12/6/2019 The elegant physics experiment to decode the nature of reality | Aeon Essays

rough two doors

How a sunbeam split in two became physics’
most elegant experiment, shedding light on the
underlying nature of reality
Anil Ananthaswamy

Imagine throwing a baseball and not being able to tell exactly where it’ll go, despite
your ability to throw accurately. Say that you are able to predict only that it will end
up, with equal probability, in the mitt of one of five catchers. e baseball randomly
materialises in one catcher’s mitt, while the others come up empty. And before it’s
caught, you cannot talk of the baseball being real – for it has no deterministic
trajectory from thrower to catcher. Until it becomes ‘real’, the ball can potentially
appear in any one of the five mitts. is might seem bizarre, but the subatomic world
studied by quantum physicists behaves in this counterintuitive way. 

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Microscopic particles, governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, throw up some of

the biggest questions about the nature of our underlying reality. Do we live in a
universe that is deterministic – or given to chance and the rolls of dice? Does reality
at the smallest scales of nature exist independent of observers or observations – or is
reality created upon observation? And are there ‘spooky actions at a distance’, Albert
Einstein’s phrase <https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781403944962> for how
one particle can influence another particle instantaneously, even if the two particles
are miles apart.

As profound as these questions are, they can be asked and understood – if not yet
satisfactorily answered – by looking at modern variations of a simple experiment that
began as a study of the nature of light more than 200 years ago. It’s called the double-
slit experiment, and its findings course through the veins of experimental quantum
physics. e American physicist Richard Feynman in 1965 said
<http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_01.html> that this experiment ‘has in it
the heart of quantum mechanics’. Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist and
founding member of quantum physics, would often refer to this strange experiment
in his discussions with others to ‘concentrate the poison of the paradox’ thrown up by
nature at the smallest scales.

In its simplest form, the experiment involves sending individual particles such as
photons or electrons, one at a time, through two openings or slits cut into an
otherwise opaque barrier. e particle lands on an observation screen on the other
side of the barrier. If you look to see which slit the particle goes through (our
intuition, honed by living in the world we do, says it must go through one or the
other), the particle behaves like, well, a particle, and takes one of the two possible
paths. But if one merely monitors the particle landing on the screen after its journey
through the slits, the photon or electron seems to behave like a wave, ostensibly going
through both slits at once.

When microscopic entities have the option of doing many things at once – like that
metaphysical baseball – they seem to indulge in all possibilities. Such behaviour is
impossible to visualise. Common sense fails us when dealing with the world of the
quantum. To explain the outcome of something as simple as a particle encountering
two slits, quantum physics falls back on mathematical equations. But unlike in
classical physics, where the equations let us calculate, say, the precise trajectory of a
baseball, the equations of quantum physics allow us to make only probabilistic
statements about what will happen to the photon or electron. Crucially, these
equations paint no clear picture about what is actually happening to the particles
between the source and the screen.

It’s no wonder then that different interpretations of the double-slit experiment offer
alternative perspectives on reality. For example, in the late 1920s and early ’30s, some
physicists made the startling claim that a particle going through two slits has no clear
path or indeed no objective reality until one observes it on a screen on the other side.
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At a gathering of physicists and philosophers at the Carlsberg mansion near

Copenhagen in 1936, the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir recalled someone
protesting: ‘But the electron must be somewhere on its road from source to
observation screen.’ To which Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics,
replied that the answer depends on the meaning of the phrase ‘to be’. In other words,
what does it mean to say that something exists? One philosopher in the group that
day, the Danish logical positivist Jørgen Jørgensen, retorted in exasperation: ‘One can,
damn it, not reduce the whole of philosophy to a screen with two holes.’

Yet it is extraordinary just how much of quantum physics and philosophy can be
understood using a screen with two holes – or variations thereof. e history
<http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/94/1.1> of the double-slit
experiment goes back to the early 1800s, when physicists were debating the nature of
light. Does light behave like a wave or is it made of particles? e latter view had been
advocated in the 17th century by no less a physicist than Isaac Newton. Light,
Newton said, is corpuscular, or constituted of particles. e Dutch scientist Christiaan
Huygens argued otherwise. Light, he said, is a wave – the name given to the
vibrations of the medium in which the wave is travelling. For example, a wave in water
is essentially the way water moves up and down as the wave propagates. Huygens
argued that light is vibrations in an all-pervading ether.

