Dr. Quantum's double slit experiment

Bluestar

Jedi Council Member
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc&feature=player_embedded

Someone sent this link to me and wanted to share with you all. It is an animated presentation for I believe school kids. But never the less the results of the experiment is amazing. Also to note I am just minimally educated in the terminology and theory here. It is truly fascinating.

Thought that the topic was interesting enough to maybe discuss the basic principle that matter on quantum levels can act as a particle or a wave depending on if there is an observer or not.

So being that each of the elements of the experiment, the atom & observer, are in a space/time state, and the observer being the only reference time, because that is all we have, then we have relativity because the atom has its own relation to time as does the observer. Am I making sense? And does the atom know that it is actually being watched or is it just the observers interpretation? Though one can not deny the end result.

How does this compare to higher levels like us in relation to 4D through 6D. By observing 3D, does 4D make things change 3D's behavior? So if we were left to our own accord, without 4D manipulation(sts)/observation(sto), I wonder how our 3D sts world would be now? Do you suppose we would have naturally moved back towards aligning ourselves to sto?

Also, is this what has happened with 7D, that by observing matter, 7D has changed the wave form into particles that then form frequency envelopes and shape the infinate forms that matter can come up with in 3D? Have read many of the transcripts and Laura's work and this little video seems to be putting things in perspective for me, if I am on the right track here.

This is where I will stop and see if anyone one wants to comment and thanks for sharing my thought process here.
 
So being that each of the elements of the experiment, the atom & observer, are in a space/time state, and the observer being the only reference time, because that is all we have, then we have relativity because the atom has its own relation to time as does the observer. Am I making sense? And does the atom know that it is actually being watched or is it just the observers interpretation? Though one can not deny the end result.

I hope this help a bit

http://www.higgo.com/quantum/laymans.htm

Why is it weird?

Niels Bohr, the father of the orthodox 'Copenhagen Interpretation' of quantum physics once said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it".

To understand the weirdness completely, you just need to know about three experiments: Light Bulb, Two Slits, Schroedinger's Cat.

Two Slits

The simplest experiment to demonstrate quantum weirdness involves shining a light through two parallel slits and looking at the screen. It can be shown that a single photon (particle of light) can interfere with itself, as if it travelled through both slits at once.

Light Bulb

Imagine a light bulb filament gives out a photon, seemingly in a random direction. Erwin Schroedinger came up with a nine-letter-long equation that correctly predicts the chances of finding that photon at any given point. He envisaged a kind of wave, like a ripple from a pebble dropped into a pond, spreading out from the filament. Once you look at the photon, this 'wavefunction' collapses into the single point at which the photon really is.

Schroedinger's Cat

In this experiment, we take your pet cat and put it in a box with a bottle of cyanide. We rig it up so that a detector looks at an isolated electron and determines whether it is 'spin up' or 'spin down' (it can have either characteristic, seemingly at random). If it is 'spin up', then the bottle is opened and the cat gets it. Ten minutes later we open the box and see if the cat is alive or dead. The question is: what state is the cat in between the detector being activated and you opening the box. Nobody has actually done this experiment (to my knowledge) but it does show up a paradox that arises in certain interpretations.



What does it mean?

The meaning of quantum physics is a bit of a taboo subject, but everyone thinks about it. To make it all a bit more respectable, it is better to say 'ontology' than 'meaning' -- it's the same thing. There are several competing interpretations and the one thing they all have in common is that each of them explains all the facts and predicts every experiment's outcome correctly.


Copenhagen Interpretation (CI)

This is the granddaddy of interpretations, championed by the formidable Niels Bohr of Copenhagen university. He browbeat all dissenters into submission (with the notable exception of Einstein) at a Brussels conference sponsored by a man called Solvay in 1927. Bohr thereby stifled the debate for a generation or two.

The CI has a bit of a cheek calling itself an interpretation, because it essentially says "thou shalt not ask what happens before ye look". He pointed out that the Schroedinger equation worked as a tool for calculating where the particle would be, except that it 'collapsed' as soon as you took a peek. If anyone asked why this was, he would say, "shut up and calculate" (or he might as well have done).

When you do try to take Copenhagen seriously you come to the conclusion that consciousness and particle physics are inter-related, and you rush off to write a book called The Dancing Wu-Li Masters.

