My interpretation of the double-slit experiment has been that the presence of physical matters in a certain configuration imposes some sort of probabilistic "reality field" that propagates at light-speed. The superposition of these "reality fields" at a certain point in space(-time) determines the probability of the particles' behaviour at that point, not unlike how support vector machines with a RBF kernel work.
This interpretation has the benefit (I think) of bypassing the problems with the "observers" --- any apparatus that is able to discern the path a particle had taken just so happens to impose a field such that, when superposed with the original "reality field" the double-slit imposes, the mixture field no longer exhibits the interference pattern.
Of course I am not a physicist by training, so the above could be completely nonsense (or it could have already been an established theory).
I would love for someone to clarify this for me: My understanding is that the physical act of observing, as in, with the specific machine we use, is what causes photons to suddenly behave different. Like if decided to gently touch a marble rolling down a ramp in darkness to measure how fast it was rolling, the act of touching changes how the marble rolls. It's not that we're actually observing the marble's behavior, is that's we're interfering with its behavior when we measure it.
Is this accurate? Or is the observation of the photon not physically impacted by our observation, and through some magic of quantum behavior, it somehow "knows" it's being observed and changes because of that?
I'd thought direct observation of the photo would mean physically interact with it (and thus changing its behaviour). My understanding is that there are also other experiment designs which allow identifying which path a photon went after it passed the slits; in such cases the interference pattern disappears too.
This interpretation has the benefit (I think) of bypassing the problems with the "observers" --- any apparatus that is able to discern the path a particle had taken just so happens to impose a field such that, when superposed with the original "reality field" the double-slit imposes, the mixture field no longer exhibits the interference pattern.
Of course I am not a physicist by training, so the above could be completely nonsense (or it could have already been an established theory).