Also, their interpretation of what's happening largely falls apart with the quantum eraser variations.

If it's collapse from mechanical measurement side effects, why does it go back to an interference pattern when which path information is erased by a polarizer?

One of the key points that the "it's just mechanical interactions, bro" crowd should be more aware of though are the quantum eraser variations (not the delayed choice quantum eraser).

There is still something rather bizarre about mechanical interactions that measure which path information being sufficient to collapse on their own but suddenly insufficient when something like polarization which erases which path information is added back in later in the chain.

Also, it's worth declaring when giving an answer like this that you are operating under the assumptions of QFT, and that this isn't necessarily for sure what's going on. For example, I'd imagine there's Bohemian mechanics adherents still around somewhere that would take issue with your "it doesn't exist as a single point in spacetime until it's measured."

People take the word "observe" at face value (no pun intended) a bit too often

It's not a conspiracy.

It's straight up some of the ways in which various accredited physicists were explaining how and why it does the weird things it does.

Von Neuman arguably started it by correctly pointing out that the collapse could be taking place anywhere between the measurement device to the subjective perception of that measurement.

The latter boundary was favored at the time by people like Fritz London, a five times Nobel nominee.

Eugene Wigner further doubled down on the theory, and has the rare distinction of being one of the few people whose gedankenexperiment eventually ended up realizing the very counterintuitive result it was proposed to explore.

These weren't conspiracy theorists.

They were physicists.

Thinking outside the box and from all different angles to try and understand counterintuitive experimental results.

Some of those theories have since been extrapolated from by popsci and new age circles to claim ridiculous things, but the existence of "quantum stickers" to cure your ills doesn't mean Dirac and Schrodinger were crackpots, and so neither does someone claiming "The Secret" like powers based on quantum theory mean that folks like Wigner or Penrose are conspiracy theorists.

It's a legitimate interpretation with a number of very experienced physicists in favor of it over the years, even if not a popular one.

Considering it was one of the basic labs I did in college physics that pretty much every student has to take, and a significant portion of the classes just do the experiments wrong until they get helped, there's probably just enough familiarity to kinda know what's happening but with major misconceptions.

I mean it can happen with any scientific & technological concept that reaches wide enough in the collective consciousness.

https://youtu.be/s5yON4Gs3D0

There's a video about how the delayed choice experiment is compatible with existing quantum physics and doesn't require further weirdness like retrocausality to explain.

"Sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." -Mercedes Lackey or... maybe Larry Dixon. Unclear.

As far as I know, the detectors need to be able to interact with the photons, which redirected(or consumed) the outer "branches" that were landing in the outer slits. This left the only two slits untouched. It shows the fallacy of using detection equipment without considering their impact on the environment or experiment, especially when the extremes of our physical world are being tested. In the experiment, the detection equipment, or sensors, were placed in the two slits.

What if a computer reviews the data and prints a readout? Is the program a consciousness for this purpose?

If it isn’t falsifiable then it’s not science, period.

Yes, but eyes and other sensory organs are passive observers. You can only see photons if they've already been reflected in your direction, and whether you're looking has no impact on if they are reflected or not.

Feels like a kind of "if a tree falls in a forest" scenario. Whether your eyes were in the way or not makes no difference.

It's not even "observing" in that sense. It's just an interaction that forces the waveform to collapse. Basically, if anything requires a result, then it collapses. It doesn't need to record anything or anything like that. It just needs to be effected by (or apply an effect to) the photons.

Actually not correct, words in a lab can mean different things from the popular usage. With Theory being the most popular misconception, as so many people believe that it just means I guess, when in reality it is closer to something we can't test, but if it weren't true so many other things that we can test couldn't possibly be true.

Typically a theory is never proven nor disproven, it is however replaced with a more accurate Theory.

Inside of a laboratory, observation means something less like you saw it, and something more like you measured it. All the observation changing it proves, is that we don't have a method of measuring it that will not interact with it. Which is to be expected given that Quantum phenomenon is legitimately so small that even a microscopic bacterium would say it's tiny.