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Comment by drdrek | Hacker News Reader

After many years of reading about quantum effects it's just became clear that most of the unintuitive nature of it is due to confusing language.

"Measuring" is usually hitting the system with a photon. At those scales it is similar to measuring the state of a person by shooting him with a canon, you would not be surprised if the "Measurement" changed the state of the person.

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Why would you say the opposite of the what wiki says?

Shooting a person with a canon over and over does not prevent time evolution of the person.

Alright I'll give you another analogy that is more relevant to this specific experiment. You have a balloon in the air that is slowly descending from state A (in the air) to state B (on the ground). You measure if the balloon is in the air by throwing a ball at it, each hit of the ball makes the balloon temporally bounce a bit higher. You then realize that if you "measure" fast enough the balloon will never transition from state A (in the air) to state B (on the ground) AKA the xeno effect.

This is incorrect. You are not actually analogizing.

You are literally saying the opposite of the article. Tell me what eigenstate the balloon is in?

No, we don't know what measurement is, and it's nothing to do with the fact we're hitting it with something, that's the observer effect. Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a fundamental property of reality, separate from "if we hit things they move"

I should repeat again: we still have no idea yet what exactly is a quantum measurement and what isn't, it's one of the great unsolved questions of physics

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