>>14115846>What is it about the detector at one or another of the slits which destroys the interference pattern that a particle creates with itself in the absence of said slit-detector?Whenever a particle in its wave state decides to touch something, anything, it stops being a wave. If it decides to touch your detector, it stops being a wave.
>The interference pattern does not require a perfect vacuum (a concept which doesn't exist in nature), so it is obvious that a photon/particle that self-interferes in a double slit experiment is interacting with *something* as it passes through one or another slit.Wrong.
When photons touch air particles, they do collapse. It happens much less often than you think. Notice how when the sky is blue, yellow and above are still where you see the sun. This is because they interact with the air much less than blue. In a small room, a chance of such interaction would be insignificantly small.
This is the very reason why organizing the double slit experiment with particles other than photons took so many years.
