A Missing Link: The Double-Slit Experiment and Quantum Entanglement

This article reconsiders the double-slit experiment by establishing a new type of relationship between it and the concept of entanglement. While the role of entanglement in the double-slit experiment has been considered, this particular relationship appears to have been missed in preceding discussions of the experiment, even by Bohr, who extensively used it to support his argument concerning quantum physics. The main reason for this relationship is the different roles of the diaphragm with slits in two setups, S1 and S2, defining the double-slit experiment as a quantum experiment. In S1, in each individual run of the experiment one can in principle (even if not actually) know throughout which slit the quantum object considered has passed; in S2 this knowledge is in principle impossible, which impossibility is coextensive with the appearance of the interference pattern, once a sufficient number of individual runs of the experiment have taken place. The article offers the following argument based on two new concepts, an “experimentally quantum object” and an “ontologically quantum object.” In S1 the diaphragm can be treated as part of an observational arrangement and thus considered as a classical object, while the object passing through one or the other slit is considered as an “ontologically quantum object,” defined as an object necessary to establish a quantum phenomenon. By contrast, in S2, the diaphragm can, via the concept of Heisenberg-von-Neumann cut, be treated as an “experimentally quantum object,” defined as an object treatable by quantum theory, even while possibly being an ontologically classical object. This interaction is not an observation but a quantum entanglement between these two quantum objects, one ontologically and one experimentally quantum. This argument is grounded in a particular interpretation of quantum phenomena and quantum theory, which belongs to the class of interpretations designated here as “reality without realism” (RWR) interpretations. The article also argues that wave-particle complementarity, with which the concept of complementarity is often associated, plays little, if any, role in quantum physics, or in Bohr’s thinking, and may be misleading in considering the double-slit experiment, often explained by using this complementarity.