What the bleep do we know? Down the rabbit hole. part 4

A clip from the film What the Bleep. Here we see a simulation of the famous double slit experiment that works like this. If you randomly shoot marbles, or particles, through a slit towards a screen, you see them hit the screen in a pattern that resembles the band created by the single slit. Shoot them through two slits, and you see them create two bands. If you shoot waves through a single slit, they radiate out and hit the back wall with the area of most intensity falling in line with the single slit. If you shoot waves through a double slit, however, if the top of one wave hits the bottom of another, they cancel each other out and they create waves of interference resulting in bands of various intensity on the back wall. An electron is a tiny bit of matter, so you would expect them to behave like the marbles or particles in the two variations of the experiment. Indeed, if you fire electrons through a single slit, they do hit the back wall in the band that resembles the single slit. But if you fire them through a double slit, they don’t create two bands on the back wall, Instead, they start to behave like waves and create interference patterns. How can pieces of matter create an interference pattern like waves? The only explanation is that those little electrons leave the firing gun as a particle, become a wave of potential that goes through both slits and interferes with itself. If you think that’s strange, the mathematical explanation is even more strange. Mathematically, the electrons go through both slits and neither slit. Utterly mystified at what could be happening, scientists then put a measuring device to see which slit each electron fired actually went through. But what they discovered was even more mind blowing. When being measured or observed, the little electron went back to behaving like a marble and created a pattern of two bands rather than creating an interference pattern. In other words, the very act of observing changed what the electron did. This astounding series of experiments are what lie behind the metaphysical idea that, as the world around us is created from quantum elements, our very presence and act of observing changes the world around us.