Often cited dictums in Quantum Mechanics include "observation disturbance
causes loss of interference" and "ignorance is interference". In this paper we
propose and describe a series of experiments with modified Mach-Zehnder
interferometers showing that one has to be careful when applying such dictums.
We are able to show that without interacting in any way with the light quantum
(or quanta) expected to behave "wave-like", interference fringes can be lost by
simply gaining (or having the potential to gain) the which-path knowledge.
Erasing this information may revive the interference fringes. Delayed choice
can be added, arriving to an experiment in line with Wheeler's original
proposal. We also show that ignorance is not always synonym with having the
interference fringes. The often-invoked "collapse of the wavefunction" is found
to be a non-necessary ingredient to describe our experiments.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures; to appear in EPJ
