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Entertainment District / Re: I'm just going to leave this one here....
« on: April 15, 2012, 09:39:26 pm »Sometimes they get defensive, but contradicting them and providing them with solid evidence almost never gives them "more fuel". It might get them all riled up for no reason, but that's about the worst thing that will happen if you stay calm.Agreed. Staying calm is key. Being a dick is more likely to fuel the fire.
An anecdote:That is an awesome story.
I once sat next to a hippie girl on a flight.
She kept talking about metaphysical crap like spirits, "energy", and karma.
When I made it clear I didn't buy any of it, she wondered why I was such a skeptic. I told her "because I have no evidence to believe in anything supernatural."
She sounded pretty convinced that she did have evidence to believe in the supernatural. She gave her recounting of what sounded like Young's interference experiment, but her version had a twist.
She thought that when humans watched the room, we saw the double-slit pattern. When only recording devices watched, we saw the single-slit pattern.
I chuckled and calmly explained "That's not really what happened in that experiment."
She was incredulous. We made a bet to check Wikipedia after we got off the plane, and that's what we did.
We landed, and found a place to sit down. I found the article, gave her my laptop, and let her read.
"Oh my god, you're right!", she said. Of course... no good nerd is without a good (superficial, at least) understanding of the double-slit experiment. "This changes everything!"
Yep. Her entire belief in the spiritual realm rested on this fabricated version of the double-slit experiment. I don't keep in touch with her, but I'll always remember that as the day that arguing with a kook actually did something.
Funny you bring up this experiment. I have a friend that consistently refers to the double-slit experiment as evidence that through the act of concentrated observation, we can deliberately collapse the waves of probability to our will (for applicable phenomenon only), which in turn provides us with some sort of godlike choice of which universe out of all multiverses we reside in. So for example, he believes that if, during the Schrödinger's cat experiment, the observer had a single-minded focus that the radiation would not reach the Geiger counter, then there would be a much higher probability that the cat is still alive, at least within the observer's universe. He claims this is just a theory of his, but he refers to it so often that I think he really uses it as a sort of a motivation for accomplishing seemingly impossible goals.
I've debated with him over this for amusement, and though this is clearly flawed in my mind, I can never find the right words to explain why. Admittedly my knowledge of physics is limited. How would you refute this idea?