how do we know electrons have different behaviours depending if they’re being observed or not? What are those behaviours?
In: 7
Our current best model for interactions of small structures like electrons and photons characterizes them not as waves or particles but as probability functions.
Best example I can come up with offhand: Mario Kart item boxes. The single item boxes are all the same but they have the potential to become any item; you just don’t know what item it is until you hit the box and observe what is inside it. Before hitting the box, it has a probability function that defines how likely it is to contain any particular item but you don’t know what item it will be until you hit it. But by ‘observing’ the box, you have collapsed that probability function and revealed what the item it is.
Unlike Mario Kart item boxes, when you STOP observing what these small structures are doing, they revert back to probability functions. The instant the blue shell explodes, it turns back into an item box.
One of the ways this relates to electrons specifically: The Neil’s Bohr model for an atom (electrons as planets orbiting a nucleus like a sun) is vastly simplified because the electrons aren’t solely particles and only kind of orbit (not enough time to cover this). Each “orbit” is a cloud of electrical charge that the probability functions exists within. The ‘particle’ that is the electron could be anywhere in that cloud and the only way to find out is to observe it by having it interact with something or move to another electron orbit. But by interacting with it, you have changed it and thus don’t know where or what it is anymore, so it’s back to a probability function.
This is a really cool trick that allows things like magnetic fields and electrical charges to move at speeds that are WAY faster than a single electron can move. If you want to dive into this via the medium of high budget YouTube explainers, Veritasium did a couple of videos on this phenomenon: [The Big Misconception about Electricity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHIhgxav9LY) and [How Electricity Actually Works](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI_X2cMHNe0).
edit: clarity and grammar
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