The prions of spacetime.

Out here folding along.

Nice reference to PBS Space Time. The YouTube channel where I just get bullied with science, and for some weird twisted reason I like it.

Hah! Time. Like that's a real thing.

Phone stuff. Sorry about that

We have to recycle nowadays. Besides we can't have people throwing away perfectly good electrons. They could end up anywhere.

I've heard this weird concept repeated over and over but I've never once run across it in literature or in speaking to my particle physicist friend. Can you provide a source?

Actually, it can be there, but then you won't know how fast it's moving.

That's not a good analogy because typically cameras don't change the things they're observing. But, a camera with a flash...

Imagine a guy driving down a dark road at night. Take a picture of him without a flash and you'll get a blurry picture.

Take a picture of him with a powerful flash and you'll get an idea of exactly where he was when the picture was taken, but the powerful flash will affect his driving and he'll veer off the road.

You can't measure something without interacting with it. This is true even in the non-quantum world, but often the interactions are small enough to ignore. Like, if you stick a meat thermometer into a leg of lamb, you'll measure its temperature. But, the relatively cool thermometer is going to slightly reduce the temperature of the lamb.

At a quantum level, you can no longer ignore the effect that measuring has on observing. The twin-slit experiment is the ultimate proof of this weirdness.

Radiating milk equally in all directions, of course.

It's because to observe something you have to interact with it. Dealing with particles is like playing pool in the dark and the only way you can tell where the balls are is by rolling other balls into them and listening for the sound it makes. Thing is, you now only know where the ball was, not what happened next.

In the quantum world, even a single photon can influence what another particle is doing. This is fundamentally why observation changes things.

I think a lot of the confusion people have is around the word “observation” which in everyday language implies the presence of an intelligent observer. It seems totally nonsensical that the outcome of a physics experiment should depend on whether the physicist is in the lab or out for a coffee! That’s because it is!

I have this beef with a lot of words used in physics. Taking an everyday word and reusing it as a technical term whose meaning may be subtly and/or profoundly different from the original. It’s a source of constant confusion.

Its that an observation is always an energetic interaction. You can't measure a system without interacting with it and at the particle scale every interaction has enough energy to affect the particle in some way. Like when you light up a room you're slightly heating the molecules in it.

If your room is small enough that the light bulb is bigger than the room, this effect becomes very noticable.

Ah let's see, of the top of my head...

~~1s² 2s² 2d⁶ 3s² 2p¹⁰ ...~~

Edited (iirc now, the d block is in the middle with the transition metals, p block with metallics, Halogens, Noble Gases...):

1s² 2s² 2p⁶ 3s² 2d¹⁰ ...

Using "+1/2" and "-1/2" as vector labels is fine. Using it on the context of "the spin can have those 2 values here" for laypeople without further explanation is just making the subject less accessible.

Also, yeah, I was too lazy to search for the unicode ħ.

Ahh... hmm. In some ways it is literally inaccessible, because we can't observe it directly. All of our experimental (e.g. real) subatomic knowledge comes from smashing particles into each other at near-light speed and observing the bits that come out, which is somewhat like dropping a smartphone off the Empire State building and trying to figure out how it works by picking up the broken pieces off the sidewalk. We can probe the structure of molecules with electron microscopes, but there are no tools for directly observing anything smaller than that. We draw conclusions for how smaller things behave through inference.

And frankly, the entire concept of spinors and the relationship to observed properties like electron charge is pretty mysterious, and nobody really understands wave-particle duality, that's just the best explanation we have for what we observe.