Title: Q & A: Observer Effect? | Department of Physics | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Headings: 
Q & A: Observer Effect?
Follow-Up #1: quantum
Follow-Up #2: observation and light
Follow-Up #3: measurement and consciousness?
Follow-Up #4: free-will?
Follow-Up #5: confusion between the uncertainty principle and the observer effect
Follow-Up #6: Quantum for the non-scientist
Follow-Up #7: Unconscious observers
Follow-Up #8: Bell's Inequalities and free will
Follow-Up #9: free will and quantum mechanics
Follow-Up #10: what collapses wavefunction?
Follow-Up #11: What causes quantum interference loss

Content: It would be extremely surprising if anything as simple as an electron could have any sort of consciousness. However, when someone tries to watch an electron, they usually do something to the electron to make its behavior more evident. That something (e.g. shining a light on it) changes the electron's behavior. Mike W.
(published on 08/20/2010)
Follow-Up #4: free-will? Q: As a follow up to the previous answer, I'd like to share something I found interesting. If one defines free will as something like "non-deterministic", one can prove from three simple axioms that if you wish to claim we (experimenters) have "free will", then we must conclude electrons have "free will" as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem  It is an interesting way to demonstrate the "measurement problem" in quantum mechanics, for in the traditional Copenhagen approach the evolution of a system is completely deterministic except for a measurement. If it turns out all of physics can be explained with the appropriate choice of lagrangian, can we really have the freewill to choose a random measurement?