena, in fact.

Therefore in consecutive experiments the particle prefers the paths of flagellum patterns and such result doesn't depend on the observer, the human consciousness the less. The result of double slit experiment is pure wave mechanic phenomena and the result of foamy structure of vacuum, because whole the AWT relies upon the classical Newtonian mechanic without introducing of another postulates.

Was such explanation sufficiently clear for you? It's evident, the Paul Falstad's ripple tank applet is partially relevant to DES, but it supplies just a part of the whole explanation of this important effect. The AWT approach makes the explanations of relativity/quantum mechanic phenomena surprisingly intuitive and simple.

This post has been edited by Zephir on Jan 19 2007, 02:24 PM

Ok, and now in laymens terms:
Assume a wave is both a particle and a wave.
If you do not observe, you do not know which way the particle/wave will go.
So what you see is the result of a particle/wave going through both slits.
If you do observe at 1 slit, then you know where it's going , so no interference pattern.
In quantum mechanics the call this 'the collapse of the wave-function'.
You get the same result when you close one slit which is like detecting only particle/waves going through that slit. So it is the detection, not the consciousness.

I know not everyone will agree with me, but it's in laymens terms and explains somewhat what's going on.

Whenever you're observing the particle before passing through double slit, you'll become entangled with it via shared energy, which is transferred between you and particle during observation. The behavior of such system is more predictable, then the particle, which is moving quite independently.

What are you talking about?
I don't get entangled with anything! Through shared energy transferred between me and the particle?
No such thing...

LOL, why not? You cannot observe any particle without exchanging of some energy with it. But at this moment the particle will stop undulate randomly and it gets synchronized with the undulations of the particle of observer. Such synchronized internal motion is called the quantum entanglement.



The animation illustrates, how one member of entangled pairs of particle wave packets stops be entangled after exchanging of some energy with the observer and how it will becomes entangled with the observer. This phenomena is the base of quantum cryptography - you cannot observe the entangled information during transport without destruction of such entanglement.

This post has been edited by Zephir on Jan 19 2007, 09:17 PM

OK guys,

Here is an alternative idea.



Yes, the low intensity double slit experiment seems to imply that light and electrons are both waves and particles! But it just seems this way.

1) First light. The infamous low intensity double slit experiment. The light diffracts (wave) but little dots appear on the film like individual "photons" (particles) have hit the film. Read this:

www.modelofreality.org/Sect5_6.html

(cut and paste into browser. I'm a newbie, so they won't let me put in a link)

If you have read the above section, then you will realize that if you have a discrete detection medium (digital camera or film crystals), then this medium has a threshold intensity that is required to start activating it. When the incident light intensity just reaches this threshold, the discrete areas start activation producing dots, even though a continuous, low intensity wave is what that's hitting the medium (not light particles).

Take the water wave analogy. Have you ever been to the beach surfing? If waves were always pure and uniform, you never would have to "wait for a big one", now would you.? But you do!

When you are just below the threshold for the detector, it is these random "big ones" that put dots on the detector (film). And these "big ones" are not big all the way down the beach. Just in a small section.

But even if the light source were somehow made to have uniform emissions:

The film still has random sized crystals and randomly oriented defects.

So even if the incident light were one of those uniform "ideal" waves,
the randomness of the film would still take over and randomize the dots
that were produced.

I don't think that anyone would be able to claim that each silver bromide crystal is
uniformly spherical at exactly 10 nanometers, and that each has crystalline
defects (necessary for the silver bromide to be light sensitive at all) that are all
aligned the same with the same degree of defect.

What does this mean?

It means that initially, random dots form on the film near the maxima due to an incident light wave, not light particles. Real world.

2) Next, electrons. The famous electron interference experiment in an electron microscope. Read these:

forum.physorg.com/index.php?showtopic=11975&st=0
www.modelofreality.org/Sect5_7.html

If you have read these sections, you will see that a beam of coherent pulsating electron particles acts just like a pseudo-wave. In this experiment, the beam of particle electrons bends around a charged filament and the electrons overlap.

I know it sounds crazy, but:

If two electrons are turned "ON" when they overlap, they repel each other forcefully and do not continue on their original way to the film. This produces a minimum. If two electrons are turned "OFF" when they overlap, then they continue on to the film to a maximum.

Again, even though they seem like matter waves, electrons are really particles, just as one always suspected.


Andrew Gray

This post has been edited by andrewgray on Jan 19 2007, 09:25 PM

The random result of DSE is the result of chaotic density fluctuations of aether foam (so called zero point energy, ZPE). It has nothing to do with light interaction, as the same result appears in the darkness, too. Like I've said, the particles are forming a standing wave packets, which are following the path of the maximal density of vacuum. If this path is random due the density fluctuations, the motion of particles will be random, too.

The same result you can obtain even for proton or neutron particles without charge, so the explanation shouldn't depend on the particle mutual interaction. The main problem of your approach is, the double slit experiment proceeds consecutively, the time delay between individual particles can be infinitelly long. Such particles cannot interact mutually at all.

The physics is not philosophy, where each phenomena can be interpreted by many ways. Just a single description can be perfectly consistent with all experiment variations.

