3 ms·

Going off the double slit experiment, it seems the definition of an observer is something that can take in light, interpret and measure it. The examples given a

• Green_man 6y ago
  "observation" isn't important, it's enough interaction to decohere the superposition, or in another sense, entangle it with the environment. A polarization filter could be considered an "observer" in some sense, but I think focusing on observation results in a less clear and truthful understanding of what a measurement is. A polarization filter rather interacts with the light in a strong enough way to force conditional behavior based on its polarization. This results in photos that have a superposition of different polarizations to probabilistically become one of the polarizations, wrt the respective amplitudes of each polarization for that photon.
• wongarsu 6y ago
  The double slit experiment works with much more than just light. It works just as well with electrons, and even with large molecules (the current record seem to be molecules of 2000 atoms each) [1]. That gives you a pretty wide range of observers under your definition. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment#Other_variations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment#Other_v...