I would love for someone to clarify this for me: My understanding is that the physical act of observing, as in, with the specific machine we use, is what causes photons to suddenly behave different. Like if decided to gently touch a marble rolling down a ramp in darkness to measure how fast it was rolling, the act of touching changes how the marble rolls. It's not that we're actually observing the marble's behavior, is that's we're interfering with its behavior when we measure it.

Is this accurate? Or is the observation of the photon not physically impacted by our observation, and through some magic of quantum behavior, it somehow "knows" it's being observed and changes because of that?