j reacts to pop science misunderstandings of the observer effect

the observer effect. it's a pop science thing that drives me nuts. i run into this all the time, from people of all kinds of education levels. i've even met physics students that started studying physics because they heard this interpretation of things, and have refused to let it go as they've learned it's nonsense.

the bottom line is that it's something we want to believe, because it puts us at the center of our own universes. not only do we get to keep religion, but we get to be gods. it's compelling.

what all these people believe, educated or not, is the following pop science reading of the observer effect. suppose you look up into the sky at night. by observing the night sky, you create the shooting stars. fuck conservation laws. it's just magic.

i've learned that one rarely gets anywhere explaining this properly, but for the record let's do this. how does the observer effect relate to shooting stars? well, let's realize that it's not restricted to quantum effects. the observer effect is universal between masses, like gravity is. things do not have to be alive to observe each other, and that itself should give you a clue that nothing is actually happening at the level of projective thought. there is an observer effect between a rock and a tree. but, you might guess correctly that it would be smaller than any kind of statistical error you could conceive of. this is the actual observer effect you may have on a shooting star: the disturbance is entirely insignificant. that star shoots by whether you see it or not. the tree falls. and, while you do have an effect on the shooting star, that effect is purely abstract - you couldn't even really begin to try and quantify it.

that shooting star has probably been floating around the galaxy for billions of years. it doesn't matter whether you see it enter the earth's atmosphere or not. it will or it will not dependent entirely on the various gravitational forces at work.

but, there's a twist. depending on the size and age of the object, there may very well be an important observer effect on the shooting star, but from other gravitational objects. jupiter. saturn. the sun. maybe even some of that exotic pull we've got coming from outside the galaxy. and, the sum total of all of those planetary observer effects would comprise something called the n-body problem.

so, it would follow that if we were the size of planets then we could measure our effects on the stars. to scale, that's why we can have a noticeable effect at the quantum level.

so, no. physics doesn't say that you imagine your own reality. that was a bunch of fucking potheads in the 60s, not physics. maybe they watched star trek together or something. i dunno. i know it drives me bonkers...