h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

in new scientists a month or two ago they had an article about an iraqi-american that discovered a way to proof the double slit experiment wrong, he was doing the experiment and viewing the wave face, while indirectly measuring for particles, he did it by laying down wires where the dark patches are in the interference patern. when only one slit was used and the other was covered, the wires made the light jump off in all directions and the photon detectors didnt regester as many as when there wasnt wires. but when he oppened the second slit, the photon detectors detected the same number of photons as when there were no wires, which means that the photons where not bouncing off the light and that there was an interfernence patern as well. i think that is the just of the story, something seems to be missing though, anyways the point was that there was both the particle face and the wave face, so it might of meant that is no such thing as a photon and most of quantum physics will be needed to be re-writen. he is currently conducting the experiment with more sophiticated technology and only firing one photon at a time to see what happens.

so if the double slit is wrong, does that mean that theory of parallel universes might be somewhat wrong as well and this experiment would fail?

Yes - I read about that. I think his experiment - if it is to be taken seriously - would merely prove that there are other quantum laws that are exceptions to those that we already know, or that our interpretation of the quantum world is flawed slightly. I don't think that affects the validity of the thinking that parallel universes are a possibility, but it all depends on our interpretations of it all.

I wouldn't be surprised if the double slit experiment was proved wrong one day.

You might be interested to know that a group calling themselves the ‘Neo Diffractionites’ say that the effects of diffraction can occur when a particle reaches an edge (previously it was only thought to occur as a particle moves away from an edge). They say that if the two slits are close enough then the front-edge diffraction effects will overlap (i.e. interfere) hence the resulting interference patterns.

They claim that since the interference is caused by overlapping edge-diffraction, and not by particle-waves interfering with each other, getting the same pattern when firing individual particles is no longer a mystery.

I read about this on the Facebook ‘Quantum Physics Discussions’ page (the title of the posting = ‘Idiots propose an alternative explanation of the double-slit experiment’).