It is. I just always feel the need to comment this on these posts because the mystical understanding annoys me, and is surprisingly common. This meme doesn't do that exactly, and it even has an accurate experiment setup.

There are entire new age movements based on the misunderstanding of quantum mechanics.

Off the top of my head: "What the Bleep do we Know?" and "The Secret" are two that come to mind.

Not sure how popular they are these days, but they were huge in the 00s-10s

It's probably (hopefully) not a majority, but a disturbing number of people really do believe it works like that. I've once had someone, whose intelligence I used to respect, calmly explain to me that telekinesis is possible because "QM proves that the mind can influence matter".

I wouldn't be so sure. There's a disturbingly high amount of people (including adults) out there who take Schrödinger's cat literally.

I may not have been paying attention in school. Once adult, I read about it but wondered what it means "when observed". Couldn't find anywherw that explained it clearly. Figured it was surely related to a physical process necessary to get signals, but I couldn't know what exactly. Now, I know.

A lot of people do believe it unfortunately.

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.

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.

No, not the slits. How the "observation" is done is you measure what goes through the slit with a detector just on the other side. The detector has to interact with the photons, so it collapses the waveform, making it behave like a particle, only passing through one slit. If you remove the detector then it has wave-like behavior, as the waveform only collapses once it hits the surface on the far end.

The waveform collapses any time it interacts with something. The experiment just takes advantage of this by making it collapse in a way that creates a different result than if we don't collapse it until later, where the waves can interact.

I'm aware. I just hate the mystical way things like this are treated, and there's a lot of uninformed people. I don't care that the meme is wrong. I care that people believe that the experiment says something other than what it says, which is already really cool.

Was it always like this or only since Yilong Ma took over? How ppl are using this shit beats me.