I can’t be the only one who absolutely hates the idea of a particle having two states at once, right? Is it just a personal thing or is it tied somehow to the fact that autistic people generally have more binary thinking?
Forgive me if it’s a stupid question. I’m still trying to figure out how this all works and whether I’m autistic or not.
What gets me is the uncertainty principle.
Like… no fucking shit you can’t know the state of a thing until it’s observed. You can’t know until you know, you know? But you can still take a fucking guess.
You appear to be discussing quantum indeterminacy, measurement, and wavefunction collapse rather than the uncertainty relation. Also, quantum indeterminacy is not a matter of “knowledge”, as you seem to suggest.
And, it’s still a certain way until observed. It doesn’t somehow change suddenly because it’s been observed!
No, that’s entirely wrong. That’s really the core idea. A particle is not in a certain way, it is in an undefined state. The very fact that you look at it, involes exchanging information (like sending another particle at it and see “how it bounces back”, to make a very primitive example).
Observing something intrisically means interacting with it and that interaction will affects the state of the particle.
I see
Ok… how can you know that, though? The slit test is always the proof I’m pointed to, but that doesn’t explain in any way how a particle is essentially stateless until observed, only that how it is observed changes the outcome. How would you know it is stateless until you look at it? You can’t know for sure until you measure it!
The whole thing seems less like physics and more like philosophy.
There is no absolute “knowing” in science. Physicists constructed a model and that model is then used to make predictions which are checked againt experiments. And so far quantum mechanics turns out to be an exceptional accurate model.
It doesn’t mean that we know it is true. But so far sticking to this weird model with all it’s quirks allowed us to build amazing gadgets
The particle does have a state before it’s observed—it just might not be an eigenstate with respect to the variable that shall be measured, but rather there is a well-defined distribution in said variable which comes from the wavefunction.