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Moonshed

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Moonshed last won the day on May 12

Moonshed had the most liked content!

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    Keithmayes123@yahoo.co.uk

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    I will begin by saying it’s not what you do that you live to regret, it’s what you don’t do!
    My interests have naturally changed over the years as I have gradually aged. I was born in 1946 near Romford, Essex. When I lived in Scotland we used to love going hill walking but I cannot manage to walk that far today, or climb to such heights! I also loved flying gliders, nothing for me could beat gliding silently through the air over such outstanding landscapes. These days I still have my books, hardly gone a day without picking up a book, and of course the tv, especially science documentaries such as presented by physicist Brian Cox. Plus dramas and thrillers.
    The one interest that has stayed with me all my adult life is of course astronomy, plus my love of cosmology and all things scientific. My first ‘scope was a simple 4” reflector purchased in the ‘60s with a table top tripod, then a 2” refractor followed by my current 8” Celestron SCT with its computerised GOTO mount that bears no comparison to the first mount that it came with.
    I have always enjoyed travelling and have visited the Pyramids at Cairo, the Valley of the Kings and King Tutankhamen’s tomb, the Greek Parthenon, driven from Essex to Italy over the Alps, been to New York and Phoenix, stayed at The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, helicopter flight through the Grand Canyon, cruised the Norwegian Fjords and north up to Svalbard and spent 72 hours in perpetual sunlight, and many more wonderful places.
    These days my life has other rewards, such as enjoying our grandchildren and great grandchild. And always, waiting patiently in its “moon shed” is my trusty 38 year old (2023) Celestron. I love that ‘scope, had it since I bought it second hand in 1991. Only a fellow astronomer will appreciate it when I say how much pleasure astronomy has brought to my life over the years and hopefully will continue to do so for many more to come.
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  1. Moonshed
    I don’t know about the program you mention but I went onto YouTube and typed double slit experiment into the search engine and was impressed with the number of videos on the subject. I was especially impressed with Veritasium’s take on it, he took a fridge sized cardboard box onto a beach and did the experiment with sunlight with interesting results. I managed to spend a lot of time looking at the various demonstrations and explanations, most enjoyable.
  2. Moonshed
    My understanding of time is that it was created at the time of the Big Bang along with the three space dimensions we are aware of to create the space time continuum. You could ask if the universe itself could exist without us humans to observe it. Right, that’s it, I’m going back to finish my cup of tea, that’s something I can understand, and I’m pretty certain that it stays there even when I’m not looking at it. I think.
  3. Moonshed
    Good question. The detectors, because they can detect which slit a photon goes through, will cause the photon to collapse into a particle and pass through one slit or another, thus creating the two clusters in line with the slits. The detectors prevent the photons acting as a wave and passing though both slits simultaneously. At this stage no conscious observer has witnessed this so we can only assume that is the pattern that has built up on the screen, but as you say how can we tell? It may be that there will be an interference pattern until the moment our conscious observer looks at it. As far as I am aware we have no way of knowing if the detectors independently of observers can cause the collapse of the wave function.
  4. Moonshed
    Thank goodness you still have two good eyes, you were lucky.
  5. Moonshed
    The light from a distant star arrives at your eye at the speed of light, so if it is 100 light years away it will take 100 years to reach us, from out perspective. From the perspective of the photons travelling from the star no time has passed, it left the star and instantaneous arrived at your eye. It still traveled 100 light years though. Well, that’s my understanding of it though I am no expert and may be proven wrong due to the strangeness of Relativity.
  6. Moonshed
    I have to agree with you, that Feynmann book is a very good read, lots of interesting information explained clearly. As you say, single photons fired through either slit unobserved will place themselves on the screen such that when enough have gone through they will have built up an interference pattern on the screen. A single photon interferes with itself! How does each photon know where to place itself on the screen in order to build up the interference pattern? It really is a mystery.
  7. Moonshed
