The Friday Roundup - 1/5/2024 Edition

Nonlocal Reality, Electrically Augmented Hypnosis States, AI Discovering New Antibiotics, The Death of Our Godless Era, Michael Bublé Unplugged

Every Friday, I share some of the most interesting articles, videos, and books I’m looking at with our subscribers. It’s an eclectic mix fueled by my unique personal variant of ADHD and pattern recognition, so you won’t find compilations like these anywhere else.

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Happy New Year, everyone! I’ve got some fun ones for you today, so let’s dive right in, shall we?

The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It - Daniel Garisto/Scientific American

There’s a well-known physics experiment called “The Double Slit” experiment, and it challenges our understanding of how the universe works — and the fixity of observable properties. A summary of that experiment, from ChatGPT:

The double-slit experiment is a famous experiment in quantum mechanics that demonstrates the fundamental principle of wave-particle duality. In this experiment, particles such as electrons or photons are fired at a barrier with two parallel slits. When observed, the particles pass through one slit or the other, behaving like discrete particles and creating two distinct bands on a detector screen. However, when not observed, the particles seem to interfere with themselves as if they are waves, creating an interference pattern on the screen that resembles what would be produced by waves passing through both slits and overlapping.

This experiment highlights a key quantum mystery: particles behave like waves when not observed, but like particles when observed. It suggests that the act of measurement affects the behavior of quantum particles, a phenomenon that challenges classical intuitions about the nature of reality.

Or, in simpler terms:

Ah. The power of nerdy memes!

When physicists talk about the non-local reality of the universe, they’re talking about this. And other mind boggling realities, like quantum entanglement, which somehow allows particles to communicate instantaneously over vast distances, even at speeds that would exceed that of light.