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Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨fossilesque@mander.xyz⁩ to ⁨science_memes@mander.xyz⁩

https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/c19f7fcc-1d7a-44fd-8f16-2e38a8e09b46.jpeg

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  • RobotToaster@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    See also, the Pauli effect: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_effect

    Since the 20th century, the work in some subfields of physics research has been divided between theorists and experimentalists. Those theorists who lack an aptitude or interest in experimental work have on occasion earned a reputation for accidentally breaking experimental equipment. Pauli was exceptional in this regard: it was postulated that he was such a good theorist that any experiments would be compromised by virtue of his presence in the vicinity. For fear of the Pauli effect, experimental physicist Otto Stern banned Pauli from his laboratory located in Hamburg despite their friendship.

    An incident occurred in the physics laboratory at the University of Göttingen. An expensive measuring device, for no apparent reason, suddenly stopped working, although Pauli was in fact absent. James Franck, the director of the institute, reported the incident to his colleague Pauli in Zürich with the humorous remark that at least this time Pauli was innocent. However, it turned out that Pauli had been on a railway journey to Zürich and had switched trains in the Göttingen rail station at about the time of the failure.

    R. Peierls describes a case when at one reception this effect was to be parodied by deliberately crashing a chandelier upon Pauli’s entrance. The chandelier was suspended on a rope to be released, but it stuck instead, thus becoming a real example of the Pauli effect

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    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      I’ve wondered if mental state actually affects reality around us. Like some people who see paranormal shit are just more open to it or something while the presence of a skeptic prevents it from happening

      And people who just don’t have confidence that tech will work can cause random issues just by being present, but sometimes when a tech confident person comes to assist them, their confidence gets it to work properly.

      Maybe it has to do with particle/wave duality and the observer effect, and the simulation approximates things more when people aren’t paying as much attention or won’t likely investigate an issue closely after the fact, so the simulation gets sloppy because it’s approximating. But then when someone who will pay closer attention comes (or will come), the waves collapse into particles and it behaves as expected.

      Maybe those cases where a user claims something usually works when they do it a way that is clearly wrong to the more experienced observer, the approximation works out in their favour, but the collapse to particles makes it break like it was supposed to the whole time.

      Maybe Pauli understood some things about the technical equipment (and ropes?) that the others didn’t or was better at calibration and collapsed the wave more than usual.

      Though my guess for the chandelier is that someone first thought of the dropping it when he entered joke but then realized that saying they tried to do that and it failed would be even funnier plus save them a chandelier and be much easier and safer to pull off.

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      • psud@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Having worked in tech support for a system that I knew very well, I often saw problems vanish when users attempted to demonstrate them with me present

        People would say my tech aura made it work

        Really though people just take more care when an expert is present, and so avoid whatever error their earlier carelessness caused

        I wonder if people who experience the opposite encourage less care among those around them

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      • Vilian@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Particle don’t have anything todo with a person observing it, it collapses if you try to observe it because the only way to observe a particle is launching another particle to it, and that changes the particle state

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      • SanndyTheManndy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        You might be on to something

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    • ProfessorOwl_PhD@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Interesting, I seem to have the opposite condition - something breaks, then they ask me to look at it and by the time I get there it’s working perfectly again.

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    • propter_hog@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Is this a corollary to the Pauli Exclusion Principle?

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      • RobotToaster@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        The article I linked says they’re unrelated.

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    • Mango@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      What if these people are actually bad people and we just can’t know why?

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  • Mwallerby@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Image

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    • bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Image

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      • rockerface@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        This is glorious

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  • ThePyroPython@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Yep. Ghosts in Machines are real.

    I have witnessed it first hand multiple times.

    At university there was an old 1st gen Makerbot 3D printer and if you took away one of it’s prints that were displayed around it, all of your prints would fail, even if you replaced it the printer held a grudge. And never EVER say a 100% certainty statement that the print would succeed like “it is printing ok, it will be finished in an hour”. Only say things like “the print is doing ok so far”.

    The electronics lab was throwing out five old Cathode Ray Oscilloscopes so our little maker group took them in and two were working fine. The other three weren’t displaying the trace on the screen. One of our members, a chap from Romania who in his youth spent his time fixing old TVs in his home country, said to let him have a look. I swear down he plugged them in, leant his ear against it, said to the scopes “shh it’s ok, we’ll look after you”, and gave them gentle taps on top just behind the screen, and all three jumped back into life in perfect calibration.

