Double Slit Experiment Revisited

Welcome to The God's Eye View Podcast.

I'm your host Trevor, Clinical Neuroscience Researcher by Day.

More of philosophy, fringe science, religion, spirituality, Christianity by night.

I try to be an explorer of Christianity all the time through the best of my ability, but

anyway, today we're talking about the double slit experiment.

And I hope that doesn't make you roll your eyes because I have noticed something lately like

the double slit experiment is sort of like maybe played out. You could say like a lot of people

are tired of hearing about it and people tend to have pretty strong opinions about it. I see people

either say it's absolutely meaningless, not meaningless, but that it doesn't really say anything

special about existence or consciousness. It's just a physical experiment, very repeatable,

very empirical, but maybe overinterpreted, overinterpreted, sorry, I didn't get a great sleep

last night. Anyway, so though I would say that's sort of the skeptical camp. They're like,

yeah, it's cool. It teaches us interesting things. It helps us make predictions, but it's not

magic. It doesn't mean we live in a computer, you know. Then you have, I would say the camp that

sort of the woo-woo camp or like the overinterpreters who think, oh, it's clear evidence that you know

matters in the mind of the beholder, like the power of intention, the secret. If you will it

will happen. If you believe there's a cat in the box, then there's a cat in the box, you know,

I mean, people really take it to extreme conclusions like that you can manifest reality and stuff.

I am in neither of those camps. I'm sort of in a sort of middle ground and I want to share that

perspective with you a bit today, but first a reminder that this episode and all episodes

are sponsored brought to you by the God's Eye View book. If you go on amazon.com or audible

and search God's Eye View, you'll see a book by me Trevor with the big black hole on the cover.

There are a few other books with similar names, so you have to find

the one with the black hole, the black book by Trevor. And that's me. And so you can download that

to listen to or you can purchase that on amazon. Anyway, I talk about this quite a bit in the book.

And if you want like the details and the cool history of quantum physics and Copenhagen and stuff,

that's that's in there. Not in a not in like a history class way, just kind of an overview,

but it is interesting. This argument these arguments that we're going on between

Niels Bohr and Einstein and Heisenberg and Trotinger and on one side you had Heisenberg and

Bohr and a bunch of other people who they really felt like this new world of quantum mechanics

like really changed everything about the way we view physical matter. They very much saw this

as supportive of the creator of creation, of evidence of just the mysterious properties of our

universe that don't really conform to Newtonian physics. And then you had Einstein and Trotinger

and these guys more so and more of a realist camp, you know, they believe particles had to find

properties in that if we were having a hard time measuring them, that was just a human limitation.

And so if you're already lost, let's let's talk about the experiment a bit and what it what it

told us. So this is a multi-century old experiment that was first done by Thomas Young.

And this is part of the problem when people say double slit experiment, they could be referring to

one of hundreds of different versions of this experiment. So what I'm most interested in for

today's purposes is it's sort of a classic double slit experiment where you're shooting

particles, if you can call them that, of matter through a screen that has two vertical slits in it.

And you're capturing their impacts on a reactive film or sensor, some distance behind that screen.

And you can just Google double, double slit experiment and you'll most likely see something like that.

And what they found is if you shoot one particle at a time and you measure which slit that particle

travels through, particles behave exactly how you would expect like particles, like bullets,

BBs. So if you aim, you know, a BB gun at these two slits from far away, there's a bit of variability

in the trajectory of the BB coming out of the gun. So sometimes it will go through the left slit,

sometimes the right, sometimes it will bounce off, it will miss. And you're going to get two

vertical bars of, you know, taking the bullet analogy further, like two bullet hole patterns

in the shape of the slits that the bullets are traveling through. It's like a stencil.

Like a spray paint stencil, it makes sense obvious, nothing particularly interesting.

Now what is interesting, if you don't measure which slits those particles travel through,

they actually stop being particles, they become waves.

And my kids are talking in the background, sorry, but the reason we know their ways is that

we see an interference pattern. And what this means is this quote unquote particle that we're

emitting out of this particle gun, now whether this is an electron or an actual like something that's

indisputably matter, like a big ball of carbon. Now when I say big, I mean like, I don't know,

I think the biggest they've done is 2000 atoms. So it's still not visible to the naked eye, but it's

obviously a particle. Anyway, that particle we shoot out of the gun, it somehow travels through

both slits at once and interferes with itself. And it creates this interference pattern.