In the first years of the 19th century, the English polymath omas Young seemingly
settled the debate. He was the first to perform an experiment with a ray of sunlight, a
sunbeam, through two narrow slits. On a screen on the other side, he observed not
two strips of light – as you’d expect if light is made of particles going through one slit
or the other – but a pattern of alternating bright and dark fringes, characteristic of
two sets of waves interacting with each other.

Fig 442 from Thomas Young’s ‘Lectures’ published in 1807 detailing his original ‘two-slit’ experiment.
Courtesy Wikimedia.

Imagine an ocean wave hitting a coastal breakwall that has two openings. New waves
spread out from each opening and head toward the coast. ese waves eventually
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overlap and interfere – at some places constructively (where the crest of one wave
meets the crest of another), and at some places destructively (the crest of one wave
encounters the trough of another). In Young’s experiment, he saw similar
interference. e fringes that he observed had bright regions indicative of
constructive interference and dark regions typical of destructive interference.

is view of light as a wave gained strong mathematical support when the Scottish
physicist James Clerk Maxwell developed his theory
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4360095/> of electromagnetism
in the 1860s, showing that light, too, is an electromagnetic wave.

T hat would have been the end of story – if not for the birth of quantum physics,
which began with the German physicist Max Planck’s argument in 1900 that
energy comes in quanta, or tiny, indivisible units. en, in 1905, Einstein studied
<https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol2-trans/> the photoelectric effect, in
which light falling on certain metals dislodges electrons; the effect can be explained
only if light is also made of quanta, with each quantum of light analogous to a particle.
ese quanta of light came to be called photons.

Now, the double-slit experiment gets maddeningly counterintuitive.

Imagine beaming light at two slits one quantum, or particle, at a time. Our classical
sensibilities tell us that the photon has to go through one slit or the other. And on the
screen on the other side (say, a photographic plate that records photons as they arrive
one by one), each photon creates a spot, and we expect these spots to pile up behind
the two slits and form two bright strips.

But it’s the quantum world, so of course that’s not what happens.

As the photons land on the photographic plate, over time an interference pattern
emerges. Each photon goes only to certain places on the plate – to regions that would
represent constructive interference if light were a wave. e photons mostly avoid
regions that represent destructive interference. It’s a clear sign of interference and
wave-like behaviour.

But our source is emitting light one photon at a time. e photographic plate is
recording its arrival as an individual particle. And – this is crucial – the photons are
going through the apparatus one at a time. ere’s no interaction between one
photon and the next, or the first photon and the 10th, and so on. So, what’s
interfering with what?

is is where the mathematics comes in. In the mid-1920s, a few fabulously talented
physicists, among them Heisenberg, Pascual Jordan, Max Born and Paul Dirac in one
group, and Erwin Schrödinger on his own, developed two ways of mathematically
depicting the behaviour of the quantum underworld. ese two ways turned out to be
equivalent. It boils down to this: the state of any quantum system is represented by a
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mathematical abstraction called a wavefunction. ere is a single equation – called

the Schrödinger equation – which tells us how this wavefunction, and hence the state
of the quantum system, changes with time. is is what allows physicists to predict
the probabilities of experiment outcomes.

The wavefunction starts to spread, as a wave would, with

different values at different places

In the context of the double-slit experiment, think of the wavefunction as an

undulating surface that encodes information about the location of the photon. When
the photon emerges from its source, the wavefunction is peaked at one location, and
nearly zero everywhere else, suggesting that the photon is localised near the source.

But now mathematics kicks in. e progress of the photon can be captured by the
Schrödinger equation, which reveals how the wavefunction evolves with time. e
wavefunction starts to spread, as a wave would, with different values at different
places. ese values are related to the probabilities of finding the particle in those
locations, should you choose to look.

As this wavefunction spreads, it encounters the two slits. And just like a wave of water
hitting two openings in the breakwall, the wavefunction (which, don’t forget, is a
mathematical abstraction) splits: one component goes through the left slit and the
other through the right slit. Two wavefunctions emerge from the other side, and each
spreads and evolves, still according to the Schrödinger equation. All this is
deterministic and predictable. By the time the individual wavefunctions reach the
photographic plate, they have spread out enough to start interfering with each other
like the waves in the ocean. e photon’s state is now given by a wavefunction that is
a combination of the two components’ interfering wavefunctions: the photon itself is
now said to be in a ‘superposition’ of having gone through both slits. At the
photographic plate, upon detection, this combined wavefunction again peaks in one
location and goes to more or less zero everywhere else. e photon is registered at
that location.

