FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT
I was reading a book about infinity. In it, the author, not a physicist, deviates into a discussion of the quantum world. He explains how on the extraordinarily small scale of the particle, way down in the squintingly infinitesimal nether region of the electron, say, things don't operate as they do up here in the middle-size world we operate in. Down there, he says, things get counter-intuitive, spooky even. An electron, he claims, lives in a kind of ghostly state of non-being – in a weird state of both clockwise and counter-clockwise spin, and one or another position or all possible positions, all at the same time. And then by observing them through taking a measurement (of position or momentum or spin, say) we kind of magically call them into a state of being. Though I'm no physicist either, this is not at all my reading of the science. This idea of “the position of the electron”, as far as I can tell, is a silly game we primates are imposing on electrons. We want there to be a position for the electron because that's what we expect of the world, having evolved in a world of sand and boulders and mountains. But this in-between world is not the domain of the electron and does not apply. No, you don't “see” an electron. This is not what an electron is or how it works. Electrons are different. Just as real and tangible as a tree or tarantula, but fundamentally different than the kinds of things, like these, we “see”. The electron is precisely not what you see, and being seen in a place or having momentum or spin is really a distortion of the electron. There's just no such thing as “where the electron is”; instead, there is only the probability. If that doesn't make sense it's because you're not an electron. If a physicist seeks to locate an electron they arrive at a wave-function, a mathematical description of the quantum state of the electron, and the probability of possible measurements of this quantum state. This wave-function is the totality of the electron. The wave-function describes all spatial properties of the electron and the electron behaves AS this distribution described by the wave-function. Nothing “pops into existence” in such a way, as you've undoubtedly heard. Yes, to take a measurement “collapses the wave-function”, as they say, and we get a precise measurement, but that's NOT the electron. The quantum state of the electron IS the electron (not the where or when or what or how). An electron is not a grain of sand or a boulder or a mountain or anything of the sort. An electron is not a “thing” in this way, as you know and expect “things” to be. And this is why illustrating them or trying to talk about them without math is hard and causes great confusion. A poor but better illustration that helps me think about electrons is to compare them to fungi. When you're walking through the forest and you come to a mushroom you think “A-ha! Look! A mushroom! Amanita muscaria!” (Or maybe that's just me, regardless...) Yes, there's a mushroom under that spruce tree, busting out of that litter of needles; but what you see, the “mushroom”, is not the organism, not the Amanita muscaria. This is just its fruiting body, just one of its reproductive parts that has exploded into the world like a fleshy flower for the purpose of spore dispersal. The fungal organism often remains hidden as a nearly invisible network cobweb-like threads, or hyphae. And fungi may be distributed below the forest floor, like Amanita muscaria, or running up the middle of a tree trunk or behind a shield of its bark, or it may be slowly snaking unseen through your loaf of bread or block of cheese. And an individual fungi, in its thin, filamentous, branching essence may stretch, just one tenth or one fiftieth of a millimetre thick, for miles. (The largest discovered to date is a single organism measuring 2,400 acres, roughly approximating the area of 1,650 football fields.) So when you spot a mushroom some place you may think you're seeing one of these organisms (Amanita muscaria, Boletus edulis, Cantharellus cibarius...) but you're not. You may spot ten mushrooms of all different shapes and sizes and colours; but is that ten individuals, five different species, or many parts of just one at different stages of growth? And where, for that matter, is the source, the actual organism? Well, most of it may actually lay in the valley below you, across the shallow creek you just waded through, or maybe twenty-five feet up that tree over there. And, try as you might, you're never really going to locate “it”. In fact, even to start looking for it with any precision you cannot help but disrupt its delicate distribution. But this is still not an electron.
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