DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him]

The curvature of spacetime does wild shit to how you would expect physics to work. If you want to fall into a gravity well, you have to slow down or you’ll just slingshot past it.

A gaggle of particle physicists standing in a circle chanting “RING! WORLD! RING! WORLD!”

While I wouldn’t put it past Google/YouTube to do something as shitty as this, I think people are far too quick to assume foul play over the much more likely possibility that the world’s largest video platform occasionally shits itself.

Consciousness is not part of the observer effect (which is itself named in the most infuriating way possible, specifically because it makes people think that the universe is somehow aware of when something sentient is looking at it). “Observing” a particle requires interacting with it in such a way that you meaningfully affect its current state of being, whether that be deflecting it in a different direction than it was going or changing its velocity, and therefore it is impossible at a quantum level to be a passive observer that does not influence the outcome.

In the case of the double slit experiment, if unobserved light will act as a wave with interference and if observed then it acts like a particle. The reason for this is both complicated and simple: light behaves as a wave due to probability. There’s no way of observing a photon without influencing it, so therefore the best we can do is say it has a certain probability of being in this collection of spaces, which in the case of photons is a wave (because it can travel in any of a number of directions outwards from the photon emitter in the experiment, but all going away from the emitter and towards the wall the slits are cut into). For the purposes of this probability wave, the start position is the emitter and the end position is the wall behind the slits, so averaging out a large number of photons will recreate the interference pattern on the wall.

However, if you observe the photons at the slits to try and figure out which slits they’re going through you have influenced the photons and thus collapsed that probability wave into a particle, and in the process created a new probability wave from that moment onwards which has the same end position as the original wave, but now starts at the individual slit. From its perspective, there is no second slit, so now the wave acts as if it is in the single slit setup because from its perspective it is, hence the loss of interference.

Nothing here has anything to do with consciousness. You can recreate this experiment with no one in the room and it will behave exactly the same, and has a sound (if very confusing conventionally) mathematical cause.

On a side note, string theory is effectively unfalsifiable and therefore completely useless as a scientific theory.

Famously impossible thing to detect in historical records: massive amounts of uranium-235.

Because Stormtroopers are functionally heavily militarized colonial police more focused on enforcing a terror regime than fighting against peer militaries, and the Rebels are more or less the singular exception. Same reason that wearing typical riot body armor IRL is unlikely to keep you from getting fucked up if someone’s shooting .308 at you.

Nothing improves morale like the on-call having to unfuck production for the third time that hour because mUh VeLoCiTy decided code review and testing in CI was too slow.

Techbros are fucking cultists.

If you want to support your favorite artists, buy their merch while at one of their live shows. That’ll put literal orders of magnitude more cash in their pocket than streaming their music ever would, and you get a dope ass t-shirt out of it.

How the fuck did I miss that we already had the perfect emoji for this?

Seems simple enough to me.