I can’t be the only one who absolutely hates the idea of a particle having two states at once, right? Is it just a personal thing or is it tied somehow to the fact that autistic people generally have more binary thinking?
Forgive me if it’s a stupid question. I’m still trying to figure out how this all works and whether I’m autistic or not.
Just to add another interpretation (that’s not exactly correct, but might rest your mind a little bit): when you measure a single particle (or molecule) it’s kind of hard to predict the outcome - so it’s useful to think of particles having two states (or molecules having more vibrational states, for instance). When you add a lot of particles or molecules together, the population behavior gets a lot more predictable, and this situation is closer to what we are used to in the real world, that’s one of the reasons quantum mechanics feels unnatural. It’s also somewhat similar to how a single person can be different and unpredictable, but marketing can easily get insights from large populations. Imagine studying a million people and figuring out 0.5% of them are blonde and have AB+ blood type. When you look at this, you might ask what does 0.5% of people even mean: it’s only 1 in 200, but depending on how you think about it, it looks very weird - what does half person even mean in the real world? In the end, it’s more a matter of how we interpret things, and trying to compare quantum behavior with real-world analogies will always be weird.