This post presumes familiarity with basic Quantum Mechanics and specifically, the double slit experiment.
I like this summary:
So from the double slit experiment we know that a single photon (electron) can exist in one of 2 states:
- particle
- wave (energy)
This is called the wave-particle duality. The weirdness of the double slit experiment occurs whenever any measurement of which slit the photon (electron) goes through is made.
Any attempt to measure (observe) which slit the photon goes through causes a ‘collapse of the wave function’. This is also known as a collapse of the superposed state. (‘superposition’, in turn, is going through both slits at the same time).
Expressed differently, any attempt to determine which of the 2 slits the photon (electron) goes through changes the result of the experiment as follows:
If no attempt at observation is made, the photon(electron) goes through both slits simultaneously (superposition) and produces the ‘wave pattern’ in the figure. If observations are made of which slit the photon went through, we get the ‘particle pattern’.
This is about as far as modern science can take us. No one really ‘knows’ why this happens. Here is my proposal.
We know from General Relativity that e=mc^2. Basically energy and matter are the same thing. What if information (i), energy and matter are ALL the same thing?
There are a few ways of introducing information (i) into general relativity but for now, I’m going to do it quickly by saying that
Matter = information + stuff.
That’s just a fast way of saying that matter has information in it and possibly other ‘stuff’.
re-writing General Relativity we get
energy = (information+stuff)c^2
Now at last, the results of this befuddling experiment start to make a bit more sense. In the double slit experiment, there are quite obviously 2 slits. Let’s call them Slit1 and Slit2. Let’s put our detector (observer) at Slit1. There are still two cases here. 1) The photon goes through Slit1 or 2) it goes through Slit2.
So our observer (detector) is on slit and and we’ll take the first case where the electron goes through slit one. A detector at its core is a sensitive bunch of atoms who, if hit with an electron will become excited, release that energy and that energy will cause a cascade of events leading to detection. So where did the energy come from to excite that detector? It came from a loss of energy in the superposed photon.
Again, the photon was poised to go through both slits. That it is was in the superposed state. Now, we put our detector in the way and the energy required to activate the detector, lowers the overall energy-mass of the superposed state yielding information about which slit the photon went through.
The other case is even weirder. Here we have the observer (detector) at Slit1 but the photon(electron) goes through the other slit, Slit2. In this case we still know that since the photon did NOT go through the observed gate, we KNOW that it went through the other one (binary choice). Causality which is insensitive to time in this case will cause the information to be revealed and the energy of the superposed photon to drop the exact instant the negative signal (signal that the photon did NOT go through Slit1) is measured.
The double slit experiment now makes a bit more sense. Since we extracted information from the system, the system was reduced in mass-energy by a certain amount. The photon now lacked the energy to go through both slits in a superposed state because that energy was lost to information. Some questions immediately come out of the above equation. Can information produce energy? Can information produce matter?
Further Reading. It may seem like a grand step to relate information to energy and matter. However, it seems there are several scientists/researchers on the same track: https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/the-basis-of-the-universe-may-not-be-energy-or-matter-but-information
