The One Experiment that Broke Reality
Rock Your Reality: Part V
The Rock Your Reality series offers simple facts in order to snap you out of your stupor and ignite your curiosity.
Part Five: The One Experiment that Broke Reality
Ok. I’m about to talk physics. I’m about to use words like photon, wave function and interference pattern. And I really, really want you to follow along with me as best you can, because never before have stuffy scientists in lab coats and questionable hair nets rocked our reality with such force.
This reality-bender is called the Double Slit Experiment and it changes everything we know to be true about the universe, and how we interact with it.
Effectively, it begins like this.
Physicists began by firing single particles of light — photons* — through a long, narrow window and onto a wall of delicately sensitive photo film. (If you like, imagine the photons are ping-pong balls, and you are propelling the balls through a narrow slot in a screen. Behind the screen is a squeaky clean blackboard, and every time a ball passes through the slot and hits the blackboard, it leaves a tiny mark.) The researchers would check the film afterward to observe the pattern that had been created.
*or electrons. The results are the same with either particle.
Every time this experiment was conducted, the pattern on the film was the same. A tall, narrow band or cluster:
Soon after, the physicists became cunningly curious. “What happens if we fire one particle at a screen with two slits in it? Which slit will the photon choose to pass through, and what pattern will that create?”
Well, it created this:
“Wait!” the physicists cried. “That’s an interference pattern! That only happens if you are working with waves, not particles.” And so, behold, it was discovered that light is not only a particle (of matter); it can also be a wave (of probability).
Instead of choosing which of the two slits to travel through, a photon will turn itself into a wave and will pass through both slits at the same time.
And this is where things start getting really weird.
“Mwah-ha-ha!” the scientists exclaimed (because they, apparently, spoke like cartoon villains). “Let’s discover how light does this magical transformation. Let’s set up a mechanism to observe the photon before it passes through the two slits. Let’s view it as it transforms from a particle into a wave.”
So they did. And there was just one, tiny problem: the photons were camera shy.
You see, after running the Double Slit experiment whilst observing the photons, they captured the following pattern:
A simple pattern of particles passing through one slit, or another. Checking their recordings, the physicists were dismayed and amazed to find that, in this experiment, the photons had remained as particles and had seemingly ‘chosen’ a single slit to pass through.
When photons are observed in a Double Slit experiment, they remain in particle form. It is only when they are unobserved, that they transform into a wave.
Broken Reality, Part 1: Somehow, a photon — an inanimate particle of matter — is ‘aware’ when it is being watched, and ‘chooses’ to act differently because of it.
But that’s only the beginning, because then the Double Slit experimenters started messing with our concept of reality and time.
“Ok”, said the physicists. “The photon knows we’re watching before it goes through the slits, and it chooses to remain a particle. So … what if we watch the particle after it has passed through the slit? It won’t know we’re there until it’s too late.” And so they did that. But it didn’t matter how early or late they observed the process — the instant the photon was observed it would appear in particle form. And it would retroactively appear to have been a particle through the entire process — even before it passed through the slits.
The photon changed its behavior at the beginning of the experiment because it somehow knew it was about to be observed in the near future.
In time, more complicated experiments requiring crystals and entangled pairs of photons (or electrons) and a mind-boggling array of detectors, were developed. Sometimes, observations of the photon were erased randomly, after the photon’s trip was complete. But the resulting patterns were always the same. An observed process created simple cluster patterns. An unobserved process (whether the decision was made in the present, or in the future) created an interference wave pattern.
Broken Reality, Part 2: A photon appears to be ‘aware’ of whether it is going to be watched sometime in the future and acts accordingly. The alternative understanding, if we are to keep time untouched, is that reality itself is not objective and we are creators to some degree, in the reality we observe.
The Double Slit experiment and its later variants are the most incredible, mind-boggling, reality-rocking developments of our time because they cast doubt on our entire idea of matter, time, consciousness and reality itself.
If there is one fact you embrace in order to rock your reality and open your mind to the possibilities that lie beyond human understanding — make it this one.
Pour yourself a strong coffee and get to know this reality-shifting discovery:
Kim Forrester is an award-winning author, educator and intuitive consultant with over 15 years’ experience as a professional intuitive and spiritual teacher. She combines cutting edge science with traditional spirituality to offer the latest understandings of psi, consciousness and holistic well being.
