(March 28, 2022 at 7:46 pm)JairCrawford Wrote:(March 28, 2022 at 5:31 pm)HappySkeptic Wrote: If you think of all those Starlings as "pieces" of the electron wave, then the analogy isn't bad.
Just don't think of the electron as being "inside" the electron cloud. It is the electron cloud. There is no tiny thing zipping around.
If the electron is the wave, and it’s not zipping around, how is the wave a probability of location? Is this where we get into particles being multiple places at once, and quantum leaps, and weird stuff like that?
The electron can be measured as having a tiny size (how small a size, we really don't know). But, until that measurement, it does not have a precise location. It isn't just that we don't know it - theory says it cannot be known (not even by a god -- that knowledge cannot enter the cosmos until a measurement is made, and the cosmos is by definition all of reality).
It is best to think of the small particle as one potential aspect of the electron (and even that is still a small wave). In QM, its all waves. Even measurements are just entanglement and decoherence with waves from the environment.
