this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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Science Memes

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[โ€“] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Also as Heisenberg found, at a certain point things get blurry not because our instruments don't have the technical capabilities, but because what we are looking at is fundamentally blurry.