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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we dont exactly know. one mechanism we’ve come up with is decoherence which is the idea that when the superposition interacts with the first layer of particles in the detector, all of their wave functions become entangles with the wave function of particle. Those all then get entangled with the particles of the next layer and so on and so forth until eventualy the signal is displayed on your computer screen. This is called a von neumann chain. When particles become entangled their wavefunctions are combined together. Each of those components adds a random vector component causing the total wavefunction to be perturbed. All of the vector components cancel out the superposition leaving only one possibility remaining.
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