"Well... You see... When its a particle it spins. When its a wave its still doing that. How does a waveform spin you ask? Listen. Shut the fuck up. The math is really weird and some of this stuff just happens and you can't visualize it in your head. We didn't believe it at first either but after 50 years of experiments we have to just accept that reality is consistent with the math even if we don't fully conceptualize what that means even"
That's not a good analogy because typically cameras don't change the things they're observing. But, a camera with a flash...
Imagine a guy driving down a dark road at night. Take a picture of him without a flash and you'll get a blurry picture.
Take a picture of him with a powerful flash and you'll get an idea of exactly where he was when the picture was taken, but the powerful flash will affect his driving and he'll veer off the road.
You can't measure something without interacting with it. This is true even in the non-quantum world, but often the interactions are small enough to ignore. Like, if you stick a meat thermometer into a leg of lamb, you'll measure its temperature. But, the relatively cool thermometer is going to slightly reduce the temperature of the lamb.
At a quantum level, you can no longer ignore the effect that measuring has on observing. The twin-slit experiment is the ultimate proof of this weirdness.
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
It's because to observe something you have to interact with it. Dealing with particles is like playing pool in the dark and the only way you can tell where the balls are is by rolling other balls into them and listening for the sound it makes. Thing is, you now only know where the ball was, not what happened next.
In the quantum world, even a single photon can influence what another particle is doing. This is fundamentally why observation changes things.
I think a lot of the confusion people have is around the word “observation” which in everyday language implies the presence of an intelligent observer. It seems totally nonsensical that the outcome of a physics experiment should depend on whether the physicist is in the lab or out for a coffee! That’s because it is!
I have this beef with a lot of words used in physics. Taking an everyday word and reusing it as a technical term whose meaning may be subtly and/or profoundly different from the original. It’s a source of constant confusion.
Its that an observation is always an energetic interaction. You can't measure a system without interacting with it and at the particle scale every interaction has enough energy to affect the particle in some way. Like when you light up a room you're slightly heating the molecules in it.
If your room is small enough that the light bulb is bigger than the room, this effect becomes very noticable.
Google "Electron Orbitals". All the spaces there are all the possible highest likely locations for the electrons. Good Introduction to some Quantum Mechanics 👍
Except they only look like that if there is an external reference system imposing some structure on the atom!
Otherwise all orbitals are basically spherical because they can all just be in a superposition of all possible orbitals and we couldn't tell a difference...
And then suddenly you have two atoms meeting and need to explain why 1+1=0 for their molecular orbits -.-
I don't think so. Orbitals give you the spaces of highest probability! Electrons could be outside as well. And since it is based on probability it is definitely a useful model.
Electronic orbitals are regions within the atom in which electrons have the highest probability of being found.
I'll have a look at this later, I remember it being any possible existence of an election, not just highest probabilities, from when I was taught this several weeks ago.
Fucking hate the people that insist on using only half of the number as if it was a real value. At least say you are working with natural unities or something.
Using "+1/2" and "-1/2" as vector labels is fine. Using it on the context of "the spin can have those 2 values here" for laypeople without further explanation is just making the subject less accessible.
Also, yeah, I was too lazy to search for the unicode ħ.
If we theorize that the universe is like a computer program, then maybe the Universe has several layers of abstraction and we only can access our current layer, therefore forever having an incomplete model. If something external to our layer is affecting it, it would probably be impossible to know.
Ahh... hmm. In some ways it is literally inaccessible, because we can't observe it directly. All of our experimental (e.g. real) subatomic knowledge comes from smashing particles into each other at near-light speed and observing the bits that come out, which is somewhat like dropping a smartphone off the Empire State building and trying to figure out how it works by picking up the broken pieces off the sidewalk. We can probe the structure of molecules with electron microscopes, but there are no tools for directly observing anything smaller than that. We draw conclusions for how smaller things behave through inference.
You can absolutely know if something external is affecting it. Dark matter and energy might be such a thing. What you might not be able to tell is how those mechanics arise, you'll only know the aggregate result on your layer.