More recently, Henry Stapp at the University of California has written papers such as On Quantum Theories of the Mind (1997). Stapp's central thesis is that the synapses in your brain are so small that quantum effects are significant. This means that there is quantum uncertainty about whether a neuron will fire or not - and this degree of freedom that nature has allows for the interaction of mind and matter.

What happens to the cat? You're not allowed to ask.

[Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI)

The various paradoxes that the Copenhagen Interpretation gave rise to (famously Schroedinger's cat, and Einstein's dislike of "spooky action at a distance") led others to keep on trying to find a better interpretation.

The simplest was put forward by a student, Hugh Everett, in 1957. He simply said that the Schroedinger equation does not collapse. Of course, everyone laughed at him, because they could see that the photon, for example, was in just one place when they looked, not in all possible places. But after a couple of decades, this issue was resolved with the concept of decoherence - the idea that different universes can very quickly branch apart, so that there is very little relationship between them after a tiny fraction of a second.

This has led to what should strictly be called the 'post-Everett' Interpretation, but is still usually called MWI. It is now one of the most popular interpretations and has won some impromptu beauty contests at physics conferences. Unfortunately it means that billions of you are splitting off every fraction of a second into discrete universes and it implies that everything possible exists in one universe or another. This comes up with its own set of hard-to-digest concepts, such as the fact that a 500-year-old you exists in some universes, whereas in others you died at birth.

In 1997, Max Tegmark at Princeton University proposed an experiment to prove that MWI was correct. It involved pointing a loaded gun at your head and pulling the trigger. Of course, you will only survive in those universes where the gun, for whatever reason, fails to go off. If you get a misfire every time, you can satisfy yourself -- with an arbitrarily high level of confidence -- that MWI is true. Of course, in most universes your family will be weeping at your funeral (or possibly just shaking their heads and muttering).

What happens to the cat? It's dead in half the subsequent universes and alive in the other half.

[Pilot Waves, Hidden Variables and the Implicate Order

David Bohm (1917-1992) was a very brilliant physicist and that's why people went along with him when he came up with an elegant but more complicated theory to explain the same set of phenomena (normally, more complicated theories are disqualified by the principle known as Ockham's Razor).

Bohm's theory follows on some original insights by Prince Louis de Broglie (1892-1987), who first studied the wave-like properties of the behaviour of particles in 1924. De Broglie suggested that, in addition to the normal wavefunction of the Copenhagen Interpretation, there is a second wave that determines a precise position for the particle at any particular time. In this theory, there is some 'hidden variable' that determines the precise position of the photon.

Sadly, John von Neumann (1903-1957) wrote a paper in 1932 proving that this theory was impossible. Von Neumann was such a great mathematician that nobody bothered to check his maths until 1966, when John Bell (1928-1990) proved he'd bodged it and there could be hidden variables after all -- but only if particles could communicate faster than light (this is called 'nonlocality'). In 1982 Alain Aspect demonstrated that this superluminal signaling did appear to exist, although David Mermin then showed that you could not actually signal anything. There is still some argument about whether this means very much.

Bohm's theory was that the second wave was indeed faster than light, and moreover it did not get weaker with distance but instantly permeated the entire universe, acting as a guide for the movement of the photon. This is why it is called a 'pilot wave'.

This theory explains the paradoxes of quantum physics perfectly. But it introduces a new faster-than-light wave and some hidden mechanism for deciding where it goes -- to create an 'implicate order'. That's quite a lot of extra baggage, and scientists like to travel light. Worse still, Bohm went on to become a mystic, identifying his 'implicate order' with Eastern spirituality and spawning books like Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics . That's heretical behaviour in the eyes of any decent physicist.

What happens to the cat? It's either dead or alive, of course!

[Consistent Histories

The Consistent Histories interpretation, put forward by Robert Griffiths in 1984, works backwards from the result of an experiment, arguing that only a few possible histories are consistent with the rules of quantum mechanics. It's an interesting idea but not very popular because it still doesn't explain how a particle can go through two slits and interfere with itself. Roland Omns, in The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (1994) wrote down 80 equations in a single chapter and came to the conclusion that the 'consistent histories' interpretation was pretty much the same as Copenhagen, with a few knobs on.

What happens to the Cat? Again, you're not supposed to ask.

