you're right, but the thing is.....this is a meme. so it doesn't have to be factual

One particularly annoying thing in the SCP-verse that ends up breaking immersion.

maybe because you're observing it?

Whilst I've heard this idea said plenty of times by scientists as a way of demystifying the double slit and similar experiments, it doesn't really do justice to the weirdness of the quantum world.

Firstly in the "default" interpretation there's no mechanism or explanation for how an observation causes wavefunction collapse, it's just a rule that it just does that. And the collapse doesn't correspond to a change in momentum of a particle or any other change in classical physical state, but something else entirely.

In the double slit experiment a detector at one slit somehow seems to affect the particle as it leaves the source, before it reaches the detector (so the effect is backwards in time!) And without the detector it goes through both slits at once.

Well yes, however intuitively there should be photons smashing into it even if nobody is observing it.

I would argue it's still mysterious. If it were simple, we wouldn't have what's called the measurement problem.

Also, there is more than one way to measure something, and not all of them require a real photon to hit some particle. In the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester, you can "measure" whether the quantum bomb's sensor is working or not without actually hitting it with a photon. Instead, you hit it with the "chance" of a photon hitting it, and that's good enough. (It'll still blow up half of the time, but you can design the tester with multiple recursive tiers to increase your tested-but-unexploded bomb yield to arbitrarily close to 100%.)

That's pretty mysterious in my mind.

I think the point of this exepirement is not to observe an electron to see its path, but the fact of obversion itself. Because without obsevation it takes both paths.

Once you define what’s actually happening, it becomes a lot less mysterious why “observation” changes the results.

Yes and no.

The essence of what you're saying is correct, but there's still a "black box" area that we can't measure, because if it was just a matter of a billiard ball deflecting another billiard ball, we could theoretically build finer-scale devices that could cause less interference of find ways of inferring what's happening before waveform collapse.

This is what Heisenberg worked out that crushed physics a century ago, it's not just a matter of making a precise enough measuring device, the nature and behavior of the particle is fundamentally unpredictable, meaning that you can even manipulate it by using information you don't have.

Example: let's say you want to teleport some percentage of photons across a barrier. You simply measure their velocity with greater precision, thus making their position less defined, and BAM some of them start popping into existence across the barrier. And you can do the opposite. This is how many of our electronics and measuring devices work today.

Uncertainty is a fundamental property of all these waves as they propagate through space.

I'm not very well versed in this topic but as far as I know this is only one of the explainations. There are also explanations that think observation itself, in a literal sense is what's special and not the way we measure things.

I once had it explained to me in a way that finally clicked:

What if beings from the 42nd dimension wanted to observe life on our planet? The problem is that they're from the 42nd dimension, so they can't just sit and "watch" us in our basic four-dimensional world. However, what they can do is stir up electrons in our atmosphere until they start a lightning storm. Then they can "observe" the lightning. It turns out that they can learn a lot from the lightning itself, but at the same time it may have some effect on life here on Earth.