I’ve heard that electrons behave differently when observed, but how do you actually observe an electron?
In: Physics
In quantum mechanics, the word “observation” has its own specific definitions. It’s easier to use the more objective word/concept “interaction” that comes to us from successful modern Quantum Field Theory (QFT). In other words, any time any particles *interact* with each other, regardless of any instrumentation or humans present.
For example, in the well-known double-slit experiment, the “observation” can refer to the particle *interaction* that caused a “dot” to appear at one specific location on the detector screen.
If the screen hadn’t been there, there’d be no “interaction”, and so the *position* of the particle wouldn’t be defined at that location, except in terms of a probability distribution. This is again easier to understand in the framework of Quantum Field Theory, where the word/concept “particle” is *redefined* to refer to an excitation in a fundamental fully-space-occupying field. That means our intuition is way off the mark if we imagine a “classical” particle like a little chunk of something zooming around.
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