Popper's experiment is an experiment proposed by the philosopher Karl Popper to test aspects of the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics.
History As early as 1934, Popper had started criticising the increasingly more accepted Copenhagen interpretation, a popular subjectivist interpretation of quantum mechanics. Therefore, in his book Logik der Forschung he proposed a first experiment alleged to empirically discriminate between the Copenhagen Interpretation and a realist ensemble interpretation, which he advocated. Einstein, however, wrote a letter to Popper about the experiment in which he raised some crucial objections and Popper himself declared that this first attempt was "a gross mistake for which I have been deeply sorry and ashamed of ever since". Popper, however, came back to the foundations of quantum mechanics from 1948, when he developed his criticism of determinism in both quantum and classical physics. As a matter of fact, Popper greatly intensified his research activities on the foundations of quantum mechanics throughout the 1950s and 1960s developing his interpretation of quantum mechanics in terms of real existing probabilities (propensities), also thanks to the support of a number of distinguished physicists (such as David Bohm). In 1980, Popper proposed perhaps his more important, yet overlooked, contribution to QM: a "new simplified version of the EPR experiment". The experiment was however published only two years later, in the third volume of the Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery. The most widely known interpretation of quantum mechanics is the Copenhagen interpretation put forward by Niels Bohr and his school. It maintains that observations lead to a wavefunction collapse, thereby suggesting the counter-intuitive result that two well separated, non-interacting systems require action-at-a-distance. Popper argued that such non-locality conflicts with common sense, and would lead to a subjectivist interpretation of phenomena, depending on the role of the 'observer'. While the EPR argument was always meant to be a thought experiment, put forward to shed light on the intrinsic paradoxes of QM, Popper proposed an experiment which could have been experimentally implemented and participated at a physics conference organised in Bari in 1983, to present his experiment and propose to the experimentalists to carry it out. The actual realisation of Popper's experiment required new techniques which would make use of the phenomenon of spontaneous parametric down-conversion but had not yet been exploited at that time, so his experiment was eventually performed only in 1999, five years after Popper had died.
Description Popper's experiment of 1980 exploits couples of entangled particles, in order to put to the test Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
Indeed, Popper maintains: "I wish to suggest a crucial experiment to test whether knowledge alone is sufficient to create 'uncertainty' and, with it, scatter (as is contended under the Copenhagen interpretation), or whether it is the physical situation that is responsible for the scatter." Popper's proposed experiment consists of a low-intensity source of particles that can generate pairs of particles traveling to the left and to the right along the x-axis. The beam's low intensity is "so that the probability is high that two particles recorded at the same time on the left and on the right are those which have actually interacted before emission." There are two slits, one each in the paths of the two particles. Behind the slits are semicircular arrays of counters which can detect the particles after they pass through the slits (see Fig. 1). "These counters are coincident counters [so] that they only detect particles that have passed at the same time through A and B."
Popper argued that because the slits localize the particles to a narrow region along the y-axis, from the uncertainty principle they experience large uncertainties in the y-components of their momenta. This larger spread in the momentum will show up as particles being detected even at positions that lie outside the regions where particles would normally reach based on their initial momentum spread. Popper suggests that we count the particles in coincidence, i.e., we count only those particles behind slit B, whose partner has gone through slit A. Particles which are not able to pass through slit A are ignored. The Heisenberg scatter for both the beams of particles going to the right and to the left, is tested "by making the two slits A and B wider or narrower. If the slits are narrower, then counters should come into play which are higher up and lower down, seen from the slits. The coming into play of these counters is indicative of the wider scattering angles which go with a narrower slit, according to the Heisenberg relations."
Now the slit at A is made very small and the slit at B very wide. Popper wrote that, according to the EPR argument, we have measured position "y" for both particles (the one passing through A and the one passing through B) with the precision Δ y {\displaystyle \Delta y} , and not just for particle passing through slit A. This is because from the initial entangled EPR state we can calculate the position of the particle 2, once the position of particle 1 is known, with approximately the same precision. We can do this, argues Popper, even though slit B is wide open. Therefore, Popper states that "fairly precise "knowledge"" about the y position of particle 2 is made; its y position is measured indirectly. And since it is, according to the Copenhagen interpretation, our knowledge which is described by the theory – and especially by the Heisenberg relations — it should be expected that the momentum p y {\displaystyle p_{y}} of particle 2 scatters as much as that of particle 1, even though the slit A is much narrower than the widely opened slit at B.
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