Most allergic reactions start with milder symptoms, and some get worse each time you’re exposed. You would probably notice (and hopefully see a doctor about) the burning/itchy/numb mouth and throat, and/or upset stomach, before it progressed to a lethal allergy
If the measurement device were a light year away and were precise enough to “zoom in” and see which slit the electrons went through, what would happen on the final screen?
That level of precision implies technological advancement, that would result with far better equipment to perform the test and measure the results, providing they would be still needed.
I know it sounds like an attempt to brush the question off, but it’s Spherical Cow and/or Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword territory. 😉
The results of the double slit experiment and the uncertainty principle will not change with our level of technology. They are fundamental laws of nature.
The quality of the camera to observe the result of the double slit experiment (meaning the pattern on the wall) has no effect on the results.
The hardware, software, money involved and other variables required to conduct an experiment from a lightyear away definitely elevate the project to different level on Kardashev’s scale.
The “observation” doesn’t occur when a person sees the result, but rather when the electron or photon interacts with the device (in this case the wall). The wall is making the observation. In this situation “observation” doesn’t have the traditional meaning, but rather refers to an interaction event.
So the same average result will happen no matter where the device is, the only thing that changes is its proximity to you.
First, though, your premise is a bit off. Zooming in still wouldn’t change the speed of light or change how fast the photons take to get from point A to your zoom lens. Zooming doesn’t give you a time or distance shortcut - all zooming does is decrease the angle of view of whatever you are pointied at. The only thing that matters in the double slit experiment is whether you observe them enroute or if you observe the screen after impact. If the screen were between you and the photon sources and you zoomed in, the photons would still hit the screen first and the photons you observe through the lens would come after.
The TL/DR of that article I cited earlier is that we still know the field would collapse. The more interesting question (and the one they pose in the article that remains unanswered) is: how fast does the collapse propagate back to the source? Is the propagation delay of the collapse instant/infinite (like what would be described by entanglement) or is the speed of the collapse still subjected to the speed of light (which is the same for the propagation delay of gravitational waves)?
The links to the older articles are dead in that link. Here’s an archive of the 3rd essay (and it links to the second and first). The 3rd essay presents a thought experiment very close to what OP is asking. If we delay the choice of inserting a detector then would we still get an interference pattern when we’re not supposed to? It seems that the question is still unanswered but theoretically, no, because the universe is not locally real and quantum effects seem to happen faster than light in plenty of other experiments.
A measurement device is necessarily local: if it’s “zooming in” from a light year away, it’s using transmitted particles to observe—and those particles are traveling (and entangled) with the particles you’re trying to observe.
When you say zoom in, what you are actually asking is what if the wall was a light year away, and you’re building the delayed choice version of the experiment, details here …m.wikipedia.org/…/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser
But basically, the universe knows, and you can’t worm your way around it.if you detect which slit the photons flow through, then you lose the interference pattern.
I know China has done a lot of “regreening” of areas and I’ve read that the Sinai could be a good candidate for the same sort of restoration. It’s not my area of expertise but the best candidates seem to be areas that are deserts because of human activity (like over farming, excessive water use, etc.).
What China did was plant trees, restore nutrients to the soil, add terraces to hills, limit livestock, and other things that slow down water loss. They successfully regreened and area the size of France but I think, crucially, it got enough water naturally. The land was just depleted, which caused the water to wash away topsoil instead of support vegetation.
So, I don’t think we could realistically show up to an arid desert and turn it into much. But there’s places we think of as desert now that would be good candidates for restoration.
I’d say the most important part is moisture. When a desert starts getting more rainwater, it starts to be an interesting habitat for algea and cyanobacteria (all they need is sun and moisture). These organisms start colonizing the desert, because it’s not hostile for them anymore. As they live and die there, organic matter starts to pile up and allows other organisms that consume this matter to colonize the desert as well. Soil is slowly developing and allowing more and more plants and animals to inhabit the place. The whole proces is very slow. You can do the same (and faster) through artificial means, but you have to water the land and take the water from somewhere else. If you stop watering, the land turns into desert again if there’s not enough rainfall. At some places that are not dry naturally you could reestablish a long term green habitat - e.g. instead of a dam and dry land surrounding it, you could recreate a wetland forest with a meandering river, which would help the surrounding area, because forests create their own small water cycles so more rain can be expected around them.
Naturally this kind of thing happens over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. So, even going back to BC times, we’re still only a small fraction of how far we need to go back to find really major, long-term climatic shifts. These things are supposed to happen sloooowwwwllly, not really discernable as changing over the scale of a single human lifetime, which is just the blink of an eye in planetary time scales.
Can we though? Probably. We can certainly dam rivers and use irrigation to make the land more agriculturally productive. But we should have the technology currently to attempt more dramatic geoengineering projects if we wished.
The problem though, is unintended consequences, where you change one thing over here, and you didn’t realize it was also controlling something else over there, and that thing changes too now, even though you didn’t necessarily want it to.
Like, to make up a fictional example, say we engineered rainfall over the Sahara somehow. But we didn’t know some of this moisture influences air currents, and now southern Europe and the Middle East are changing too somehow, by accident.
It’s like when you’re trying to untie a really tangled knot, and you pull on one part thinking its going to start undoing it, but it just tightens it somewhere else instead.
I seem to recall that Mythbusters episode proving the exact opposite. They showed that fecal matter definitely gets sprayed all over the bathroom when the lid is up when flushed.
I won’t lie, if you don’t close the lid and I know it, we’ve nothing to ever speak about because that’s disgusting and please stay away from me, I don’t want your toilet aura near me. 💀
Toothbrushes were mentioned, and I'd assume that the toothpaste does a good enough job at killing bacteria that it doesn't make a difference, aside from that the bacterial load is probably low enough to be negligible.
But yeah, you don't want to be thinking about putting a pooey stick in your mouth either.
I mean, we still CLEAN our toilets when they’re still just visibly stained with hard water or whatever causes rings and whatnot, so I can see the feeling better about being a huge component
I remember watching a video where they added some liquid visible with UV to the water and flushed, there were droplets everywhere including the tester’s face.
It’s not a study but it’s enough to make me close the lid, especially when my toothbrush is in the same room.
Yes, toothbrushes live uncomfortably close to the loo in my house too.
A friend gave me some light banter about closing the lid = under my wife's thumb but it's absolutely about me attempting to keep the toilet business contained to the toilet!
Someone once tried to argue against it by saying it still got the droplets in the air with the lid closed so there’s no point. My counterargument was that it still contained a lot of the droplets by closing it and that it’s the most minor of inconveniences to close it so you should just do it anyways.
Woah, cool video! I think this video deserves its own post. I just need to figure out which scientific community it is most relevant to … Physics? Epidemiology? Hmmm 🤔
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