- #1
john taylor
- 24
- 1
I was told of a thought experiment by a friend of mine who says that his thought experiment will either prove or disprove randomness in quantum mechanics, and this was in fact verified by several other physicists, who said that if this experiment was ever successfully carried out it would either prove or disprove quantum randomness. His thought experiment imagines(in laymans terms), two teams of scientists who want to measure the position of 10 000 neutrons which will be fired, so that they travel 1 at a time. The scientists will measure the position of these neutrons by bouncing gamma rays off of the neutron to find its location, and they will measure it at exactly the same time. You would naturally expect both parties to measure the exact same position each time for each particle. However because the probability of the wave function is relative to each observer, the wave function collapse would have to collapse randomly relative to each of the two observers. Therefore if they observe the same location for each neutron 100% of the time it would prove determinism because if the wave function is randon collapsing 100%(all of the time) of the time to produce the same result for its location for both observers it is by definition not a random process(because you cannot consistently get the same result from two random process all of the time, that would suggest if this took place that it was not random but that it was fixed and that there was a defined process taking place underneath), however the only way for randmness to then be proven would be for the scientists to observe to conflicting results for the same particle at exactly the same time, for it's position, because it was shown earlier that it would not be random for two random relative processes(the collapse of the wave function), to yield the same result for the position of a large sample of particles, so the only way to disprove this would be to observe an instance in which tow conflicting results for the position of a particle is measured at exactly the same time. would this experiment be a proof if it could be done? Or could this experiment be a stepping stone to an experiment which would actually work?