Alternate Histories

The Alternate Histories Interpretation is quite different, being similar to the Many-Worlds Interpretation, but with the insistence that only the actual outcome is the real world and the ones we're not in don't actually exist. Unfortunately this gets us right back to their being some kind of 'collapse'.

What happens to the cat? Again, you're not supposed to ask.

Time Reversibility

Richard Feynman (1918-1988) was a genius who developed a new approach to quantum mechanics. He formalised its crowning achievement, Quantum Electrodynamics, which is the most accurate scientific theory ever devised. He also developed the Feynman Diagram, which represents the interaction of two particles as the exchange of a third particle. This diagram has time on one axis and space on the other and the interaction can be viewed as happening both in forward and in reverse time.

An electron, on its way from point A to point B, can bump into a photon. In the diagram this can be drawn as sending it backwards not just in space, but also in time. Then it bumps into another photon, which sends it forward in time again, but in a different direction in space. In this way, it can be in two places at once.

There is little doubt that a Feynman diagram offers the easiest way to predict the results of a subatomic experiment. Many physicists have seen the power of this tool and taken the next step, arguing that reverse time travel is what actually happens in reality. Victor Stenger of the University of Hawaii argues strongly for this ontology in his forthcoming book. Of course, for a layman, it is hard to understand why a photon bounces around in such a way that it appears in two slits at once.

What happens to the Cat? It is both dead and alive simultaneously. We don't see this because of the macroscopic 'measurement problem'.

Transactional Interpretation

Like Stenger's, John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation relies on the fundamental time-symmetry of the universe. He argues that particles perform a kind of 'handshake' in the course of interacting. One sends out a wave forward in time, and another sends one out backwards in time.

What happens to the Cat? Ermm...

Gremlins

A new interpretation, presented for the first time here, is that there are little green gremlins hovering around, going backwards and forwards in time, shaking hands and collapsing with mirth as they poke and prod subatomic particles in a way they calculate most likely to confuse us. This explains all of the observed experimental results, but it does introduce gremlins, and the need for a further theory about why they should want to confuse us. Using the principle of Ockham's razor, this interpretation will probably not find much popularity among the scientific community although it may be the basis for a new religion. Watch this space.

What happens to the Cat? Depends on what the gremlins think will confuse us most.
 
There's a good summary of Ark's views here:

http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/intro02.htm

Essentially you have the many-worlds and transactional interpretation mentioned in Galaxia2002's post. A transaction (like an observation) chooses one of the many paths. There's always a particle. The wave is really a wave of probabilities for different paths. The weird part for most is the idea of choosing a path that goes back into the past. The cat is both dead and alive, you may later have the chance to pick which one to observe; or the photon went through both slots but you may later have the chance to pick which one to observe. For relativity, this future effects past structure shows up as extra dimensions and dimensions that are loops.

6th density being massless perhaps "see" their whole path instead of just the present transaction point and can choose to branch off at any point on their path. 4th density would be more like us with variable physicality so they would kind of just perhaps use their better technology to do more things with transactions. If left to ourselves, we in 3D might eventually destroy ourselves as Ark mentioned in this link; might only take one guy with the right technology.

7D might not even be quantum as we know it at all. I kind of just think of it as information where all the bits are connected to each other, you don't have to do any transactions to get anywhere, it's all there all at once (or something like that). We are perhaps like 7th density with a bunch of paths blocked off.
 
Wow, thanks for the info. Had read The Cassiopaean Experiment last year and will reread it in its entire again. Did reread Ark's statement and that all made a lot of sense to me. We either can already go back and forth through time and cancel it all out by negation or we would be in oblivion. So really it does not matter to think upon this to much because we can never really know. We just can be the observer and/or be observed and what happens, happens. At least with the aid of people like Gurdjieff, Laura & Ark, SOTT and the people here, etc... to help us along, we may get a better understanding of this all.


Still this is a fantastic wonder. Will do some more research and see if it all sets in a bit better.

When we all get to 6D we can say to ourselves, aha!
 
The collapsing of the matter wave as a by-product of observation reminds me of something I experienced a few years ago...sometime around 2003 or so. I noticed that occasionally, for a few brief minutes, things appeared as though I was looking at them through two sets of eyes...two sets of eyes that were a few feet apart. I could see the object I was looking at, but was also aware that there was a second view, in one case, of an entertainment center. I was standing in front and to the left of center of it, but looking at it, I could see around the right side, along the right side, to the wall. Just to verify that my eyes weren't going wonky or walleyed, I stepped to the right a few steps until I could see the "other angle" clearly, and it was nowhere near where I was originally standing.