It behaves like a wave, that's important part. So you know, the conclusion is,

if you are measuring which slit the particle passes through, it behaves like a particle.

If you are not measuring which slit the particle is passing through, it behaves like a wave.

And this has been interpreted a million different ways. There's sort of two exciting ideas,

and then, you know, just sort of like a reductionist skeptical interpretation that I think

has problems, but I think we should consider it also. So one interpretation is this sort of

Schrodinger's Cat idea, which is that any time you have a particle that could go through one or

the other slit, and when you, once you measure it, you force it to assume a possible reality.

I'm kind of applying the Schrodinger's Cat odd experiment to the double slit. It's not a perfect

analogy. I'm doing my best, not a physicist. And so the idea is that there's sort of this,

this particle that sort of exists in a superposition where it travels through both slits until we

force it into a real tangible reality. Or another word of thinking about it is we kind of pull it

into our universe. And so by looking at it, by measuring which slit it travels through,

let's say it goes through the right slit, that means in some other universe, it went through the left

slit. If that sounds kind of crazy to you, that's because you're a rational person with common sense.

This is kind of a crazy idea, right? But it's an increasingly popular scientific idea

for how to deal with superposition, which is this idea that particles don't really exist

in a specific place and time until we interact with them.

Now in sort of popular science or sort of fringe science, and including in my book, I maybe make

the mistake of saying that it's conscious observation that pulls this matter into reality.

This is closer to what's called the Copenhagen interpretation, which is

matter doesn't really, and this is not exactly what the Copenhagen interpretation says. I'm just

trying to explain sort of a layman's kind of overview of one exciting interpretation,

which is that you being aware of matter is what pulls it into a physical existence.

And this is where the computer metaphor works perfectly because

you know, if you have a character, you're playing a world of warcraft, you're looking at a castle,

right? From your character's perspective, that castle is physical. He can walk up, he can't walk

through the wall. He has to touch the door handle, open the door handle. Everything is very physical

to him. As a physical appearance, sounds his ears, his hand can't pass through. The wall,

the matter is real as density, but you and I know that really that world is completely

pretend and it's made of bits. It's made of information spinning on a hard disk.

And his frame of reference pulls it into his world. There could be a castle behind him.

The castle is not rendered though. It's just firmly on the hard drive. But if he turns around,

the graphic processor and the CPU, they pull it into his dimension, his plane of existence.

So does that mean it's not real? Well, not really. It's real from his perspective.

But its reality in a format that he can interact with is dependent on him interacting with it.

And so this is really, I mean, this is not that fringe of a theory. There's a lot of people

that feel that this is basically how the world works. But there are a lot of people.

I would say maybe a bigger portion. It's tough to say because, you know, physicists, they want to

maintain credibility. They don't go around advertising their beliefs, right? So it's really

tough to get a good sense. I would say the biggest group of people is that no matter is matter,

Newtonian physics makes sense. But at the subatomic or even, you know, small,

you know, because it's actually much bigger than subatomic now that's gone through this experiment.

Like I said, 2000 atoms behave the same way as electron, which is wild. But at this very small

level stuff acts strangely. And it isn't so much our conscious observation that pulls

what is normally like information and energy into a physical, observable state. It's not our

observation. It's interacting with it physically. And so the premise is, well, you know, how does

a camera work? Because you have to use a camera to determine which slit this pass is through, right?

And especially at the level of the electron, you're basically, you're like trying to bounce a

photon off of the electron. And so maybe, you know, electrons exist in a state of superposition,

but then you hit them with the photon and that causes them to collapse into a definite spot.

This is totally reasonable. It might actually be correct, but there are some problems.

One is that, well, it doesn't matter where you put the sensors. You can put the sensors after the

split. And so now we have a time issue. We have like a retro causality violation, because if we're

measuring which slit the electron pass through after it already passed through the slit,

and our interference of it shouldn't affect what happened in the past. So that's one problem.

But even then you could say, well, maybe it did somehow pass through both slits, but then you

collapsed it in a specific location after the slits. Maybe again, not if it says we would need to

get someone to explain that to us. And we'd be happy to have that person on if you're listening.

