>>13973677Everyone in this thread is a fucking idiot OP, here's the deal: things don't exist.
Look at the sun. Your eyes are interacting with photons that elicit specific imagery in your mind. Your nerves absorb heat from the radiation. The sun isn't a "thing", it's just an abstraction for a collection of common interactions around a single source. For QM to be intuitive, you have to be open to viewing ALL of reality through this lens.
In QM, we describe these interactions using probability distributions. The distribution for an electron in the hydrogen atom is just a distribution for how likely we are to detect an interaction at any point in space. You cannot detect a particle, they aren't real. You can only detect an interaction that seems "particle-like". When people say the wave function collapses, they mean that they have detected one of these interactions for a system. It DOES NOT mean that the particle is confined to a known state; that implies particles exist, which we established, is false. It only means an interaction was detected.
In the example of the hydrogen atom, it may be more fruitful to think of the electron as the actual distribution (wavefunction) instead of a particle that flies around super quick. For all we know, electrons don't even move, they just spawn events that appear to come from small & quick things.
Tldr fuck you, I aint summarizing shit