It all seems to make sense – sort of – until you start digging into the mathematical
equations. What’s a wavefunction and what does it mean for a wavefunction to go
through two slits? Is the wavefunction something real? And how does one figure out
where the wavefunction will peak when it encounters the photographic plate? Why
does it peak there and not elsewhere?

In the equations of quantum mechanics, the wavefunction is, well, a mathematical

function. For any quantum system with more than two particles, the wavefunction
does not live in the three familiar spatial dimensions of our world. Rather, it exists in
something called a configuration space (an abstract mathematical space, the number

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of dimensions of which mushrooms with increasing number of particles, but we can

ignore that for now).

In the summer of 1926, just months after Schrödinger came up with his eponymous
equation for the evolution of the wavefunction, Born figured out that the value of the
wavefunction at a given point in space and time can be used to calculate the
probability of, for example, finding the photon at that location. For the double slit, it
turns out that the probabilities are very low for regions where the two components of
the wavefunction interfere destructively, and high for regions where they interfere
constructively.

A ll this seems tantalisingly understandable, but upon closer examination more

questions appear. Did the photon go through both slits at once? Does the
photon have a trajectory, as it leaves the source and is eventually detected at the
photographic plate? And given that the mathematics says that there are many regions
where the photon can be found with a non-zero probability, why does it end up in one
of those regions and not others? Finally, if the photon didn’t go through both slits, but
rather the wavefunction did, is the wavefunction real? 

Trying to answer such questions takes us into the heart of what’s confounding about
quantum mechanics, and brings us in contact with profound philosophical issues
about the nature of reality.

Take the question of determinism. When you throw a baseball in the classical world,
physics will tell you where it will land. Not so in the quantum realm. e wavefunction
cannot predict the exact location at which the photon will land – only its probability
of landing at any one of a number of spots. For any given photon, you can never
predict with certainty where it will be found: all you can say is that it will be found in
region A with probability X, or in region B with probability Y, and so on. ese
probabilities are born out when you do the experiment numerous times with identical
photons, but the precise destiny of an individual photon is not for us to know. Nature
at its most fundamental seems indeterminate, random.

e double-slit experiment also allows us to explore notions of realism, the idea that
an objective reality exists independent of observers or observation. Recall Casimir’s
account of the gathering at the Carlsberg mansion: common sense tells us that the
photon must have a clear path from the source to the photographic plate. But the
mathematical formalism of standard quantum mechanics does not have a variable
that captures the position of a particle as it moves – only a starting point and an end
point that is contingent upon observation. And so, the photon does not have a
trajectory. In fact, in one way of interpreting the formalism – named the Copenhagen
interpretation after the place where it took shape – the photon has no objective
reality until it lands on the photographic plate. At its extreme, the Copenhagen
interpretation is often said to be antirealist
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/1572513814Y.0000000009?

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journalCode=yjcr20> . More generally, antirealism takes the position that reality does
not exist independent of an observer (an observer does not necessarily mean a
conscious human, it could be a photographic plate; opinions vary on this).

Einstein was a realist. He was adamant that standard quantum mechanics is

incomplete, in that it lacks the necessary variables to capture trajectory – the position
and momentum of a particle as it moves. Einstein was also an avowed adherent of the
principle of locality: the notion that something happening in one place cannot
influence something happening elsewhere any faster than the speed of light. Taken
together, this philosophical position is called local realism.

e opposite of locality – nonlocality – gets highlighted by something as simple as

the double-slit experiment. When the photon’s wavefunction nears the photographic
plate, the photon is in a quantum superposition of being in many places at once (this
is not to say that the photon actually is in these places simultaneously, it’s just a way of
talking about the mathematics; the photon itself is not yet ascribed reality in the
standard way of thinking about it). Upon observation, the wavefunction is said to
collapse, in that its value peaks at one location and goes to near-zero elsewhere. e
photon is localised – and thus found to be at one of its many possible locations.

Surely a photon, which cannot be divided into further

smaller parts, cannot go through both slits at once?