    When we talk of quantum entanglement and wormholes, dark energy and dark matter, black holes and virtual particles, multiverses and multi- dimensions, it makes me realise how very little we really know about the universe in which we live. One thing I know for sure, at some point I will die, my atoms will eventually return to the universe from whence they came, I am as much an integral part of the universe as any star or planet and I will again be at one with the universe. Does this make me immortal? I don’t think so because the me that is me at this moment in time will cease to exist, only my already recycled atoms will survive, unless I have a soul, a consciousness that lives on after death, but I have no idea if that is true or not, although I tend to think not. Will we ever know? Will we ever fully comprehend the universe? I hope not, for what would be left to wonder about?
  8. Moonshed
    There are of course many books covering quantum mechanics and I’m sure most of us could recommend a few. One that I particularly like is “Schrödinger’s kittens and the search for reality” by John Gribbon. Although I have a bookcase full of such books and trying to pick out just one is almost impossible but this is a good one.
  9. Moonshed
    Yes, from the photons point of view there is no such thing as the passage of time. I think that our inability to understand time, we see it as flowing in only one direction, is holding back our understanding of the physics of the universe. Time is a puzzling. How long does the present last? Where does it go? Does the past still exist? Does the future exist? Is time continuous or come in discrete quanta? If it does it has to be less than a femtosecond because we have recorded chemical changes taking place at that incredibly small fraction of a second. Time is a real mystery.
  10. Moonshed
    Yes, of course “spooky action at a distance” was a reference to quantum entanglement and I thought I had made it clear that it was not related to the double slit experiment. As for woo woo managed we do not have an explanation for quantum entanglement's instantaneous communication over any distance thus beating the speed of light limit. Plus this point as raised by AstroKeith “An interesting effect, verified by experiment. If you wait until after the wave/photon has passed through the slits, but then try to measure which one it went through. It still destroys the interference pattern.” Interesting.
  11. Moonshed
    I did have a go at describing Quantum Mechanics in my website http://www.thekeyboard.org.uk/Quantum mechanics.htm and later in my book. This was back in the late 90’s /early 00’s at which time the conscious observer was at the very heart of the problem. That view seems to have changed over time yet there is still no adequate explanation for the double slit experiment, let alone what Einstein famously described as “spooky action at a distance”.
  12. Moonshed
    AstroKeith Where did you read the bit about 'conscious'. That I think is a red herring. I've never the heard that wordused. From Wikipedia A notable example of the observer effect occurs in quantum mechanics, as demonstrated by the double-slit experiment. Physicists have found that observation of quantum phenomena by a detector or an instrument can change the measured results of this experiment. Despite the "observer effect" in the double-slit experiment being caused by the presence of an electronic detector, the experiment's results have been interpreted by some to suggest that a conscious mind can directly affect reality.[3] However, the need for the "observer" to be conscious is not supported by scientific research, and has been pointed out as a misconception rooted in a poor understanding of the quantum wave function ψ and the quantum measurement process.[4][5][6]
  13. Moonshed started following The double slit experiment
  14. Moonshed
    I have just been watching a program about quantum mechanics and the double slit experiment. What I keep hearing is that a conscious observer forces the photon to go through one or other of the slits as a particle and hit the screen as a bullet would, but if not observed it will behave as a wave, go through both slits and go on to form an interference pattern. Okay, got it. Now here is my question. Is it not a fact that the detectors fitted at the slits are what determines which slit the photon goes through, not the conscious observer? It seems to me that the conscious observer plays no part in this as they obviously cannot observe a photon. This all seems so obvious that I feel I really must be missing something and showing my ignorance on the subject. Can someone please explain to me about the conscious observer’s role in this. I understand how it works with Schrödinger’s cat in the box experiment because we can all see if a cat is dead or alive when we open the box, but the double slit is different. Any input would be appreciated. I feel I should mention that in an alternate reality I am a world famous theoretical particle physicist.
  15. Moonshed
    What you are describing is basically NASA’s Space Launch System, Orion space craft and Artemis. Its aim is for a permanent moon base and easy flights from the moon to lunar orbit and then back home. Anyway that’s the theory.
  16. Moonshed
    Yes of course the booster doesn’t land on the moon, silly me.
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