how can a particle be in two places at once?
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Imagine a lake with some waves. Where is the wave? In some sense it’s everywhere (on the surface). Now imagine dropping a stone in and a circular pulse propagating outward. Now where is this pulse? It probably makes sense to say “wherever the high points are”.
In quantum mechanics, a particle _is_ a wave. When it’s very concentrated (like a pulse), then it makes sense to say the particle is at wherever the peak of the pulse is. But other times, the particle truly behaves like it’s spread out like a wave. For example, a water wave can be split up and recombined to make very interesting patterns (this phenomenon is known as interference) and what’s amazing is that single particles can do that too.
In our daily experience, when a very large amount of particles are involved, this sort of effect diminishes very rapidly, and so you never directly experience things in two places at once. But when you zoom in far enough, these weird quantum effects start kicking in and need to be taken into account when working with them.
It can’t, and it’s not.
However, particles also behave as waves, with smaller particles being more wavelike and less particle-like. Waves exist as a distribution of energy across some amount of space.
The confusing part is that sometimes these waves have to interact with stuff (like camera sensors) at which point they turn into a particle to do the interaction. However a single particle cannot interact with two camera sensors at once. What it CAN do is have a 50% chance of interacting with either sensor. If you have a large number of sensors spread out in a line, mapping out the chance of the particle interacting with each sensor will look like a statistical distribution that roughly matches the wave distribution.
In quantum mechanics, entities are neither particles nor waves – they just exhibit particle-like and wave-like properties depending on how you look at them.
And no, it doesn’t make sense. To “understand” quantum mechanics you need to disconnect from things you have learned in the macro world.
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