this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2026
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Maybe they shouldn't have been refering to it as OBSERVATION then poindexters, don't get mad when you confuse the laymen and he get annoyed.
For real, the amount of "smart" people saying this actually had an effect via human sight had me not understand how this shit worked for years cuz that made absolutely no sense, as it turned out all those 'smart' people turned out to just be parrots not understanding wtf they're talking about.
I totally agree. "Observe" was a bad choice of words, but it stuck. It should have been "interacted with", or "measured", or something like that.
BTW, before a detector aparatus can be created, many physics results were (are?) identified through observation, which might include a measurement or might be qualitative.
The point is that you can't observe anything without some kind of interaction. Even just looking at something requires bouncing light off of it.
We're used to our observations seeming passive because light is often hitting the things anyways, but the double slit experiment forces the point because the subjects of the experiment are so small that even just using ways of observing them affects the outcome of the experiment.
Sincerely yes, we can just stop saying observation and start saying interaction or something else less confusing