This post has been edited by Zephir on Jan 20 2007, 04:08 AM

Zephir,



Here is a typical neutron "diffraction" pattern. This is way different than a double slit experiment. Neutron diffraction must be done through a crystal lattice.

There is no neutron double slit experiment.

It cannot be done since neutrons do not act like very good pseudo-waves.

In my opinion, a neutron is a bound electron and proton. I believe that it is still pulsating:

ON+ OFF ON- OFF ON+ OFF ON-

or something like that. But the overall effect is neutral. So it still can have preferred directions through a crystalline lattice like a pseudo-wave.

Andrew

Zephir,

I believe you are referring to the "one-electron-at-a-time" double slit experiment.

Well, I have looked into this. "One-electron-at-a-time" in a 100 cm microscope at 100 KeV corresponds to .05 nanoamps. Since I work in the electronics industry, I know that this small of current can easily be measured, but it cannot be regulated.

Electron double slit experiments typically are done in an electron microscope at 100,000 volts. Trying to regulate 100 Kev electrons to "one-at-a-time" would be like trying to drop birdseed into a feeder "one-at-a-time' with a backhoe.

What is happening with .05 nanoamp current at 100 KeV is that the electrons build up on the tip of the electron gun until they surge out in a group. Then there is pause. Then they build up again and surge again.

This occurs such that the average current is .05 nanoamps.

"One-particle-at-a-time" current regulation is not real world.

To give a feel for this current magnitude, I calculated the average drift velocity and how long one electron would take to get all the way back to the electron gun from the target down a hair-sized wire.

Well, I was stunned. Plugging in the values gives a drift velocity of

v = ( 50x10E-12 amps ) over { (8x10E22 per cubic cm)(5x10E-6 sq cm)(1.6x10E-19 Coul) }
v = 8 x 10E-10 cm/sec

Statistically, it takes 1.25 x 10E11 sec (4000 years) for the electron to go back the 100 cm to the top of the microscope. I could not believe my eyes, so I went back over and over again to check the arithmetic. Finding no mistake, I went back to find the error in Halliday & Resnick's expression for drift velocity. I could find none. I plugged my numbers into their examples. Still found no error. Perhaps I am crazy, but it appears that it is a gazillion times worse than we ever suspected. If the target electron pattern is just 1 micron across, it would take the electron 35 statistical hours to exit the target at this drift velocity. So trying to distinguish between 1-electron-per-3 nsec, 100-electrons-per-300nsec, or 1000-electrons-per-3-microseconds seems impossible. The system is just way too mushy. The reservoir of electrons in the equipment supplies all the current in this experiment for any reasonable duration. The analogy would be if someone were using eyedroppers to put water droplets in Lake Superior, and someone with a very accurate liquid flow meter at the other end of the lake was trying to distinguish between 1-drop-every-sec and 1000-drops-every-1000 sec.

If he claimed that the other guy was actually dropping in just "one-drop-at-a-time" at the other end of Lake Superior, he would be laughed out of town. Well, ...

Andrew Gray. Real World.

Since then particle interference has been demonstrated with electrons, photons, neutrons (1, 2), single neutral atoms and molecules as large as carbon-60 and carbon-70 fullerenes or even single oil droplets bouncing at the water surface.

You should know something about experimental physics, before starting to babble about it. The double slit experiment interpretation shouldn't require some particle-particle interaction at all, the particle charge the less, because it works perfectly both with charged particles, both with neutral particles without charge. You can feel free to delete your pages from the Internet without problem, as they're based on the nonsenses and false assumptions.

The single electron double slit experiment was subject of particular interest and they were first performed in Milan laboratory (Am. J. Phys. 44 306-7) and subsequently repeated in much more better experimental arrangement by Tonomura and others later [A Tonomura, J Endo, T Matsuda, T Kawasaki and H Ezawa 1989 Demonstration of single-electron build-up of an interference pattern, American Journal of Physics 57 117-120].



The picture above illustrates the single-electron events build up over a 20 minute exposure to form an interference pattern in this double-slit experiment by Akira Tonomura and co-workers. [a) 8 electrons; [ 270 electrons; [C 2000 electrons; [d) 60,000. A video of this experiment is available on the Hitachi web.

As there is only one electron in the apparatus at a given time, the figures show how an interference pattern can be built up from single-electron events. These experiments were carried out from beginning to end with constant and extremely low electron intensities - fewer than 1000 electrons per second - so there was no chance of finding two or more electrons in the apparatus at the same time. This removed any possibility that the fringes might be due to interactions between the electrons. The electrons arriving at the detector were detected with almost 100% efficiency. Therefore, the detection error in Tonomura experiment was limited to less than 1%.

It is also worth noting that the double-slit experiment with single electrons was actually a by-product of research into the practical applications of electron interferometry.

This post has been edited by Zephir on Jan 20 2007, 11:12 AM

Zephir,

When there are dots on the film, they are single-dot-events, not single-electron-events. One film dot does not correspond to one electron. Many electrons collide with the film and do not produce dots. One electron does not a dot make. It could be that one dot corresponds to 10 electron events.


Also, like I pointed out before, one-electron-at-a-time current regulation is impossible, even laughable.


Andrew

This post has been edited by andrewgray on Jan 20 2007, 08:50 PM