most people give an example of water waves but I thought every single “wave” has particle-like atomic structure. What does it mean for the most smallest particle like an electron to be a wave?
In: Physics
It means it doesn’t have only definite, fixed characteristics. Instead many of its properties are random, with an average or expected value, and a probability distribution.
It also means that two electrons will interact in wave-like ways (adding together or even subtracting) rather than in particle-like ways (bouncing off each other).
When we get into quantum mechanics it is often easier to stop thinking about *things* doing stuff, and start thinking more about *systems* existing in *states*. In normal mechanics a chair is a thing. It can be moved around, it can be pushed or pulled. But a chair is made up of a huge number of different other things, all interacting in complicated ways; the chair is a *system*.
In QM, if you have a system that isn’t interacting with the outside world it behaves in a weird, probabilistic way. Rather than existing in a particular state, it has to be modelled as existing in *in a combination of all possible states*, with some complex (!) maths to explain how it all works. The system then collapses down to a specific state (with an associated probability) when you break open the system by interacting with it.
So if we have say an electron-in-a-box system, and we isolate it from the rest of the universe, there are a whole bunch of different states the system could be in (the electron could be on one side, or on the other, and moving left-to-right or right-to-left, moving faster, moving slower etc.). From the outside we have to model the system as being in a combination of all those possible states. And mathematically one of ways of doing that is with a probability wave.
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