Dear hearts, today has been a bad day for me. However instead of boring you with my ongoing war with my ex employer and the great powers of the dole (at least today I found out that it IS company policy to bum rape staff for as long as possible after they leave), and detailing just how much blood my body appears to feel it doesn't need and the number and variety of places it has found to dump it......I have decided to pose some thinking experimental type stuff at you.
Heisenberg.
Smart motherfucker of the highest order (and not the bloke with the cat, that was Erwin Schrodinger, and it too was a thought experiment, no cats were harmed!), he postulated what became known as "uncertainty principle".
What this basically says is.....you cannot tell what an electron is doing and where it is at the same time. This is because if you measure it's speed you change it's direction and position, and if you measure it's position, you change it's speed. NOTE: If you then factor in old Erwin's Cat it gets weirder even than that.....the electron's not there UNTIL you measure it.....but for the purposes of this discussion this is not to be considered.
What does this mean....well for one thing it means the transporter system in Star Trek is fucked.
They therefore cleverly came up with "heisenberg compensators" which you may occasionally hear referred to in the show.....In an interview Michael Okuda, one of the design boffins on Trek, said that someone rang him once to ask how the Heisenberg compensators worked, his reply was "just fine thank you".
Anyway, Heisenberg was only interested in that fucked up sub atomic quantum world, but surprisingly the idea that it's impossible to measure something, translates remarkably well to our big fat macro world....for example.....
Placing a thermometer in a cup of coffee.....cools the coffee!
Weighing something will cause atoms of it to slough off on the scale changing it's mass.
Even a police LIDAR speed gun affects it's own result....the pressure of the photons striking the car will slow it down.
In terms of things where it doesn't apply?
I had thought, measuring length by means of an adjacent ruler at the same temperature as the object (assuming we could ever really know that). However, my smart arse of a brother (the real brains of the outfit, sadly some bits are made of shit though), pointed out that the presence of the mass of the ruler will warp local spacetime affecting the result.
That leaves only, video analysis, where speed and perhaps size can be determine by "metameasurement", ie performing the measurement on analogous data captured entirely passively, as in a tv camera at distance.....of course such methods are not very accurate which kinda misses the point.
I would be interested to hear comments, suggestions, refutations, whatever.
Bring it on science bitches.
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