I don't think it's meaningful to say that the electron described by QM doesn't exist in nature... something exists in nature and all we can ever do is describe it with a model.
Indeed, having completed a graduate degree in physics, by the time you've been introduced to a different model of the electron for the third or fourth time, it begins to sink in.
Yep. I immediately started thinking about how this “real”/“not real” dichotomy applies to programming. We write programs that confidently declare not only that they’re defining facts for the purpose of the computation, but transferring them and interoperating with other such stated facts. But they’re all abstractions, they’re all convenient fictions we use to describe, model and hopefully send electricity through minerals to achieve the result we defined.
Even stepping a bit away from the physics involved, just considering the humans who do lithography and are closest to reality, their mental model and work is still an approximation of that reality that’s effective at their level of abstraction.
And this doesn’t just apply to human-mechanics interaction. It’s something my messed up brain thinks about with human-human interactions all the time. We have mental models of how the electrical impulses travel through our fellow animated bags of meat, but they’re not just approximations they’re often very flawed. But we still interact and we hopefully don’t become overly obsessed with the underlying details we don’t and probably can’t fully grasp.
Well technically I think the answer would he "We don't know" instead. We don't have anything better than the standard model - the perceived clash between wave and particle is resolved by a more general theoryz for example.
And to be fair, with regards to the standard model, we know the standard model is not fully correct and we still don't have anything better.
Most scientists, I think, use some definitions along the lines of "Reality is whatever appears in our best models/explanations of our observations of the world".
If all observations of electrons we have ever made obey some law, we say that's the real behaviour of electrons. If we find out it doesn't always work, we realize reality is something more complex, and at some point hopefully we find out what it is.
My favourite example for this is the electron. Does an electron how we describe it in quantum mechanics exist in nature? The answer is no. The electron is a model construct we have made up that describes natural phenomena. Nothing more.
This is where non-experts that didn't study physics get confused when they read that an electron is a wave but also a particle. All of these concepts are just physical models that again do not exist in nature. But they describe different aspects of nature pretty well. And so we assign them a meaning beyond what the mathematical or physical model contains, a part of reality.