The question of "realism" has to do with whether the result of the measurement exists before it is measured. I have a bowl of fruit in my kitchen that has some apples in it. I don't know how many are left; it is either two, three, or four. But I don't believe that the number of actual apples in my actual bowl is ambiguous, nor that the wavefunction of the bowl will collapse into e.g. the three-apple state when I go to look at it, nor that I can keep the number of apples ambiguous by pulling one off the top while carefully not looking at the bottom of the bowl. But all All of these counterintuitive statements are things people do say about quantum-mechanical states. These ideas are particularly associated with the "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum mechanics, in which a special process called a "measurement" produces an instantaneous global change in a wavefunction.