And what I am driving at is what feels like a contradiction:
- Starting from a "collapsed" state, Electrons self-interfere if and only if which way information of a double slit is not extracted
- If an electron is diffracted with a single slit and no insight is obtained whatsoever (a perfect vacuum), then the electron's presence is a half-circle of distributed likelihood expanding transversely from the single slit
- The half-circle should not be interactive -- it should be impossible to 'determine' the electron by pushing or pulling energy into or from the diffracted probability region
- But when the half-circle encounters a double slit, and which-way information is extracted, the half-circle of likelihood should collapse retro-actively (as if the electron had never diffracted to begin with
- But this requires interaction with the electron's wave state)
Thus, an electron wave state of probability amplitudes is non-real and interactive if the diffracted electron behaves the same way as a collapsed electron.
On the other hand, the electron is real and non-interactive if the diffracted electron does not behave the same way as a collapsed electron, and passes right through the which-way information extractor as if nothing is happening.
So, the following properties could go either way:
- particle or wave
- waves are real by which-way information-based collapse
- waves are not real because no one can interact with a diffraction cloud, just the actual electron
- (Contradiction) But the waves are real (or not real) because a diffraction cloud will not interact with which-way information collection (or it will)
- (Fork 1: Contradiction) If the diffracted electron is fundamentally the same as an electron, then it is interactive and responds to which way information collection, but it is simultaneously not interactive and cannot be interacted with as a cloud
- (Fork 2: Holistic Interaction) If the diffracted electron is fundamentally different than an electron, and it does not respond to which way information collection at a double slit in the same way as an electron. This means that information about the electron's state can be leaked via which-way information collection after diffraction and without collapsing the electron's state or entanglement or what-ever
The two distinct ways to interpret the above amount to, one:
- An electron is fundamentally the same whether diffracted or collapsed
- Meaning that, for energy absorption and emission tasks (photon propagation), an electron can be viewed as the cloud or shell of probabilities
- An electron will collapse regardless of size when a massive interaction (electroweak, weak, strong, whatever nuclear force interaction)
- The collapse is "instantaneous" (if the electron cloud encounters a which-way collection interface, it 'pops' and evaluates to a particulate, determined electron)
- The electron will remain in the wave-form until the cloud collapses
Two:
- A wave-form electron is different than a regular electron,
- A wave-form electron is collapsed in a special way
- A wave-form electron is effectively invisible to all forms of energy and matter until the special collapse mechanism occurs
- A wave-form electron has continuous components that can be leaked partially (not all of it is quantized)
- There may be some way to interact with the wave-form electron holistically, but if there is we don't know it
Or maybe there is some third interpretation that I don't know about. I do know that entangled state can be leaked out -- at least there are crypto physics papers that I've run into which claim this. Also, I know that beaming a pilot laser into a resonant cavity can "seed" the polarity of the waves that come out of the cavity (a quantum key distribution hack)...so waves appear to be able to self-interact.
