My Octopus Teacher.

[Toehammer]

Originally Posted by Jimjam [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The very act of observation is interaction.

False.

As an example: when the Sun emits a photon, 8.33 minutes later it strikes your eye... you are interacting with the photon not the Sun. Technically, things interact when they change each other's momentum (or exchange force carrier particles).

A semantic argument might be that the Sun births a photon that hits your eye so that is an "interaction" but interaction means something very specific! If we used that semantic argument, then eventually everything would be considered interacting with everything else, and the meaning of interaction (Newton's 3rd Law) loses all meaning.

The silliest trick Feynman ever pulled was not telling people that Feynman diagrams are just a vector representation of Newton's 3 Laws with a squiggly line.

Observation and interaction is at the heart of quantum mechanics and the measurement problem... be careful making these sorts of general philosophical extrapolations of QM!