Title text:
Mantle plumes explain Hawaii, Yellowstone, Iceland, the East African Rift, the Adirondack uplift, the Permian extinction, the decline of Rome, the DB Cooper hijacking, and the balrog in Moria. Those little hills of sand in your yard are caused by antle plumes.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3141/
The problem is the word "observation." Most people interpret that to mean a person look at it. This isn't the case. What it means is if it interacted with something where knowledge of its position is required. If this happens then the waveform collapses and a specific position is set. Before then it doesn't have a fixed position and the position is described as a probability distribution.
It's a good description, but the problem is you've still just outsourced the pseudo-mystical role of the observer in this explanation with that "requires knowledge" bit.
I think a lot of the difficulty in explaining these things is ultimately semantics.
Yeah, I guess knowledge is also a bad term. I guess a better way to say it is "when an interaction happens, so the position is concrete."