Totally confused, I meditated and contacted my spirit adviser and asked about this phenomenon. I was told that there are entities, called "Observers", whose entire purpose is to "lock down" reality. I didn't think to ask what density they were, because I didn't have any concept of "density" at the time...I just assumed that they were amorphous, bodiless entities. Now, I think maybe they were 6D, but that's just a guess.

I was also told that, at this particular point in time-space, there was an event of great significance happening, and there were more "Observers" than usual in the vicinity. More observers meant more points-of-view in which reality was being "locked down"...and somehow I was tapping into the different POV's. I wish I wrote down the exact time this was, I apologize, the best I can come up with is "sometime around 2003". To this day, I have no idea what it was, exactly, that drew so much attention, but when I saw the clip, and the matter wave collapsed due to observation, it all made sense in a flash what my adviser meant by "lock down".
 
In the Seth books by Jane Roberts the idea that two people or observers can experience two different realties while still being able to interact with each other is put forward. This got me thinking that the double slit experiment could be used to find out objectively whether this is the case. I call this experiment: The double-blind double-slit experiment.

The idea is to use the fact that in the double slit experiment, if the particles are observed passing through the slits then they form two lines on the screen, whereas if they're not observed passing through the slits then an interference pattern forms on the screen.

The experiment goes like this: two experimenters, Alice and Bob, go into the lab to perform the double slit experiment at the request of Dr X. Alice believes that in this experiment the particles are going to be observed as to which slit they pass through, while Bob believes that they are not going to observe which slit the particles pass through. Afterwards they both give their results to Dr X, whose interested in whether they observed the same pattern.

Provided that this experiment is theoretically and practically sound I think one of two things could happen:

1) They observe two different patterns.
2) They both observe the pattern as if the particles had been observed going through the slits.

If 1) occurs then this means that it is possible for two people to observe two different realties, even while they are able to interact. This would give some credit to what Seth talks about I think.

If 2) occurs then this means that it's possible that someone performing the double slit experiment might observe the pattern on the screen as if the particles were being observed going through the slits, even though that isn't part of the experiment. This would give away the presence of another observer.

I think either way this could shed some light on the "correct" way to interpret quantum mechanics. I also think that this experiment cold be whittled down to something simpler. I'd also like to point out that this experiment requires trust in Alice and Bob to report what they saw truthfully, which means you can never be 100% sure of what's really going on.
 
I'm new to the Cs but an old hand with particle physics. So, I may be wrong about this, but I'd speculate that the 2d, 3d, 4d etc. beings spoken of around here refer to actual higher planes of existence, rather than the compound dimensions found physics or the hyper-dimensions speculated upon in geometry.

In quantum physics, in order to make accurate predictions about particle behavior, it is sometimes essential to work with as many as twelve dimensions. However, everything other than the three we are familiar with (time is not one of the dimensions for these purposes) are so tightly folded up below the atomic scale, that they are irrelevant to physics problems on our scale.

In mathematics, we get new dimensions by drawing right angles in space to the previous dimension. (Time is not a dimension for these purposes, either. The math works out just fine, but the visualization is somewhat daunting. I can sort of understand a hyper-cube, but a hexa-cube is totally alien to me.

In metaphysics, we finally use time as the forth dimension. The fifth dimension is the space between various timelines. The sixth is the overarching landscape through which the timelines roam. The seventh, the universe as a whole. The eighth, the other universes and the lines that connect them. The ninth, the overarching landscape of the multiverse. Etc..

At least, those are three alternate ways to view multiple dimensions.
 
Some may find this interesting. Niels Bohr's coat of arms.


http://www.numericana.com/arms/bohr.htm
 
When you do try to take Copenhagen seriously you come to the conclusion that consciousness and particle physics are inter-related, and you rush off to write a book called The Dancing Wu-Li Masters.

That's what I was thinking about. How does the results of the double-slit experiment NOT reveal a link between consciousness and matter. Well I guess this also could give rise to the many worlds hypothesis as well. Hmm.
 
maybe this has not a relation to your post but is also interesting :3

_http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_multiverse05.htm
 
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