alt Hacker NewsPoints are a realist view - there's a real object there.
Although some physicists disagree, QM slants very anti-realist. There are no objects anywhere, no particles, no waves, only probabilistic interactions, some of which can be snapshotted into localised partially definite results.
So there are only interactions between probability distributions in space and time, and "particle-like events."
No pointy objects, and no need for them.
Replies
inigyou • today at 3:36 AM
Wouldn't it be both? Electrons occupy probability clouds, but the overall probabilities of things happening are summed over the whole cloud as if, at each point, the electron was a point particle at that point?
QM slanting anit-realist is because some prominent physicists like Neils Bohr gave the math that interpretation, and they were more persuasive than the realists like Einstein, Schrodinger, Everett.
The agnostic view is it's just a mathematical model that makes accurate probabilistic predictions when measurements are made, which says nothing about what's really going on.
Of course treating particles as points is also mathematical.