On 7/28/2013 8:56 AM, Mike Stay wrote:
An IR photon emitted when the
>buckyball is near a slit will heat up the material around the slit it >goes through more than the material around the other slit.
No. It's not a matter of heating the slit. If you were "watching" with the right instrument you could see where the buckyball was going with enough resolution to say which slit it would go through. Sure; but the material around the slit itself is such an instrument. The material is an observer if it and the buckyball exchange photons. Same with every other bit of matter in the room, though it becomes harder to correlate the photon with path information as you get farther away.
It's not clear to me that presence of matter is important. Just the photons radiating away into empty space should be enough. Essentially the EM field is an environmental sink for information just as much as quark fields in baryonic matter. So while you're right about the interaction with the matter of the slit and the room, I don't think that's essential. Brent