There are other issues. So they've tried to do passive measurement experiments where

they position the gun. So it's much more likely to go through one slit. And that,

based on the time from the emittance to the film, they can determine which slit it passed through.

And so they can determine that it went through both or neither without an actual sensor.

But once they have a way to determine which slit it passed through, it behaves like a particle.

Something like that. I forget the exact experiment. If someone wants to look that up,

that'd be great. And then there's a bunch of different versions of this. None of them are

really definitive one way or the other. I mean, some clearly something really mysterious is going on.

My position is a little different. It's a little nuance. And my position is that

that sort of skeptical hyper rationalist perspective that this really has nothing to do with

consciousness. It's all about measurement. My rejoinder to that is there's really not,

that's really not a distinction. It's kind of a distinction without a difference.

Meaning conscious observation fully depends on measurement. And measurement depends on observation.

I mean, the two things really are the same. If you think about, if you think about the human body,

I mean, we are a sensor suite being observed by an observer that we call consciousness.

And so our eyes are sensors, our ears are sensors. Our skin is filled with sensors touch.

We have different sensors for different frequencies of vibration in our skin. We have temperature

receptors. We have pain receptors. We have wrinkles discs for tactile pressure. We have

corp, you know, piscini corpus coals for deep pressure. Like we are literally just with giant

measurement machine. And so the mystery though is like, who's experiencing those measurements?

That's really the mystery. That's what consciousness says. But none of this really

does anything to refute the idea that is measurement or observation because they are the same thing.

I mean, what is measurement without an observer?

First of all, can something be measured without an observer? Well, no. I mean,

you need to agree on what the measurement means. You need to devise the measurement system.

And then also the result is meaningless without observation and interpretation.

So they're fully interdependent.

Now somebody could say, well, okay, well, it has more to do with,

it's more to do with interaction between energy and energy, really, in this case, right?

Because an electron unobserved exists in a state of superposition, a photon unobserved exists

in a state of superposition. And so by forcing one to interact with the other, you cause the

collapse. But again, forcing one to interact with the others difficult to disentangle from conscious

manipulation of something. I mean, maybe someone smarter than me can help me understand that.

The point is, I'm not really sure if it matters for the Copenhagen interpretation.

I mean, I don't think people like the word consciousness because it feels kind of woo.

But it is a real phenomenon that we should endeavor to understand, right? So,

you know, whatever makes people comfortable, the point is,

the point is, matter is not what we think it is. Exactly. Not exactly. Even if you take the most

skeptical, most rationalist view of the double-set experiment, you still have to acknowledge that

matter when it's not being interacted with or observed exists in like a probabilistic wave form

of possible locations. And that's since we don't really know what matter is.

And we have to admit, I mean, we don't have, I guess we don't have to. You can dig your heel in

or come up with a better argument. But I think reasonable people can admit that one of the best

explanations is this information theory idea, which is that just like a computer.

There is some information system that determines what the world should look like

to a conscious observer should they choose to observe it.

I think this is fundamental. And I don't think it's difficult to see how well this resonates

with sort of these ideas of creation or supernatural beings. I mean, what are you in relationship to

a computer character? I mean, you exist outside of his space or time.

He can't know that you exist really. He can look for signs. He can look around at

his created world and say someone must have created this. Why is it here? Why is there something

rather than nothing? And you can imagine, pretend you had little AIs inside of a computer game,

and they have some cognitive capacity and let's even say somehow they're conscious. I don't know

how that would be possible because I don't really believe that AI can be conscious in the same way

that you and I are. But let's say they are for the sake of argument. You can imagine

like developing science, right? And studying the rules of the world that you built for them

and just insisting that there's a naturalistic rationalistic explanation for everything. They

quantify this, you know, the force of gravity. It's 9.8 meters per second squared. They quantify

all these laws and they would be correct. Like these Areodite scientists who live in this

little creative world, they'd be right. They would be studying the rules of the universe that we

built for them. And there would be no evidence that we built it. There would be no direct evidence.

There would just be signs. There'd be deep questions like, wow, this place just seems custom made

for our existence. You know that the force of gravity and the speed of light and the strong force

and the weak nuclear force, like they're all, they all seem to be tuned to our existence.

And you know, inside of our set, let's say we even gave themselves, right? Inside of ourselves,

there's like an information system. It's incredible. It's like this was set up just for us,

right? Just for our planet and life to emerge on our planet. That would be as close as they could get.

