This may be physically true, but the theoretical framework of quantum mechanics does not require it. This is why this Dark Energy test is an interesting point to make. Most astrophysicists will probably agree that it sounds rather ridiculous, but the point is that the way Dark Energy is theoretically modeled by some people (e.g. a quantized scalarfield, probably in a false vacuum), the result is as the article describes.
That is to say, you need not postulate anything about how a photon interacts with a detector to still get the strange result in thedouble-slit experiment. Just say that the measurement collapses the wave function (e.g. fixes it to a definite eigenstate), and you get the results observed. So it isn't all in the details about the interaction- there's something going on that applies rather well in general to all quantum mechanical interactions.
To sum up, "observation changes things" is not a"mystification," but rather a way to generalize what's going on and develop a theoretical framework (which, incidentally, is quantitatively by far the best verified theory science has ever created).
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This may be physically true, but the theoretical framework of quantum mechanics does not require it. This is why this Dark Energy test is an interesting point to make. Most astrophysicists will probably agree that it sounds rather ridiculous, but the point is that the way Dark Energy is theoretically modeled by some people (e.g. a quantized scalarfield, probably in a false vacuum), the result is as the article describes.
That is to say, you need not postulate anything about how a photon interacts with a detector to still get the strange result in thedouble-slit experiment. Just say that the measurement collapses the wave function (e.g. fixes it to a definite eigenstate), and you get the results observed. So it isn't all in the details about the interaction- there's something going on that applies rather well in general to all quantum mechanical interactions.
To sum up, "observation changes things" is not a"mystification," but rather a way to generalize what's going on and develop a theoretical framework (which, incidentally, is quantitatively by far the best verified theory science has ever created).