ASMSG Scifi Fantasy Paranormal Emagazine August 2014 | Page 7

SFP Indie Issue 3
other side capable of telling the differentce.
The photon could still theoretically
“choose” which slit (or both) it would go
through, but they would be able to tell
which one by its polarization when it
arrived on the detector.
Sneaky. But outsmarting Mother Nature is
not an easy task.
Much to their surprise, when they sent one
photon at a time toward the slits where it
was polarized the interference pattern did
not emerge!
Whoa!
Instead, they got random spots of light
which indicated individual particles.
Polarizing the light did not destroy its
ability to build interference patterns so this
didn’t make sense. The results implied that
when they set things up so that they’d know
whether the photon went through one slit
or the other that the individual photons lost
their right to choose and behaved like a
particle. In other words, the probability
wave function had collapsed when the final
result would be determined.
In other words, the photon can change
from a wave to a particle when someone is
trying to figure out exactly what it’s going
to do. When someone is watching, it
behaves like a particle that not only goes

through one opening or the other but loses
its wave properties as well.
Say what?
Back then the expression WTF? didn’t exist
yet, but something along those lines was
definitely what was going through
numerous scientific minds. By all
appearances, if someone was watching, i.e.
measuring the outcome, then the
probability wave collapsed and the photons
acted like particles.
Thinking perhaps this was because they
were polarizing the photons before they
went through one slit or the other, even
though they knew that didn’t stop the light
from forming an interference pattern, they
rigged things up to determine which slit it
had gone through afterwards. Much to their
surprise they got the same result as before,
a rain of itinerant particles, as if each
photon had either known in advance or
perhaps even went back in time, deciding
how to behave.
This introduced the concept of an observer
affecting
the
outcome.
Suddenly
consciousness was part of the mix, or at
least seemed to be since there was no other
explanation. Of course, physicists who deal
exclusively with the physical world were

less than enchanted by all this woo-woo
stuff. Thus began the philosophical notion
of whether or not a tree that fell in the
forest made a sound if no one was there to
hear it. May I remind you that these are
very intelligent people we’re dealing with
here and while some of them may not be
wrapped to tight as they walk the geniusinsanity interface; nonetheless, they are a
whole lot smarter than the rest of us.
Einstein called this “spooky action at a
distance” and didn’t believe it, even though
he was the one who theorized that energy
and matter were essentially the same as
expressed by his famous equation E=mc2.
To this day people are still arguing about
this aspect of quantum theory with
different conclusions. Is it possible that an
observer or some form of consciousness
can influence physical matter? Do we,
indeed, create our own reality?
What do you think?

Photos from Wikicommons and Pixabay

About the Author:
Marcha Fox is a prolific writer who has addressed a wide variety of subjects but her favorite
is science fiction. It began as a love of astronomy which eventually led to a bachelor of
science degree in physics from Utah State University followed by a 21 year career at NASA's
Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas where she held a variety of positions including
technical writer, engineer and eventually manager. Her NASA experiences included trips to
Cape Canaveral in Florida, visiting other NASA centers in Mississippi, Alabama and
Maryland as well as trips to the European Space Agency in The Netherlands but the most
memorable was the sad task of helping to recover space shuttle debris in East Texas
following the tragic Columbia accident in 2003.
Her Star Trails Tetralogy Series incorporates her knowledge of physics and space travel
within a family saga set on a primitive planet where survival is an ongoing struggle which is
further complicated by political intrigue.

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