Alex McColgan
speaker
29,301 appearances
104 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 6d ago
Alex McColgan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 68 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 11.
Appearances
Somehow, the single photon, which was leaving the detector like a particle and was arriving at its destination as a particle, was apparently in some way travelling through both slits at once, enough to then interfere with itself on the other side like a wave.
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If light was just a particle, then when it went through the slits, you wouldn't see this pattern.
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You would only see two blobs of light, one for particles that went through the slit, and one for particles that went through the other one.
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Here was the interference pattern with its multiple lines of light disproving that.
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Scientists tried to pin light down.
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They set up the experiment, but this time with two more detectors at the slit, so that scientists could observe whether it was indeed passing through both at the same time.
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It didn't.
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But at the same time, it stopped creating an interference pattern on the furthermost detector.
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And from this, scientists began to realise something.
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Light cared about being observed.
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To be clear, it didn't matter whether it was observed by a human eye or a machine.
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The moment light was interacted with in some way by any particle,
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which is the only way we can detect light, there's no other way to observe it, it started behaving differently than if it hadn't been detected at all.
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It was as if light was snapping into focus any time the universe asked it the question of where exactly it was, when without the scrutiny, it appeared to relax into something a little more nebulous.
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Bizarrely enough, this seems to imply that light actually is more like a wave of probability rather than any discrete particle or wave.
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Anytime it was asked where it was, it confidently provided a definitive answer.
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It was at this point on the detector.
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It was not at any other point.
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But with no one checking up on it, light seems to be travelling in all directions at once, in accordance with certain probabilities.
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If you ran the experiment multiple times, you could quantify those probabilities, discovering that it was more likely to be on the bands of the interference pattern and less likely to be in the gaps.
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Showing 2101–2120 of 29,301 · page 106 of 1466
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