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How the Quantum Eraser Rewrites the Past | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios

“Any experiment that determines unambiguously which slit the particle traverses destroys the interference pattern. Instead, particles land in simple clumps, one for each slit, as though they were travelling as simple particles the whole time.

This is even true if you place detectors on the far side of the slits after the wave-particle thing should have already been interfering with itself, just like the wave function is collapsing retroactively, as if the universe is saying, OK, guys. The human figured out which way you went. No more funny stuff. Better just pretend like you were particles the whole time.”

So here’s a quick one, but I was looking at some Super Mario Maker and I got curious about how you can control the jump height by how long you suppress the button, up until some point. When you want to start falling, you release the button and your trajectory will arc downwards.

But there’s an issue.

When a human jumps, there is little you can do in the air to change your trajectory significantly, and that includes how high you rise. Remember, how high you go depends on how much energy you initially kicked off the ground with. So after losing contact with the ground, your flight pattern was essentially set in stone. So how does Mario so precisely know exactly how long you’re going to hold down the button for, and calculate how hard he needs to jump? The answer is he is a time traveler, he retroactively rewrites the past based on when you decide to descend, and the changes take place instantaneously. His behavior is loosely analogous to the quantum eraser experiment, in which we are the observers.