It’s as if the electrons know when they’re being watched and decide to behave as particles again. According to Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, the phenomenon “has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery”.
It’s only a mystery to those who stubbornly cling to a 19th century view that mind must somehow be an emergent property of matter. What quantum mechanics has been telling us, in excruciating detail, for over a century is that what we call physical reality is an emergent property of consciousness.
The key to understanding the puzzle is in understanding to what level the “observer” is neutral.
That is, with sub-atomic particles, “watching” them is not the equivalent of a person watching a football game on a television, live. The observer in the latter case has practically no effect on the outcome of the game. However, in the former case, “observation” implies interference because there is no way of observing a sub-atomic particle without affecting the particle, directly. In other words, if you were to imagine the electron as a ball, in darkness, the very act of shining a hypothetical “light” to detect its reflection off of the “electron” has an effect on the electron itself. That is the scale we’re talking about here.
The electrons travel in a medium we can neither detect, nor describe by any means, and that appears to transcend time.