Top Highlights

• Copenhagen Interpretation, after the place where the forceful Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his brilliant protégé, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, formulated the likely meaning of their extraordinary mathematical discoveries. Bohr and Heisenberg realized that atoms are not little solar systems of billiard balls but something far more mess...
• They spoke about a quantum particle as both a particle—a congealed, set thing—and a “wave”: a big smeared-out region of space and time, any corner of which the particle may occupy.
• The only thing dissolving this little cloud of probability into something solid and measurable was the involvement of an observer. Once these scientists decided to have a closer look at a subatomic particle by taking a measurement, the subatomic entity that existed as pure potential would “collapse” into one particular state.
• The moment we looked at an electron or took a measurement, it appeared that we helped to determine its final state.
• It suggests not only that the observer brings the observed into being, but also that nothing in the universe exists as an actual “thing” independently of our perception of it.