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No, it doesn't as explained in the paper I linked to and in the video by Sean Carroll.
originally posted by: cooperton
Observation of the slit (via a measuring device) is the variable that determines whether or not a photon behaves like a wave or a particle. This leads towards the conclusion that it is human consciousness, with the extension of a human-made observation device.
The paper is technical and I've had many years of training in physics to understand it which can't be duplicated in a single post, so if you can't understand it that's fine but for your request of simplification, that's what the video by Sean Carrol was for, to explain that anything can be an observer if it causes a wave function collapse, and that can include non-man-made things like a rock, as Carroll explained. Here is some further explanation from a less technical source than the technical paper:
Explain in your own words using quotes from the paper.
As Carroll mentioned in the video on observers, a non-human made rock can make an "observation" of a particle such as when a photon strikes it, the photon is no longer in a superposition of states after striking the rock. They also mention they are aware of people trying to imply some magic of consciousness to take advantage of the complexity of the topic and resulting confusion:
Q: There's a lot of confusion between the uncertainty principle and the observer effect, leading to the new age, nonsensical claim that we can willfully create the world around us by altering our thoughts. So, to be clear (because there's a lot of conflicting info out there), when we talk about "observing" an electron and thereby changing its state, we're talking about using equipment to measure it, not simply observing with the naked eye, right?
- Ian (age 29)
California
A:
Right, we have no indication at all that interaction with conscious beings (e.g. us) does something different than interaction with any other large object in which some record is left of the results. Of course, the only events we are aware of are those of which we are aware, but we can leave that worry for the philosophers. At any rate, the structure of quantum mechanics, in particular its violation of the Bell Inequalities, would run into big trouble if the random outcomes of quantum events were influenced by any local variable, including human will.
So you're right on all your key points...
Follow-Up #7: Unconscious observers
Q:
Has the double-slit experiment ever been done with animals, birds, insects or other creatures "watching"/"not watching", AND also without any man-made recording devices turned on ("watching")? If so, what were the results of having ONLY non-human conscious beings "watching"/"not watching", who presumably don't even know that they are "watching"/"not watching" anything?
- Marshall Curtis (age 59)
Bellevue WA USA
A:
Any measurement process that has a permanent effect on the system of interest causes the collapse of the wavefunction to a particular state, regardless of whether/how the results are interpreted by a human being.
As is common in cases of confusion, some people use the occasion to claim to be the center of the universe and to have magical powers. Other people buy it.
We already see large diversity in appearance and genetics, and the selective breeding has probably been happening less than 40,000 years. Try to think of the divergence continuing on longer time scales and for an ordinary person it should be apparent how this may lead to diversified species given enough time and generations, but I fear your bias will prevent you from seeing how much the diversity can increase on longer time scales.
But it will always remain the same essential thing. It will never become something other than the essential form that makes it a wolf.
Biologists claim to have observed speciation in the laboratory:
Despite millions of generations of attempting to evolve a fruit fly, they still remain fruit flies.
Should Meyer have added "no one except for ATS member cooperton"?
Biologists have discovered that the evolution of a new species can occur rapidly enough for them to observe the process in a simple laboratory flask...
“With these experiments, no one can doubt whether speciation occurs,” Meyer added.
Interaction with the environment is sufficient to collapse the wave function. When Quantum Mechanics was developed about a century ago we knew about the so called "measurement problem" but we've made some progress in the last century understanding how decoherence works. I don't know if this will make sense since it's from an advanced course in quantum mechanics, but it explains how the wave functions can be collapsed by the environment without any particular measurement being made, in effect even the molecules of air can play the role of observer, or rocks or plenty of other things without any consciousness.
originally posted by: sapien82
then how can an inanimate object like a rock act as an observer if it was not designed to measure anything
Decoherence attempts to explain the transition from quantum to classical by analyzing the interaction of a system with a measuring device or with the environment. It is convenient to imagine a quantum mechanical particle or system of particles as an isolated system floating in empty space. This simplification may be fine in some cases but in the real world there is no such thing as an isolated system. Typically a particle in flight will collide with air molecules or will emit thermal radiation that gets absorbed by the environment. Any interaction with the environment leads to an entanglement between the particle's state and the environment's state. As the entanglement diffuses throughout the environment the total state can no longer be separated into the direct product of a particle state and an environment state. What was once a superposition of particle states becomes a superposition of particle X environment states. At this point the particle ceases to act as if it were in a quantum superposition of states, instead acting as a statistical ensemble of states.
The end result of the decoherence process is that the particle will appear to have collapsed in a manner described by the Born probability law...
Decoherence tends to happen on an extremely fast timescale in most situations. The decoherence rate depends on several factors including temperature, uncertainty in position, and number of particles surrounding the system. Temperature affects the rate of blackbody radiation each radiated photon will interact with the environment. Uncertainty in position tends to create a wide range of interaction energies and thus a rapid spread in vector components. The number of particles in the surroundings affects the rate at which interactions can happen. The rule of thumb is that decoherence occurs when the environment gains enough information to learn something about an observable. In any case it takes only a few interactions before a system has become completely decoherent. A single collision with an air molecule is enough to cause a chain reaction of decoherence as the collision molecule in turn collides with its neighbors.
And even if the Egg came before the Chicken or Vice Versa there is still only one chicken in the end.
Galliformes, the class of bird that chickens belong to, is directly linked to the survival of birds when all other dinosaurs went extinct. It was water or ground-dwelling fowl much like modern partridges that survived the fireball wiping out all tree-dwelling birds with the rest of the dinosaurs.[30] Some of these evolved into the modern galliformes, of which domesticated chickens are a main model. They are descended primarily from the red junglefowl (Gallus gallus) and are scientifically classified as the same species.[31] As such, they can and do freely interbreed with populations of red junglefowl.[31] Recent genetic analysis has revealed that at least the gene for yellow skin was incorporated into domestic birds through hybridization with the grey junglefowl (G. sonneratii).[32]
Chicken
originally posted by: sapien82
then how do we account for the large variation in species of life which share most of the DNA to a certain degree
saying that chromosomal fusion doesn't happen , what is the alternative , without saying GOD or aliens
originally posted by: TheSkunk
a reply to: sapien82
Pretty certain that I asked if you have one offspring that changed species How do you get a male and female from that one offspring with different Chromsomes and that is a different Species?
A close look at our genome and the genome of our close relatives reveals that we didn’t. We just combined a couple of them. Every now and then, chromosomes fuse. This fusion occurs as sperm and eggs develop, as pairs of chromosomes fold over each other and swap chunks of DNA. Sometimes two different chromosomes grab onto each other and then fail to separate. Scientists have observed both humans and mammals with fused chromosomes. Chromosomes typically have distinctive stretches of DNA in their center and at their ends. From time to time, scientists will find an individual that’s short a chromosome, but one of the chromosomes it retains now has an odd structure, with chromosome endings near the middle and other peculiar features. This might seem like a fantastic mutation–something like a human and a horse being joined into a centaur. Remarkably, however, fused chromosomes are real, and there are surprising number of normal, healthy people carrying them.
originally posted by: TheSkunk
a reply to: peter vlar
They are fused side by side. Not mixed up to create a separate new chromosome.