Wheeler's "Delayed-Choice" Experiment Through Systemic Functional Linguistics [2]

Davies & Gribbin (1992: 207-8):

One might imagine a remote source of light, such as a quasar, emitting photons that pass around some intervening object and are focused at the Earth. The two paths around the object then play the role of the two slits. An experimenter on Earth could in principle bring the two light beams together in an interference experiment. If the delayed-choice facility were now deployed, the decision of the experimenter to expose either the wave or particle nature of the quasar light would affect the nature of that light — not just a few billionths of a second in the past, but several billion years ago! In other words, the quantum nature of reality involves nonlocal effects that could in principle reach right across the Universe and stretch back eons in time. …

Nevertheless, the delayed-choice experiment illustrates graphically that the quantum world possesses a kind of holism that transcends time, as well as space, almost as if the particle-waves seem to know ahead of time what decision the observer will make.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, waves of probability measure potential and particles are instances of that potential. In this view, light does not "decide" to be observed as particle or wave. All observations are of particles, since only particles are actual. Observations of the 'wave nature' of light are those where the probabilistic nature of instantiation cannot be ignored, as when the potential involves the overlap of one probability wave with another.