I recently finished an excellent book providing a pop-science level understanding of the experiments surrounding the bizarre fact that very small objects are neither particles nor waves, or they’re both, or, you know, something. I had almost no exposure to quantum mechanics previously so this was all fresh to me and can I just say how weird this stuff is? I mean seriously mind-blowingly weird. As in potentially it’s a wave until something possibly anywhere in the universe happens to observe (whatever that means) something that reveals its state and then, nope, no longer a wave. It is also not clear that the act of observation has to technically happen first, so the whole linear time thing gets a little messy. And apparently it is not just the electrons and photons that behave this way but even neutrons, large chunky molecules, or possibly cats? No one seems quite sure. Or at least I’m not sure.
What is fascinating to me, and maybe I can’t explain this right, but I’ll try; is that the twist in one’s world view from this discovery seems at least of the same order of magnitude as believing in angels appearing to fourteen year olds. Like, if you can stomach the fact that there is an unseen world that behaves nothing like how it “should”, well okay then, but at that point it seems like you should be open to the fact that many things may not be as they “should”, in a natural man sense.
Which is obviously not to say one should believe things without evidence of some kind. Just that, well, the world is seriously weird and not in ways that you could infer from your lived experience.
