You'll be better served by reading "observation" as "interaction". In my understanding, wave functions collapse when the particle/wave/whatever interacts with something else, like maybe a particle detector. It doesn't really matter whether there's a conscious scientist watching the display.<p>Also, what helps me wrap my head around QM is to tell myself not that quanta are waves and particles at the same time, but that what we see as waves and particles are just special cases of "the real thing" we see in QM. The way my physics professor put it is that things move like waves (interference, etc) and interact like particles (at a location).<p>As for atoms, yeah, what we think of as "solidity" is just electrical repulsion between atoms in your hand and atoms in the table. It doesn't really change anything. You can still sit on chairs and it takes effort to accelerate things.<p>I recommend examining the actual experiments used to determine the freaky properties of wave-particle duality, and maybe try to understand some of the math. Look at the photo-electric effect, the double-slit experiment, de Broglie wavelength, and the physical reasons for the uncertainly principle (that one in particular makes perfect sense). It won't all exactly make more sense, but it won't be as mysterious. It's still physics, not magic.<p>Disclaimer: I've read a lot of layman stuff on QM, and I'm taking a course involving it right now, but we haven't gotten to the really juicy bits yet.