this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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Science Memes

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[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

It's not a physical wave. A wavefunction describes how likely something is to have different values for one of its properties. For example, an electron might have a wavefunction describing how likely it is to be in different locations. By observing if it actually is in a certain location or not, you force the electron to decide where it is concretely, "collapsing" the probability function into one value (its newly decided location).