Einstein pointed out a problem with this scenario (he used a slightly different thought
experiment than the double-slit, but the conceptual arguments are the same). If the
wavefunction is something real – or is part of the ontology of the world, in the lingo of
philosophers – then its collapse is a nonlocal event. A measurement caused the
wavefunction to peak in one location and simultaneously go to zero elsewhere. In
principle, the wavefunction could be spread across kilometres, and this scenario
would still hold. Regions of spacetime far separated from each other would be
instantly influenced by the measurement-induced collapse in one location.

ere is another way to think about the wavefunction that avoids this difficultly. Many
followers of standard quantum mechanics would say that the wavefunction is
epistemic
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265415255_Is_the_Quantum_State_Rea
l_An_Extended_Review_of_ps-ontology_ eorems> – it merely captures our
knowledge about the reality. If so, the collapse is merely a sharpening of our
knowledge about reality, and so it’s not a physical event and hence does not imply
nonlocality.

But if the wavefunction is not real – then what goes through the two slits? Surely a
photon, which cannot be divided any further into smaller parts, cannot go through
both slits at once? Something must traverse both slits simultaneously to generate the

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interference pattern. If not the photon or its wavefunction, what else could it be?
Epistemic or ontological, the questions about the wavefunction remain.

Besides the status of the wavefunction, perhaps the most well-known issue
accentuated by the double-slit experiment is how something in the quantum realm
can sometimes act like a wave and sometimes like a particle, a phenomenon called
wave-particle duality. If we don’t care about knowing which slit a photon goes
through, the photon behaves like a wave, and lands on a certain part of the
photographic plate. When enough photons land on such parts, constructive
interference fringes appear. Crucially, the photons almost never go to regions that will
remain dark.

But our classical minds rebel. We cannot disregard the conviction that the photon has
to go through one slit or the other. So we put detectors next to the slits (let’s assume
that our detectors work without destroying the photons). Something weird happens.
e photons will now go through one or the other slit. Curiously, this time they will
not form an interference pattern. ey act like particles and they will go to those
regions on the photographic plate that they shunned when acting like a wave.

When Einstein and Bohr were arguing about the double-slit experiment, it was
thought that the physical disturbance produced by the act of looking causes the
interference pattern to disappear.

But since then, it’s become clear that the problem runs deeper. Experimentalists
devised ways of determining which slit a photon goes through without, ostensibly,
disturbing it. Turns out that the mere presence of this ‘which-way
<https://www.nature.com/articles/nphoton.2014.289> ’ (welcher-weg in German)
information in the environment – something that in principle can be extracted –
destroys the interference pattern. e photons behave like particles.

W ave-particle duality was pushed to the extreme by ever more sophisticated versions of
the double-slit experiment. In 1982, Marlan Scully, who was at the University
of New Mexico, and Kai Drühl, of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in
Munich, came up with one of the most memorable variations
<https://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevA.25.2208> . What if there
is a way to first collect information about which way a photon goes (causing it to act
like a particle) and then erase this information? Would erasing the information cause
the photons to act like waves – even after they presumably went through one slit or
another as a particle and landed on the photographic plate?

e empirical answer to this famous quantum eraser question is an unequivocal yes. In

2000, Scully teamed up with Yoon-Ho Kim and colleagues at the University of
Maryland in Baltimore and did this experiment <https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-
ph/9903047> using atoms that could be made to emit a pair of entangled photons (in
mathematical terms, two entangled photons are described by the same wavefunction,

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so an action on one photon immediately influences the other, because of the collapse
of the single wavefunction. Nonlocality is an explicit aspect of this version of the
double-slit experiment). e experimental setup was engineered in such a way that if
one photon of the entangled pair went through a double slit, the partner photon could
be used to extract ‘which-way’ information about the first photon. Scully and
colleagues showed that if you erased this information, the first photon acted like a
wave; otherwise it acted like a particle.

It was clear that whether a photon behaves like a wave or a particle depends on the
choice of the experimental setup. Based on this finding, in 1978 the American
physicist John Wheeler dreamed up perhaps the most famous version of the double-
slit experiment
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780124732506500066?
via%3Dihub> , which he called ‘delayed choice’.

Wheeler’s bright idea was to ask: what if we delayed the choice of the type of
experiment to perform until after the photon had entered the apparatus? Say it enters
an apparatus that is configured to look for the photon’s wave nature. So, the photon
should – according to the standard way of thinking – go into a superposition of
taking two paths. If the two paths are recombined, they interfere, and we get fringes.
Now, said Wheeler, let’s perform a sleight of hand. Just before the photon is detected,
let’s reconfigure the apparatus so that it’s now looking for the photon’s particle
nature. is can be done by taking out the device that causes the paths to recombine,
thus letting each path go on its way to separate detectors. 

