The real double-slit quantum eraser they don't want you to know about! - Mander
The recent post [https://lemmy.ml/post/6683375] made me fear that a lot of you
are taking this “monkey looks at double-slits” meme, which was only ever
supposed to be a funny monkey meme, actually seriously. Honorable mention goes
to @[email protected] [/u/[email protected]], whose 12 posts
[https://lemmy.world/comment/4639453] on the topic, insisting that the quantum
eraser experiment (but not the delayed-choice quantum eraser!) proves that the
double slit is somehow bizarre, forced me to make my own meme. This meme
explains the (non-delayed choice) quantum eraser paper from
arXiv:quant-ph/0106078 [https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0106078] and the figures
are numbered to reference the paper. First of all, looking at the photons, you
the conscious intelligent monkey, MAKES NO DIFFERENCE. You can’t actually “see”
the photons going through a slit the way you could see say a bowling ball. The
only way to detect a photon is to absorb or reflect it, and if the photon is
getting absorbed by your eye that means it’s not going through the slit or
hitting the screen. The interference pattern stays visible on the screen WHETHER
OR NOT YOU LOOK AT IT. They’ve lied to you when they said the pattern changes
when you “look” at which slit it the photon goes through. What the physicists
actually do to measure the “which path” information is they put these circular
polarizer filters in front of the slits, one clockwise one counterclockwise.
Then the pattern disappears and you get this one single blob of density (Not
even double! Figure 3). This is because light polarized in opposite directions
cannot interfere with itself - wikipedia calls this the “Fresnel–Arago laws
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel%E2%80%93Arago_laws]”. In principle you
could have put a polarization detector in place of the screen and record which
way the light hitting it is polarized, which would tell you which slit the
photon must have went through. The physicists DON’T EVEN BOTHER DOING IT. The
fact alone that the light is polarized when it hits the screen is sufficient to
destroy the interference pattern. Well, NO SHIT. You put these giant 3D glasses
in front of the slits and you still expect to see interference? This is very
much a “mechanical interaction”, not some “non-obtrusive conscious observation”.
Everything that destroys coherence will ruin your quantum experiment! Mystery
solved! So what about the quantum eraser, @kromem will ask? Popular science has
created this myth that you can look at the screen and you can make the
interference pattern literally shimmer in and out of existence by just flipping
a switch, connected to second detector positioned elsewhere, turning it off and
on. An action at a distant place (the detector POL1 observing “twinned”
entangled photons created by this fancy nonlinear barium crystal before the
slits, Figure 1) changes whether light over here behaves as a particle or a
wave, right in front of your eyes. Spooky action at a distance, right? THIS
FUCKING DOESN’T HAPPEN. The monkey will see the single blob from Figure 3 and
only single blob, no matter whether it turns the second detector on or off! The
interference pattern will NEVER shimmer back into existence. The light never
switches between behaving like a wave and behaving like a particle. It always
behaves the same way, all the time, everywhere in the universe - like fucking
light! So what do the physicists actually fucking mean when they say the
interference pattern is “restored”? If you observe the photons hitting the
screen one at a time and you correlate them with simultaneous detections at
detector POL1, you can mark those events as either “yes coincidence” category A
or “no coincidence” category B. If you look at just all the category A events
(Figure 4) you will see an interference pattern, and just category B you will
see another (Figure 5). You cannot see these patterns by eye on the screen! You
have to use a computer to record the events individually and separate them, you
will only ever see a single blob by eye. The two interference patterns are
subsets of that blob. They were always part of it, their hills and valleys mesh
together into a single continuum. NO ONE EVER FUCKING EXPLAINED THIS. The
detector POL1 has a linear polarizer filter in front of it, so straight out the
gate it will not see 50% of the twinned photons at all, because they will get
stuck in the filter. Your category A can never match more than 50% of events. It
gets worse, since the non-linear crystal in reality has very low efficiency and
most photons going through are not twinned, so you cannot measure category B
directly. In the experiment they do it by rotating the filter 90°, which changes
the correlation to category B. In the meme I show them as if the crystal was
100% efficient. The delayed-choice quantum eraser works similarly - you only
ever see a single blob and can never see the interference pattern shimmer in and
out of existence. You need the correlation data from the second detector to
split the blob into two intermeshed interference patterns using a computer. The
Sabine video [https://piped.video/watch?v=RQv5CVELG3U] was the first one I’ve
ever seen that explains this correctly. Every other popular science video up to
that point has lied to me! Whatever you do, DO NOT watch the DR. QUANTUM video
with an open mind! (Not even going to link to it, @manual3204 linked it in the
other thread.) It’s from a documentary produced by a literal UFO cult to promote
their quantum woo woo, only masquerading as a quirky science video. It came out
in the early days of youtube, when its production and animation quality were
unusually high for its time, so it immediately became youtube’s go-to video for
double slit experiment. Copies of it remain highly ranked there even to present
day. It’s total baloney!