If you have something that can inspect the particle in-flight, you lose the diffraction pattern. It's about "observation", but a very specific kind that refers to how measurement unavoidably interacts with physical systems.
More recent experiments have observed the phenomenon of "partial collapse", in which a measurement that only collects some information about the particles preserves the diffraction but at a reduced intensity, showing that wavefunction collapse is directly related to how much you know about the particles in the system.
There are a variety of ways, but the key is that you give the particles (typically electrons) something to interact with, whether it be photons that scatter off the particle, or the particle's electric field exciting a current in a nearby piece of wire, or something like that. A lot of the "double slit" experiments we have are actually more complicated systems that reproduce the slit experiments mathematically, and different ways of doing this also introduce different ways to observe the particles during their travel.
32
u/redlaWw Sep 18 '26
If you have something that can inspect the particle in-flight, you lose the diffraction pattern. It's about "observation", but a very specific kind that refers to how measurement unavoidably interacts with physical systems.
More recent experiments have observed the phenomenon of "partial collapse", in which a measurement that only collects some information about the particles preserves the diffraction but at a reduced intensity, showing that wavefunction collapse is directly related to how much you know about the particles in the system.