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Oh, okay. That makes sense and seriously simplifies it.

And maybe Espy should be focusing on finals then?

We went over it some in psychology... that is what I got of it.

Well, alas but my psych professor skipped over it. Nothing that important anyways....(or he might have gone over it and it was one of those days where I wasn't paying huge amounts of attention*

Espy already graduated, so Espy is done...

Oh, didn't knows. Yays for Espy then! (schools around here haven't gotten out yet and still have another week or so)

Espy, don't think of it as actual reality. Rather, think of it as a probability distribution. Until you take a measurement of the system -- thereby escalating one of those probabilities to 100% (you just looked at it, so it's definitely happened) and reducing the rest to 0% (you didn't see them, so they didn't happen) -- then it would be fallacious to treat the system as if it were in any fixed state. Rather, you have to treat it as a superposition of possible states.

This is, in fact, how electrons work. They're not some tiny little blob of matter spinning in circles around the nucleus of an atom. Instead, they're wave impulses. (Though at that scale, E=mc^2 says there's no difference!) And you can't measure WHERE an electron is, but rather you can measure where they CAN be, with associated probabilities.

Yeah, my school's really early.

...I get this feeling I'm gonna be on Wikipedia for the next four hours. (I somehow went from cosmology to the Planck constant...)

*head spins a bit* A bit more technical of an explanation, but definitely works. I guess I'll have to refresh on a lot of things before I get back into sciences again (hard sciences that is).

...Okay, I understood everything minus tis part, which is opposite of what textbooks teach. But then again, textbooks aren't too great at explaining atoms in general, anyways.

It's not really technical at all. You do it all the time when you're mentally exploring a set of possibilities. If there's more than one thing that can happen, you'll think about what might happen in each possible case. You can make plans based on each result. But only one of those results can happen, and you THINKING about the result is separate from what actually happens. After all, when your friend is late, you might think "what happened to them ten minutes ago?" and your actions will be based on the probabilities of each outcome. And then when you actually CALL your friend, and you find out what happened, the other possibilities stop mattering.

Your thoughts are that superposition of states, and that superposition lasts until you observe the system, even though the event in question might have already happened.

Espy, textbooks are SUPPOSED to teach about electron shells and electron clouds, with different energy states. That's what I'm talking about -- you can't pinpoint an electron in a shell/cloud but you can give probabilities about the places it COULD be. That's how the electron shells are defined -- they're the region of highest probability for an electron of a given energy state.

If you strip it back to the bases, it's similar to the concept of an equation having a variable having two possibilities. Until you actually apply it you can't know which it is, thus the cat being both until you look. It's actually way more complex than that but that's how my uni lecturer explained it to us.

And coda is right on the electrons :P

Okay, maybe not technical but more of an in depth explanation and analysis. Not that that's a bad thing.

.......Ah, okay. (Note that talking about this kind of stuff is my definition of "having fun"...)

yeah me too :P

thats why i love convos with coda <3

-grumbles a bit while working through Wiki's entry on superstring theory-