But if you don’t watch, it acts like a wave and can go through both slits at the same time?

I can virtually guarantee you that this was nothing more than a flawed experiment. Stop believing in magic.

First of all, quantum mechanics is "baffling". It is counter-intuitive. This doesn't change the fact that the article and video in question is sensationalized, non-scientific crap which is made for entertainment rather than scientific understanding.

My point is simply that real articles should actually explain the experiment rather than slinging around a bunch of magical hokum about consciousness that are designed to keep viewers fascinated enough to watch car commercials rather than actually helping them understand the concepts.

Interference patterns are rather common wave behavior. You can make a good one by poking water with a couple of sticks to make little water waves. You can also see interference patterns with sound waves.



You will notice that there are lines in the water where the water doesn't move very much.... and other lines where the water waves are very strong.

When the double slit experiment was published... people weren't particularly baffled. They said... "oh, so light is a wave". The lines on a paper held in front of a double slit are exactly what you would expect if you look at the same lines in water. The matter of whether light is a wave was settled for years.

It was Einstein and the photoelectric effect, a different experiment that showed light acting as a particle, that upset the apple cart. The baffling part is that light can act as both a wave and a particle (depending on the experiment).

So I am not objecting to the claim that the wave-particle duality is "baffling". I am objecting to the way it is being sensationalized in a way that leaves the science. If you want to learn why Quantum Mechanics is weird then you should learn the real experiments and ideas and results.

Meaningless claims like "when you add a detector the pattern disappears" is maddeningly misleading. I would love anyone here to tell me what type of "detector" they added, or how they observed the pattern disappearing. This phrase sounds good... and with the low voiced celebrity and mysterious setting it sounds downright magical. But I promise you that it has nothing at all to do with real Physics.

These articles and videos are a kind of science porn. They titillate people with wonder and mystery without explaining any of the real (and quite strange) concepts behind these ideas.

Can you give us a link?
Incidentally another "baffling" experiment was when Prof Gertrude Schmeidler's "Sheep and Goats" ESP experiment found that people who didn't believe in supernatural phenomena scored below average in ESP tests, whereas the logical score would have been around the average mark!
In other words, it's as though their disbelieving mindset was digging them into a "pit of disbelief", prompting her to say-
"This was inexplicable by the physical laws we knew, it implied unexplored processes in the universe, an exciting new field for research. From then on, naturally, my primary research interest was parapsychology"
http://www.parapsych.org/members/g_schmeidler.html

http://archived.parapsych.org/sheep_goat_effect.htm

So what was Prof Anton Zeilinger's motive for admitting to the world that it'd got him puzzled?
And are there any science vids around to bust the myth by showing it's not really as baffling as it appears?

Perhaps the fact that it's been standard quantum mechanics since the 1920s.

Another thing that the boffins can't fully explain are rainbows.
I sat through a half-hour TV science prog about them a few years ago and it was quite entertaining with lots of colour photos of bows, and lots of diagrams showing "angles of light refraction" and stuff, but at the end the narrator closed by saying "However there are some aspects of rainbows that are still not fully understood, and the jury is still out"!

Interesting, I had rather full explanation in a class in optics in college. Which aspects can't they explain?

Like I said, the narrator said scientists still can't fully explain the rainbow.
Either he's wrong or lying, take your pick..