The thing that made it click for me is to realise that particles and waves don’t really exist — they’re just terms we use to try to understand the world. When we see weird quantum shit happening, it’s not actually weird in and of itself, we’re just finding that our reductionist (but often useful) models are breaking down and we can’t straightforwardly say “that’s a particle” or “that’s a wave”.
I think of it as analogous to statistical averages. If I have a group of 100 people for whom I know the average height (and other summary statistics). Thinking of them in terms of the group is like treating them as a wave. They don’t have a precisely defined position (because they’re a diffuse blob of people), and although I know their average height, it’s clouded by uncertainty. When we do statistics on a group of people, it’s almost as if the individuals cease to exist. If all you have are the summary statistics from the group, you can’t know the heights of any individuals within the crowd.
I can “zoom in” and pluck a person from the crowd and measure their height, then that’s sort of like wave function collapse. Now I can precisely define the position of this person, because they’re just one person — if someone says “which person are you talking about?”, I can point to them and say “this one here”. However, I don’t know anything about their surrounding context — whether they’re taller or shorter than average. They’re basically a particle.
The key to this is how “zooming in” on an individual person gives us a fundamentally different perspective to the zoomed out view of the crowd.
I have come to the conclusion that everything, from the largest galaxy clusters to the tiniest quark and all the laws of physics, is nothing more than a fractal caused by rotation in the initial moment of creation of our local instance of existence that we call the universe.
There are no particles, no waves. Only rotation.
Maybe the whole wave function/pattern deal is like how British people are just naturally good at forming lines, even if there isn’t a sign indicating to do so.
I do enjoy being part of a nice, orderly queue. Makes me feel like I have some purpose in life. I can just slip partway into derealization as I submit my will to the queue.
I didn’t notice it as a thing that we did until I went travelling in Europe and frequently found myself ambiently stressed due to the lack of queue in a situation that would benefit from one. Sometimes if enough British people congealed together in one place by coincidence, we might find ourselves forming a neat little queue.
There’s so much that makes me ashamed to be British, but this is silly and fun; I like it.
The thing that made it click for me is to realise that particles and waves don’t really exist — they’re just terms we use to try to understand the world. When we see weird quantum shit happening, it’s not actually weird in and of itself, we’re just finding that our reductionist (but often useful) models are breaking down and we can’t straightforwardly say “that’s a particle” or “that’s a wave”.
I think of it as analogous to statistical averages. If I have a group of 100 people for whom I know the average height (and other summary statistics). Thinking of them in terms of the group is like treating them as a wave. They don’t have a precisely defined position (because they’re a diffuse blob of people), and although I know their average height, it’s clouded by uncertainty. When we do statistics on a group of people, it’s almost as if the individuals cease to exist. If all you have are the summary statistics from the group, you can’t know the heights of any individuals within the crowd.
I can “zoom in” and pluck a person from the crowd and measure their height, then that’s sort of like wave function collapse. Now I can precisely define the position of this person, because they’re just one person — if someone says “which person are you talking about?”, I can point to them and say “this one here”. However, I don’t know anything about their surrounding context — whether they’re taller or shorter than average. They’re basically a particle.
The key to this is how “zooming in” on an individual person gives us a fundamentally different perspective to the zoomed out view of the crowd.
I have come to the conclusion that everything, from the largest galaxy clusters to the tiniest quark and all the laws of physics, is nothing more than a fractal caused by rotation in the initial moment of creation of our local instance of existence that we call the universe. There are no particles, no waves. Only rotation.
Maybe the whole wave function/pattern deal is like how British people are just naturally good at forming lines, even if there isn’t a sign indicating to do so.
I do enjoy being part of a nice, orderly queue. Makes me feel like I have some purpose in life. I can just slip partway into derealization as I submit my will to the queue.
I didn’t notice it as a thing that we did until I went travelling in Europe and frequently found myself ambiently stressed due to the lack of queue in a situation that would benefit from one. Sometimes if enough British people congealed together in one place by coincidence, we might find ourselves forming a neat little queue.
There’s so much that makes me ashamed to be British, but this is silly and fun; I like it.