Question
Max Tegmark and this experiment’s creator, John Wheeler, explained it by turning a Mach–Zehnder interferometer into a baseball diamond. For 10 points each:
[10m] Name this experiment that inserts or removes a beam splitter after a photon passes through the first beam splitter to see when the photon “decides” to be a particle or a wave.
ANSWER: Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment [reject “delayed choice quantum eraser” or “quantum eraser”] (The illustration is only found in the full version of their “100 Years of the Quantum” article, found here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0101077v1.pdf, not the abbreviated version published in the Feb. 2001 issue of Scientific American.)
[10e] The delayed choice experiment can be done as a variant of this experiment in which light passing through two holes creates an interference pattern.
ANSWER: double-slit experiment [accept Young’s experiment or Young’s double-slit experiment; accept Thomas Young in place of “Young”]
[10h] This interpretation, which was put forth by a communist physicist, explains delayed choice experiments without forcing the past’s existence to depend on present observations. This now-spurned interpretation uses an additional guiding equation alongside the Schrödinger equation.
ANSWER: Bohm interpretation [or Bohmian mechanics, de Broglie–Bohm theory, pilot-wave model, or causal interpretation; accept David Bohm or David Joseph Bohm in place of “Bohm”]
Data
| Team | Opponent | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chicago A | Florida A | 10 | 10 | 0 | 20 |
| Chicago C | Toronto A | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Claremont A | Penn A | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Cornell A | Yale A | 0 | 10 | 10 | 20 |
| Cornell B | Columbia A | 0 | 10 | 10 | 20 |
| Georgia Tech A | Chicago B | 10 | 10 | 10 | 30 |
| Harvard A | Indiana A | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Houston A | NYU A | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Illinois A | Virginia A | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Imperial A | Rutgers B | 0 | 10 | 10 | 20 |
| Iowa State A | McGill A | 0 | 10 | 10 | 20 |
| MIT A | North Carolina A | 0 | 10 | 10 | 20 |
| Michigan A | Johns Hopkins A | 0 | 10 | 10 | 20 |
| Minnesota A | Northwestern A | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Ohio State A | Brown A | 0 | 10 | 10 | 20 |
| Purdue A | Florida B | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Rutgers A | South Carolina A | 0 | 10 | 10 | 20 |
| Stanford A | Maryland A | 0 | 10 | 10 | 20 |
| Texas A | UC Berkeley A | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| UC Berkeley B | Minnesota B | 10 | 10 | 10 | 30 |
| Vanderbilt A | Columbia B | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| WUSTL A | Duke A | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| WUSTL B | Georgia Tech B | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| Yale B | Penn State A | 0 | 10 | 0 | 10 |