And what's funny is that's where we're at, you know? That's the world you and I live it.

Now, I mean, not the preach here. So you can turn it off if you're not interested in that, but

you know, there is one religious worldview. I don't know for certain if it's right,

but there is one religious worldview where that creator stepped in to the game, right? It took

physical form. Like if you were I were to step in with virtual reality and assume the body of a

character in a game we made and tell people, listen, this isn't all there is. This place is made

for you. And you need to be better to each other because pain is real and pain hurts me as much

as it hurts you. And to really understand your plight, the plight of the people I've made,

who didn't ask to be made, to really understand what suffering is like, I'm going to suffer, right?

I'm going to pay this price. I don't know. It's kind of cool. Listen, I totally get that there's

there's faith involved just like there would be in this game analogy. Like if we made this world

for these little conscious agents, it would go the exact same way. How could it not? How could they

find evidence? You know, they can't see the zeros and ones on a spinning hard drive.

That spinning hard drive, even though it describes their existence, it exists outside of their

dimension. These are they're completely isolated from it. Just as we are completely isolated

from the information that encodes out of world, except clearly it's not a perfect analogy

because we have with science, with empirical evidence, been able to conduct the experiments that

sort of it's like we're just at the edge. It's like we're at the edge where like something is

it right here. Something doesn't make sense, but we can't quite get all the way down to the level

of the zeros and ones, but we get pretty close. You know, especially now that we're talking about

qubits instead of bits, like there's this idea that societies tend to describe the creator and

creation based on their current technology, right? Like back in the Enlightenment, people talked

about the universe like a clock because clocks were like one of the most

the highest levels of technology back then, right? And now we're using computers to describe it.

I am at least. And I fully acknowledge that the analogy is not quite right. It's not perfect.

I'm just saying it's the best analogy we can think of today and 100 years from now, you know,

maybe quantum computing is more relevant. Maybe it's not. I don't know. I really have no idea or

opinion. The point is, I don't think it's an accident that we see that this information theory

idea and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, I don't think it's an accident that

it rhymes so well with this idea of a creator. Well, I won't go that far, but with this idea that

conscious observation renders matter into existence. And so, you know, it's no wonder we have ideas like

the multiverse theory. Actually, sorry, I misspoke like the simulation hypothesis.

You know, the simulation hypothesis fits and a lot of evidence supports it, but the fundamental

question is, well, what's the difference between the simulation hypothesis and

and God creating the universe? I mean, there really is no distinction. It's a reluctance

to embrace that type of vocabulary as all it is. And then the alternative to that is the

multiverse theory. And the multiverse theory is sort of like a way to remove God.

And you know, maybe it's correct. I doesn't seem correct. It seems very far-fetched. I think

there's a very little way less evidence for that than this other interpretation, but the point

is it's a way to apply evolutionary theory, which is this idea to explain fine tuning, like how

can our world seem so custom fit for life? It's that, well, it's kind of a survivor bias. Like

it looks fine-tuned for life because we happen to live in a universe that is fine-tuned for life.

And those universes that are fine-tuned for life, life never emerges. And so there's never

anyone around to ask this question. And so maybe there's a certain percentage of universes that are

fine-tuned for life, and of course, life can only exist in those, and that's why you're in one

that looks like that. It's just it's kind of like a way of just like waving it away. Like the big

questions like, why are we here? Why is there something rather than nothing? Although it doesn't

really answer that question, to be honest. But there is one explanation that answers all those tough

questions, in my opinion. And I think you know what that is. All right, everybody, thanks for listening

to the God's Eye View podcast. Please buy the book if you're interested in this topic, because this

is really, this topic is really what the book's about. You can buy it on Amazon, God's Eye View,

or you can buy it on Audible. There are a couple of mistakes in the audiobook. I read a couple

sentences twice. Don't sue me. Don't leave me a bad review. You've been warned. But it shouldn't

affect the listening experience too much. Please email me at God's Eye View book at gmail.com.

Talk to you soon. Bye. Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing. Victory Lane? Yeah, it's even better with

Chamba by my side. Race to ChambaCasino.com. Let's Chamba. No purchase necessary, VTW Group,

voidware prohibited by law, CTNCs, 21 plus, sponsored by Chamba Casino.