33 karma · joined June 29, 2022
You can count individual quanta of any kind (photons, electrons, etc.), and you can measure their quantum collapse. But that does not mean they are localized "particles" the way Dirac liked to think about them.
As for the electron, it is an oscillator described by a wave function, quantized, without locality. Here is an image of the wave function interpreted as a probability density:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron#/media/File:Hydrogen_...
The Quantum Mechanics interpretation is that the electron is a particle in an indeterminate location and the plot describes the probability of where the electron can be located. The Quantum Field Theory interpretation is that what we see is a field in an excited state, quantized. By looking at those plots, we can see a quantized field vibrating. If we send it through a double slit, it will behave like a wave. If instead we think about it as a single, indivisible particle, then we need to explain how it passes through two different slits at the same time. Thinking about it as a quantized oscillator disolves the paradox.