I think I have a decent grasp on the dual-slit experiment, but I don’t know how the waveforms know when to collapse into a particle. Also, what counts as an observation and what doesn’t?
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When you see a car, the photons bouncing off of it don’t move the car. But when you look at quantum particles, like individual atoms, they DO get impacted by bouncing photons off them.
They don’t “know”. We just can “see” without poking them, which changes them, their direction or spin.
So it becomes a study of how much we can know something before we “touch” it. This, turns out, to be fascinating and exploitable – that these particles carry types of information in them that we can save, extract, and send along, and until they’re poked by something again, they keep that information.
And this ends up being useful in some ways, like quantum computing.
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