Alex McColgan
speaker
28,875 appearances
103 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 2d ago
Alex McColgan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 67 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 11.
Appearances
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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But any time a single photon of light was asked, it gave an answer that was 100% concrete.
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This is highlighted through something known as the 3-polariser paradox.
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Consider for a moment a pair of polarising sunglasses.
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Obviously, these reduce the amount of light that can pass through them, usually by about 50%, depending on the type of lens and the wavelength of light.
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They work by being formed of thin chains of molecules that run lengthways across the lens.
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Any light that oscillates in the same orientation as this lens gets absorbed.
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Showing 1681–1700 of 28,875 · page 85 of 1444
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