>>11209784>Why would whether something is a particle or a wave depend on whether it's been observed or not?>False premise againJesus fucking Christ, if you don't understand anything about a subject, don't shitpost about it. "Observation" in science means "to interact and interfere with the system in order to extract information". You literally cannot observe anything at all without exchanging something with it.
"Particles" and "waves" are models that we, humans, invented based on analogies to macroscopic phenomena because that's what our senses can detect unaided. The entities that constitute matter and carry energy aren't particles or waves. At all. In some instances, however, their behaviour will approximate that of a macroscopic particle (billiard ball) or that of a wave (outward dissipation, refraction, constructive and destructive interference). In their energetic, full-of-potential state, the energy carrying entities can do many things, all of which are mathematically valid and physically possible. They have many potential futures they could follow. In order to extract information from them, you must interact with them (as is true of everything in Nature, you can't sense things without interacting with them and altering their future lightcone). When you do, you disturb their full-of-potential equilibrium state and they are forced to follow a narrower path with less possible future exits. This is called "collapsing the wavefunction" because you are forcing a highly chaotic and rich mathematical description to become a dull constant or uninteresting function with trivial results.
