Kenneth Boon Faker said:
"We can know either the momentum of a particle or its position, but not both. We must choose which of these two properties we want to determine. This is very close to saying that we create certain properties because we choose to measure those properties. Said another way, it is possible that we create something that has position, for example, like a particle, because we are intent on determining position and it is impossible to determine position without having some thing occupying the position that we want to determine. Did a particle with momentum exist before we conducted an experiment to measure its momentum? Did a particle with position exist before we conducted an experiment to measure its position? Did any particles exist at all before we thought about them and measured them? Did we created the particles that we are experimenting with? Incredible as it sounds, this is a possibility that many physicists recognise."
To my mind, one should avoid such a kind of formulation by using the terms "particle" and "create". It would be better here to follow John Marburger:
“This is the gist of Bohr’s concept of
complementarity. It is not so much that the underlying stuff does not possesses position and momentum simultaneously, it is that we will never have any way of verifying it. This has nothing to do with waves and particles. It has to do with how we get knowledge about the microscopic world. We do not have this problem with large-scale things because the incompatibility of detectors for position and momentum is a tiny effect. For microscopic things, we can choose what we want to measure about Nature, but some properties are incompatible in that they simply cannot be measured at the same time, no matter how hard we try. Bohr says that such properties are
complementary.”
“Please note that I have said nothing of whether the underlying stuff is waves or particles. In the Copenhagen Interpretation of microscopic Nature, there are neither waves nor particles. There is an underlying non-visualizable stuff that has the power to make clicks in different kinds of detectors. We can use the mathematics of Schrödinger or of Heisenberg to predict how frequently a particular kind of detector, tuned to a particular value of the property it detects, will be triggered by a given apparatus. A complete description of the underlying stuff that makes the clicks, according to Bohr, can only be obtained by repeated observations of different complementary properties.”
“We do not – cannot – measure waves in the underlying stuff. We can only measure detector clicks. But when we hear the click we say “there’s an electron!” We cannot help but think of the clicks as caused by little localized pieces of stuff that we might as well call particles. This is where the particle language comes from. It does not come from the underlying stuff, but from our psychological predisposition to associate localized phenomena with particles. That predisposition is reinforced by the fact that in large scale Nature there are particles whose trajectories we can trace to an accuracy limited by the size of Planck’s constant. This is how the Copenhagen Interpretation frames the wave versus particle issue.”
“It is not true that the underlying stuff sometimes behaves like a wave and sometimes like a particle. It always behaves like itself, but we sometimes choose to measure one property, sometimes another.”
Citations from: Marburger, J. (2002, March 2). On The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. In
The Copenhagen Interpretation: Science and History on Stage. Symposium conducted at National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution.
