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I’d like to nominate Observer Effect for the Worst and Most Confusingly Named Thing Ever award.
Funny meme though.
“Observe” implies interaction with a photon.
To be fair if the only way to observe you was to smack another person into you or to electrically yank you down a strange corridor then you’d probably change your immediate behaviour.
Oh man, one of my biggest pet peeves.
“Observation” should really be called “interaction” when referring to quantum effects. The act of observation is actually an interaction with a quantum object that collapsed the wave to a point. We are affecting the quantum object by making a measurement, not by looking at it. If we don’t measure it the wave function doesn’t collapse until it interacts with the wall. In this case, the wall is the “observation” that causes the wave function to collapse.
Ok, sorry for the interruption, carry on
I think the term is fine. Interaction is also too broad a term, as there are many ways to interact with something. The main intent here is to observe, interaction just follows from that.
Maybe we behave differently when observed because some of the electrons within us are being observed
Absolutely, especially those electrons in our 5 senses (retina, ear drums, and skin, nose and tongue sensors). They get all excited.
One of the older social psych frameworks called Social Facilitation says that when we feel watched by others, how comfortable we are with the task determines if we improve or get worse. I’m of course simplifying for Lemmy but you can look to that framework easily.
They tested it with shoe tying vs putting on lab gear, measuring time to finish in the presence of others. Shoe tying got faster while lab gear, being unfamiliar, was slower.
I often give a more modern but dated example as when I play Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2, I tend to choke, because it’s not really my genre, but of the same era I tend to show off and do better if I’m playing Metal Gear Solid 2, except the skateboard level of course.
Edit: hell, the Wikipedia article is even pretty good at describing it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_facilitation
Is this a programming of physics joke?
The Electron framework is open source as much as we hate on it so probably physics
programming of physics joke
Yes
Whoops, I made a typo. I’ll leave it in.
I would say the overlap is actually complete, unless you have special meanings for “behaving”, “differently”, and “observed”.
You’re made of electrons after all.
Electrons, protons and neutrons last time I’ve checked
You could keep going but I made my point.
So did I.
The observer effect. They don’t want your labels!
Same
True. My wave-function collapses when observed. My state can only be explained in terms of probabilities.
I think one of the universal rules in science is that whatever you observe is going to be modified by said observation
