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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“Observation” in this case is a less fancy way of saying “Perturbation” which is a necessary step in observation.
If you want to see something with your eyes, what’s required for that to happen? Well you need to bombard the target with light in the visible spectrum, that’s perturbation of the system you’re observing.
If you want to know where anything is you need to perturb it in some way, even if it isn’t visible light, you need to interact with it in some way. That act of interaction changes the system being observed.
Note that this is not the same as what’s described by the Uncertainty Principle, that is a fundamental behavior of quantum systems even when they’re isolated.
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