I can’t be the only one who absolutely hates the idea of a particle having two states at once, right? Is it just a personal thing or is it tied somehow to the fact that autistic people generally have more binary thinking?
Forgive me if it’s a stupid question. I’m still trying to figure out how this all works and whether I’m autistic or not.
Quantum mechanics doesn’t have “particles”, it has “quanta”. They’re fundamentally different things. Your intuition about particles does not apply to quanta.
Think of light. You can shine a red light and a blue light on a surface at the same time. Even with a purely classical vew this gets modeled as a superposition (addition) of the intensities. That’s still wrong for how quantum superpositions work, those are adding the probability density functions of a propersty of the quanta, not the properties directly. But it’s closer.