Are Particles Theoretically Tangible?

[polymath257]

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?

Perhaps the most fundamentally counter-intuitive aspect of quantum mechanics is that it is probabilistic at base.

probabilities are used in other areas of physics. For example, statistical mechanics describes pressure and temperature in terms of the mass behavior of very small molecules. The probabilities, though, are not fundamental. They are simply averages of the behavior of all those atoms and reflect our lack of desire and ability to follow all those molecules individually. The probability is used as an alternative to modelling all those molecules. it reflects our ignorance of what is happening underneath.

Similarly, when we flip a coin, we *could* model the air currents and the strength and direction of the force from the thumb, the texture of the area the coin lands, etc. Given enough physics and a fast enough computer, we could potentially say whether the coin would land as heads or tails before it actually does so.

Instead, we use probability and say there is a 50% chance of getting heads and 50% of getting tails. Once again, we ignore all the underlying complications and use probabilities to simplify our analysis.

But that is NOT what happens in quantum mechanics. Based on the theory *and* observations, the probabilistic aspect of QM is fundamental: it is NOT based on some 'hidden variables' underneath. This is actually testable using Bell's inequalities and the actual observations put quite stringent constraints on 'hidden variables' (including that they would violate special relativity).

So the probabilities are NOT the result of something deeper, but appear to be simply an aspect of how the universe works. The universe is fundamentally probabilistic.