What is Reality? The Double Slit Experiment

In quantum physics, there's an infamous experiment—infamous because it doesn't make any sense what so ever. In the eyes of vigorous scientists, this is an absolutely confounding experiment. In the eyes of spiritual people, the monks and the yogis in the world think of this experiment as a confirmation of a belief they've held for thousands of years.

The double-slit experiment is, as we said, an experiment of quantum physics. In this experiment what scientists did was set up a wall with two holes in it and a wall behind that wall with a sensor so they know what goes through it. First, they shot light up the holed-wall and the light came out of the two holes making a sort of interference pattern (as shown below, source).

Then the scientists shot some particles at the wall with slits. And the hypothesis is that if the particles went through the holed-wall then it would end up in two strips where the holes are located, makes sense right? However, when they shot the particles through the wall they saw a similar interference pattern as when they shone light waves in front of the wall (picture below, source).

This made no sense, of course, I mean why in the world does this happen? So they wanted to figure out, and being smart quantum physicists, they thought, "let's put a camera on the slits so that we can see what the particles are doing after going through the slit." So they did just that, and what they saw after running the experiment again is where we become confounded. (Picture below, source).

The particles, when the camera was put on them acted the way that they, by the hypothesis and current understanding of physics, that they should have acted in the first place. So they reran the experiment without the camera, and they saw the interference pattern again, they ran it with a camera and saw the normal pattern again. They used other methods to track the particles, and whenever the particles were tracked, they would produce the normal pattern, and when they weren't observed going through the slits, they would produce the interference pattern.

These results make no sense: how could the particles produce a pattern when not observed, and produce another pattern when observed? Are the particles throwing surreptitious parties? Probably not, and to this day, science has no idea why these results are produced.

When we look at spiritual Eastern teachings, however, the Yogis in India have been saying something for years, even before this experiment, that explains this phenomenon, "reality exists as a probability and it's the act of observation that causes a probability to collapse into a reality." In more basic terms, reality created by consciousness. When we allow the particles to go through the slit and we cannot see them, there's a probability of how the particles act, when we look at these particles the probability collapses into something that we observe. Another, more popular example, of this is the Schrödinger's Cat Experiment you can look into if you haven't heard of it.

Remember then, that reality is based on your consciousness. You, with your mind, have much more control over your life, over your reality, over your universe than you understand. Don't let things get to you, you have more control than you understand.

(For a better understanding of the experiment, here's a video)