this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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After listening to 100s of science podcasts, watching 1000s of science vids on YT, and sleeping on a Neil Degrasse Tyson pillow I still don't understand how something can be both a particle and a wave. Sounds made up, like by a lazy SWE
It's easier once you understand that they are not both, particles are actually a type of wave 🙃
Reality is an illusion, it's waves all the way down, these meat prisons hallucinate solidity to cope with the presence of complex force interactions they can't properly perceive, Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
Iä! Iä!
I think the best way of thinking about it is that it's neither. Vaguely speaking, "quantum stuff" can be described very well by math, and this math has some elements of "waveness" (think wave equations, interference) and "particleness" (think ladder operators or maybe position eigenstates). But that doesn't mean it's one, the other, or even both
it's described by some math, and that math is agnostic as to what you call it.
In our macroscopic experience it's easy to divide the world into these two convenient buckets, but the reality is different.
Personally I think this weirdness is exploited by popsci to get more clicks, but maybe that's just my jaded opinion after years of grad school...