In the passage quoted in the previous post, the most striking claim is not that electrons somehow “know” the experimental configuration. It is that each electron is said to know what happened to the electrons that went before it and the ones that would come after it.
This appeal to past and future electrons is doing crucial explanatory work. It is also doing illicit work.
At first glance, the move seems harmless. After all, the interference pattern only becomes visible once many electrons have been detected. It is tempting to describe the pattern as something that is gradually built up over time, and then to treat that temporal accumulation as something each electron must in some sense be responding to. But this temptation rests on a quiet shift in explanatory focus: from events to distributions, and then back again.
A single electron detection is a local event. It occurs at a particular time and at a particular location on the detection screen. It has no duration beyond that event, and no access to any other event. Nothing about the physics of the situation licenses the idea that one detection is influenced by another, let alone by detections that have not yet occurred.
The interference pattern, by contrast, is not an event at all. It is a statistical regularity visible only when many detection events are considered together. Crucially, it is not located at any particular moment in time. The pattern is invariant across trials, not produced by their temporal order.
When Gribbin invokes earlier and later electrons, these two distinct kinds of thing—events and distributions—are tacitly conflated. The stability of the distribution across many runs is redescribed as though it were a temporal relation between individual electrons. Past detections are treated as if they exert an influence, and future detections as if they are somehow already in play.
This is where the sense of paradox intensifies. If electrons are truly fired one at a time, how could a later electron be affected by an earlier one? And how could it possibly be affected by electrons that have not yet been detected? The experiment begins to look as though it requires retrocausation, memory, or some kind of non-local coordination across time.
But none of this follows unless we first accept the mistaken premise that the interference pattern is something produced by electrons acting across time.
The pattern is not built up in the way a heap of sand is built grain by grain. Nothing accumulates in the world as electrons strike the screen, except marks on a detector. What accumulates is our evidence of a distribution that was already defined by the experimental arrangement.
To put the point sharply: no single electron ever contributes to an interference pattern. The pattern is not an effect to which electrons add their share. It is a property of the experimental construal that governs how electron detections are distributed across many instances.
Once this distinction is kept firmly in view, the appeal to past and future electrons loses its grip. There is no need to imagine electrons consulting a history of previous events or anticipating events yet to come. Each detection is constrained in exactly the same way, regardless of when it occurs, because the constraint does not operate through time.
The illicit temporalisation of the explanation arises from treating iteration as interaction. Repeating the same experiment many times is mistaken for a process unfolding in time, rather than for the repeated instantiation of the same structured situation. Temporal order becomes explanatorily salient only because the pattern is mischaracterised as something that emerges from the sequence itself.
This confusion sets the stage for the most persistent misreading of the two-slit experiment: the idea that electrons must somehow coordinate their behaviour across time in order to produce the observed result. In the next post, we will argue that this coordination picture is not merely unnecessary, but conceptually incoherent. Patterns do not need to be built, coordinated, or produced. They need only to be instantiated.
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