What is Double-slit experiment ?

We have written many articles about the Double Slit Experiment for Universe Today. Here’s an a forum discussion about a home-made double slit experiment, and here’s an article about the wave-particle duality.

Ideas are frequently misunderstood or purposefully misrepresented. This is never more true then when Young’s Double-slit experiment is presented as evidence that the presence of a human being can fundamentally change the behaviour of matter at a particle level.

In 1974, the Italian physicists Pier Giorgio Merli, Gian Franco Missiroli, and Giulio Pozzi repeated the experiment using single electrons and biprism (instead of slits), showing that each electron interferes with itself as predicted by quantum theory.

If you’d like more info on the double slit experiment, check out these articles from Physorg.com and Space.com.

The double-slit experiment and the odd behaviour of particles when ‘observed’ is often used in support of the idea that the human mind can fundamentally alter matter.

In addition to this it’s also frequently used to support the concept of mind body duality. The idea that consciousness can somehow exist away from the material that consists the brain, and even linger after that material is long gone.

In 2012, Stefano Frabboni and co-workers eventually performed the double-slit experiment with electrons and real slits, following the original scheme proposed by Feynman. They sent single electrons onto nanofabricated slits (about 100 nm wide) and, by collecting the transmitted electrons with a single-electron detector, they could show the build-up of a double-slit interference pattern.