I’ve been reading a lot about massive stellar objects, degenerate matter, and how the Pauli exclusion principle works at that scale. One thing I don’t understand is what it means for two particles to occupy the same quantum state, or what a quantum state really is.
My background in computers probably isn’t helping either. When I think of what “state” means, I imagine a class or a structure. It has a spin field, an energy_level field, and whatever else is required by the model. Two such instances would be indistinguishable if all of their properties were equal. Is this in any way relevant to what a quantum state is, or should I completely abandon this idea?
How many properties does it take to describe, for example, an electron? What kind of precision does it take to tell whether the two states are identical?
Is it even possible to explain it in an intuitive manner?
In very simple terms, it means that something is changing state so impossibly fast (“on a quantum level”) that we can’t tell what exactly that state is besides at the instant we check it. Exactly is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, because we can have an idea or an area, but not exactly. What that means in turn though is that by checking or measuring that state, we have interacted with it, therefore making the state we measured no longer valid for what it currently is now, or at rest.
Think of it like taking a measure of a water droplet, in the middle of a lake. You can say “there it is, those atoms are in that droplet and theyre this hot”. But the drop you measured is constantly mixing with the water around it. Sure, you measured the temperature of those atoms in that droplet, but if you try to measure it again you could get a different result. (It’s not a perfect example, but it gets the idea through)
Using your programming model, think of it like reading memory in memory that is shorting out. You can read it once, but there’s no guarantee that it will be the same value again next time you read that bit, because it’s in constant flux.