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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Imagine trying to determine the position and velocity of a small pebble. The problem is that the only means by which you have to measure these quantities is by using other pebbles, either by shooting them at the subject pebble and noting where they end up, or by scattering them about and waiting for the subject pebble to collide with them.
For measurement to occur, one of your “observation” pebbles must collide with the “subject” pebble. This collision perturbs the “subject” pebble’s motion. The result is that the “subject” pebble now behaves differently that it would have had it been left unobserved.
So it is with light. We cannot measure the passage of a photon without interacting with it in some way. This interaction disturbs its motion, leaving us with an incomplete sense of what is happening.
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