After my 13-hour metaphysics marathon ended on monday morning, I went by my professor's office to ask her a question about one of the lectures. Got there about an hour early, so I thought I'd have a nap and use her arrival as my alarm clock. I wrote "SORRY - JUST NUDGE ME AWAKE" in permanent marker on the back of a piece of paper, laid down in front of her door, covered my face with the note and fell into a nap. I woke up toward the end of her posted office hours, gave a quick knock on her door and a ring on her office phone and, deciding that she'd just not shown up that morning on account of the midterm, I left.
After class let out today, I heard her asking one of the other students if he'd heard about the weirdo who had fallen asleep in front of her door on monday morning with a sign asking people to nudge him. I told her that it had been me and that I'd had a question, but not to worry because I'd pretty much answered it myself afterward. She seemed relieved to know that it hadn't been a vagrant. Apparently, she had gotten to the office that morning, been spooked by the presence of a strange man in an oversized hoodie sleeping on the ground, and had gone instead to get a coffee from the cafe where I had just spent my entire sunday night.
***
"Until recently, the prevailing attitude of most physicists has been utilitarian: if the theory can foretell the performance of a doped gallium arsenide semiconductor, why worry about its epistemological implications?"
- John Horgan, "Quantum Philosophy" printed in Scientific American, July 1992
I did a search on experiments done at Columbia University in the 1970s relating to the indeterminate state of quantum energy. Search results pointed to the aforementioned article, so I went and photocopied it from the periodical archives at the Dirac Science Library. The basic idea of this part of the experiement is that a researcher, simply through the act of observing photons from a quasar here in the present, somehow determines whether those photons took both paths or just one path around a gravitational lens billions of years ago.
After class let out today, I heard her asking one of the other students if he'd heard about the weirdo who had fallen asleep in front of her door on monday morning with a sign asking people to nudge him. I told her that it had been me and that I'd had a question, but not to worry because I'd pretty much answered it myself afterward. She seemed relieved to know that it hadn't been a vagrant. Apparently, she had gotten to the office that morning, been spooked by the presence of a strange man in an oversized hoodie sleeping on the ground, and had gone instead to get a coffee from the cafe where I had just spent my entire sunday night.
***
"Until recently, the prevailing attitude of most physicists has been utilitarian: if the theory can foretell the performance of a doped gallium arsenide semiconductor, why worry about its epistemological implications?"
- John Horgan, "Quantum Philosophy" printed in Scientific American, July 1992
I did a search on experiments done at Columbia University in the 1970s relating to the indeterminate state of quantum energy. Search results pointed to the aforementioned article, so I went and photocopied it from the periodical archives at the Dirac Science Library. The basic idea of this part of the experiement is that a researcher, simply through the act of observing photons from a quasar here in the present, somehow determines whether those photons took both paths or just one path around a gravitational lens billions of years ago.
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it should probably be made into Twilight Zone episode.