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lessdazed comments on That cat: not dead and alive - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: DavidPlumpton 30 August 2011 08:23AM

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Comment author: lessdazed 30 August 2011 09:14:04AM 1 point [-]

So sometime after the experiment starts we magically stop the clock on the wall of the universe.

Upvoted for using the word "magically" as a label for "in a way such that I don't understand how such a thing would even be possible".

but the present has an amplitude contribution from multiple pasts.

I think it's the other way around, and the past was set up for multiple futures.

the particle is unambiguously in one position (let's say the left slit). Now any observer will have no way of knowing this at the time, and if they did detect the particle's position in any way it would change the configuration and there would be no interference banding.

If there's a particle, there's no banding in the future. If there's banding, there wasn't a particle in the past.

I think. This is less to instruct or discuss and more to make a record so I won't be able to avoid the fact I was wrong.

Comment author: Oscar_Cunningham 30 August 2011 10:01:31AM 1 point [-]

If there's a particle, there's no banding in the future. If there's banding, there wasn't a particle in the past.

At any given point in the configuration space there is a particle, but since we're not looking at it (and it's not interacting with anything else) no decoherence occurs, and so we still get an interference pattern.

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