this post was submitted on 08 May 2026
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Agree to disagree!
Nothing to agree or disagree with, you're factually incorrect. The observer effect has nothing to do with whether someone's eyes are looking toward it or not. It basically just means when a process is happening and anything external occurs to it then that will change the way the process is happening.
I was curious, so I went to Wikipedia, as one does.
Edit: erhm. this isnt an ad for Wikipedia. the words just shook out that way. lol
If anybody still doesn't understand, when the wave function collapses, that is called observation. Again, from Wikipedia:
Physics has this problem with naming things. They use words like "particle", "observation", and "spin", among others, which are words that every English speaker knows, but then they use those words to describe stuff that's actually only similar to the words everybody knows. This makes physics a lot more approachable for people who know nothing, but then completely confuses people with only a little knowledge.
My favorite example of this is the use of "stress" and "strain". In common language they're synonyms, but in Physics they're definitely not.
"Theory" is another bad one in all of science. That's what leads knuckleheads from saying dumb shit like "evolution is just a theory!"
In general, I agree, but spin is quite surprising in how much like angular momentum and dynamos it behaves. Either way, we don't know enough about it yet, and it's at best a coincidence.
Shout-out to floatheadphysics (Mahesh) for his video on spin. The way he steps through the learning process like it's a conversation with the giants that gave us the knowledge (based on their writings) and how he presents it with all the excitement of "getting it" is cathartic.
There isn't a scientific definition for "observation." In the Copenhagen interpretation, it really is treated just as vaguely as the colloquial definition, something the physicist John Bell complained about in his article "Against 'Measurement'", that the textbook axioms of quantum mechanics are inherently vague because they refer to "observation" or "measurement" which is not itself defined in the axioms. Saying that observation is just "when the wavefunction collapses" is a circular definition and doesn't answer anything, because then we can just ask, "when does the wavefunction collapse?" and the only answer the textbook axioms give is "when you observe/measure it."
I think we all understand the joke is that the eyes represent the endpoint of the observation apparatus. That is the first panel is isolated and the second panel has a detector measuring the path that the scientist then looks at.
So yeah, "eyes" don't cause a waveform collapse. But how does a two panel cartoon with no words represent no interaction? First panel is blank?
On the other hand, maybe our personal observation doesn't just cause a waveform to collapse, but also collapses a logical path for said wave backwards into time. This would mean that even the results of the initial observation only collapse at the moment you look at them.
So at what point in human evolution was one human conscious enough to have the first observation and therefore spring quantum mechanics into existence in the universe?
Obviously any living creature can become entangled with the quantum experiment if you build the right apparatus. Build a machine that kills a cat if an atom decays, and you've made cats into quantum observers. When the cat observes the experiment by not dying, it collapses from the cat's point of view. When you observe the cat, it collapses from your point of view.
What if both human evolution and "other humans" follow the same unfolding? You'd create all of that in every moment. Even the memories and logistics needed for that. That would mean that there is only now and reality has been creating itself over and over again infinitely.
Someone gets it
That's not "litterally" how it works then, just "figuratively".
Observation in quantum mechanics isn't like everyday observation. There is no passive observation, you have to interact with a particle to observe it. It's like putting your hand in front of the hose to see if it's on. You can see from the spray pattern that when the hose is "observed" the pattern changes.
and in this case, seeing the spray pattern is interfering the system not because it is "aware" of you seeing it, but in order to see it there must be light reflecting off it which certainly would have an effect for bombarding it and bouncing off it.
You are wrong though.