ClancyBoy

I think you might be thinking about it too much

We have two models what a phenomenon can be. There are waves, aka "ripples" that occur in a medium, like waves in a pond or sound waves, and there are are particles which are teeny tiny solid objects.

Things like light and electrons don't actually physically change from one to the other. When observed under some experimental conditions they act like waves (such as the two-slit experiment,) and under some conditions they act like particles (because they seem to have mass and occupy space.) What result you get depends on what technique you use. The best answer is they are at once both, and neither.

About observation though...

The only way we have of "observing" things too small to see with the naked eye is to bounce things off of them., like light or electrons, or something else that can bounce back and be detected, returning an image.

For example, say I have one of those baseball launchers people use for batting practice. I use one of those to fire a million baseballs at something, say a car. (The baseballs represent light, and the car is a human cell or a bacteria.) Based on how the baseballs bounce off of it, I can get a pretty good idea of the shape of the car, how fast it's going, etc.

Now say I use the same technique to try to observe, say, a cat. I fire a million baseballs at it and I pulverize it into a tiny red stain. I can tell there was a cat there, but what it was doing or how fast it was going will always remain a mystery, because I killed it as soon as I started shooting baseballs at it.

That, in a nutshell, is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. It means that the act of observation changes the system being observed. When you shine light (or electrons) on very small particles, the particle stops what it was doing because the thing you're hitting it with is just as big or bigger than the thing itself.


New-ageists like to make a big deal of the uncertainty principle and give it mystical overtones. The best example of this is the really crappy documentary What the Bleep Do We Know? which tries to merge QM and pop psychology and comes to some really specious conclusions. In reality though the uncertainty principle only means that our observation techniques are at present very limited.

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"Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons wait for you down there. Little pets they are, little little little pets. Cute little things, they say. Don't you believe it. No man ever saw them and walked away alive. You won't either. That's the final dash, flash. That's the utter clobber, cobber." --Cordwainer Smith, Norstrillia.