how do particles know when they are being observed?
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A particle does not change, you see it does. You have to put it in a state that you can observe, which changes it nature.
At the quantum level, observation isn’t a passive thing. Rather than just looking at an object like we would in normal life, it’s more like a blind person tapping something with their cane. Predictably, if that object is something like a baseball on a hard floor, tapping it would tell the person where it is, but also change its velocity. The same kind of concept is in play with quantum particles because we have to interact with them somehow to get information.
Particles don’t ‘know’ anything. But what is doing the observing affects the environment around itself.
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