As it happens, you cannot fool the photon no matter how hard you try.
Experimentalists have performed
<http://science.sciencemag.org/content/315/5814/966> Wheeler’s thought
experiment with increasing precision and sophistication – and the quantum world
rules. When they remove, at the very last instant, the device that recombines the two
photon paths, the photon acts like a particle, suggesting that it took one path or the
other, even though at the start it should have entered a superposition of taking both
paths at once. Based on such results, Wheeler argued that the photon has no intrinsic
nature – either wave or particle – before it’s detected. Otherwise, if it entered the
apparatus like a particle and you did a switcheroo nanoseconds before detection and
chose to look at its wave nature, it would have to go back in time and re-enter the
apparatus as a wave. How else can you explain the observed interference pattern? In
Wheeler’s account, denying the photon a reality independent of observation avoids
postulating absurd time-travelling photons, but then you have to live with the
antirealism of standard quantum mechanics, which some find unpalatable.

Experimentalists have also combined delayed-choice and quantum-erasure

experiments into one mind-boggling delayed-choice quantum-erasure experiment
<https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9903047> – in which you not only delay the choice
of what to see (particle or wave nature), but you can also randomly erase this choice.
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Again, the photon or any quantum system will show you only one face or the other –
and what it reveals depends on the final state of the experimental apparatus.

All particles in the Universe are influenced instantly by a

form of nonlocality that would make Einstein wince

Such experiments suggest that the act of measurement collapses the wavefunction,
but what does collapse really mean? Even more enigmatically, does collapse
ultimately need observation by a conscious human being? (To be clear, almost no
physicist today thinks that this is the case.)

To avoid the common sense-defying conceptual problems of standard quantum

mechanics, there have been myriad attempts to reinterpret the results and pose new
theories. One of these efforts is the so-called de Broglie-Bohm theory, which holds that
reality is both a wave and a particle. In this theory, a particle is real and has a definite
position at all times, and hence a trajectory; but the particle is guided by a pilot wave
that evolves according to the Schrödinger equation. In the context of a double-slit
experiment, the particle always goes through one slit or the other, but the pilot wave,
or the wavefunction, goes through both and interferes with itself on the other side of
the slits, and this interference pattern guides the particle to the photographic plate.
e de Broglie-Bohm theory is realist: both particles and wavefunctions are real. But
the theory is nonlocal. All particles – no matter where they are in the Universe – are
influenced instantly by the evolving wavefunction, a form of extreme nonlocality that
would make Einstein wince.

Yet another approach invokes a spontaneous collapse of the wavefunction,

independent of observers or observation. Such theories are engineered so that small
quantum systems, such as individual particles, can stay in a superposition of states for
aeons, but larger agglomerations of particles – such as a cat – cannot, and so will
almost instantaneously collapse into one of many probable states. Such theories
predict that, as systems get bigger, spontaneous collapses will cause quantum states
to become classical; they predict a mass scale at which this happens, dividing
quantum reality from the classical world.

e quantum nanophysicist Markus Arndt and his colleagues at the University of

Vienna are using the double-slit experiment to probe this divide by sending
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3104521/> larger and larger
things, such organic macromolecules and even viruses, through a double-slit to look
for interference. If they see interference, the process is quantum mechanical. But if
they can observe the disappearance of the interference pattern and show that it’s
solely because the mass of the object going through the two slits is more than some
threshold value, then they can claim to have found the quantum-classical divide. e
search continues.

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It’s hard to overstate the importance of the double-slit experiment to the entire
enterprise of quantum mechanics, despite its astonishing simplicity and elegance.

As Feynman put it during a lecture at Cornell University in New York in 1964: ‘Any …
situation in quantum mechanics, it turns out, can always be explained afterwards by
saying: “You remember the case of the experiment with the two holes?”’ In 1964,
even Feynman couldn’t have known just how important the experiment would turn
out to be. But physics has yet to successfully explain the double-slit experiment. e
case remains unsolved.

Anil Ananthaswamy is is an award-winning journalist and former staff writer and deputy
news editor for New Scientist in London. His work has appeared in Nature, e Wall Street
Journal and National Geographic News, among others. His latest book is rough Two
Doors at Once <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/550744/through-two-
doors-at-once-by-anil-ananthaswamy/9781101986097/> (2018). He lives in Bangalore in
India and Berkeley in California.

aeon.co02 October, 2018

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