When observed, the electrons act as matter, but when not observed, they act as waves?
Obviously “observed” doesn’t mean recorded on an iPhone camera, but what does it mean? Is it like if we simply know the location or the velocity of the electrons, they behave differently?
The part I’m most not understanding is why the electrons behave differently. Certainly they aren’t capable of thought and recognizing they’re being observed lol
In: Physics
> Is it like if we simply know the location or the velocity of the electrons, they behave differently?
What the observer effect actually means is that we **cannot** observe which path an electron took in the double slit experiment without interacting with the electron. We can’t detect its location without collapsing the wave function.
If you’ve seen a video on the double slit experiment, they probably lied to you that they put a detector in front of the slits to just passively “watch” which slit an electron took and that changed the electron’s behavior. But that’s not true. It’s a **thought experiment** that says no matter what kind of detector we would put there, it would **have to** interact with and thus affect the electron.
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