    And finally, my girlfriend at the time had a 1st gen iPod that would, at the most inopportune moments randomly wake itself up, play a few seconds of a random song, then shut itself down.

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    • orvorn@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      I can verify that Makerbots are both fussy and haunted.

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    • psud@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      People with little mechanical sympathy definitely have less luck with equipment

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  • affiliate@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    i was in a group call with 6 mathematicians, and it came time to order our names in the paper we were writing. in math papers, the names are always ordered alphabetically. we had to pull up a picture of the alphabet because none of us could remember which way the letters are ordered.

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    • pyre@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      memorizing the order of the alphabet would take precious real estate that could instead hold a couple more digits of pi

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      • vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Are you in Trazyn the Infinites museum by chance, specifically as an exhibit.

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    • Maalus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      You guys are mathematicians not letterematicians.

      Also, I’m doing engineering shit and I still need to count using my fingers when calculating something on a multiplication table

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      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        As a math guy, obviously the order of the letters is: x, y, z, a, b, c, then the rest of them in whatever order I currently feel like.

        As a CS guy, obviously the order is sort( [ set of all letters ] ).

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      • jawa21@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        I do trig for a living. I don’t remember how to do long division at all.

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      • affiliate@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        exactly!

        and i am always in favor of counting with fingers. we were given them for a reason, might as well make the most of them. counting is hard enough as it is

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      • Atlas_@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Exactly. That’s why I refuse to do algebra.

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  • Kowowow@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Thought emporium said that microbiologists are the most super stitisous and that if it took sacrificing a goat to get better results they would

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    • Contramuffin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Just yesterday I had a CO2 valve close on me during an experiment while I was away for a moment. It takes effort to turn the valve so it couldn’t have just shaken closed or something. The valve was in the corner of the room and was blocked off by boxes, so nobody could have accidentally bumped it. And, besides, nobody was in the room anyways. Before the experiment I made damn sure that the CO2 valve was open, and even looking through the computer records (which records the CO2) says that the CO2 valve was open until I walked away.

      I still have no idea how the valve could have closed on its own. Now, I’m not saying it’s a ghost, but I am saying that I cannot think of a single non-paranormal explanation. I’ve clearly angered the science gods and I would do well to sacrifice some more cells to the science gods to appease them

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      • Sergio@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Mother Nature is a prankster. She was just having a little fun.

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      • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        We have a ghost living in our microwave. We’ve been sitting there, in the middle of a meal, and the damn thing turns itself on. Probably doesn’t help that half the town was built on an Indian burial ground.

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      • Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Now, I’m not saying it’s a ghost, but I am saying that I cannot think of a single non-paranormal explanation.

        See, it’s not superstition. Scientists all say so.

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    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      isn’t that what fetal bovine serum is for?

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      • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Oh man, do you think spilling some FBS once is what cursed me? I think that might be what cursed me.

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  • Taleya@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Anyone who builds their own PC kit knows about the Blood Sacrifice

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    • Zementid@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      That’s why there is always that one sharp edge on the housing.

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    • DokPsy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      It’s not just PC building. Was a known tradition when I did industrial controls.

      Also: magic smoke

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      • Taleya@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        magic smoke a bad bad sign, it’s the magic escaping

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      • Shareni@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Well it’s better than the tradition of walling in live humans to appease the spirit of the collapsing building/bridge.

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    • CrazyLikeGollum@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Khorn really stepped up his game once we started rounding the edges on our PC cases.

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  • CthulhuDreamer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    So scientists are warhammer orcs?

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  • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    My PI: “Oh, we don’t use that microcentrifuge, it will ruin your results” Me: “Oh damn, how long has it been broken for?” PI: "No, it’s not broken. It’s cursed "

    I thought this was just exasperated hyperbole, but nah, there’s a lot of superstition here.

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  • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Whatever you do, do not touch that one BNC cable. Just trust me on this.

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    • psud@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      RF isn’t magic. It is awfully finicky though, so don’t touch the BNC cable

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    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Magic ▭▮ More Magic

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  • propter_hog@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Can verify: I work at a research laboratory and I can’t tell you how many Trump stickers I have seen on bumpers. These are people who mostly have either an engineering masters or a science PhD, and they still believe in fairy tales like voting works.

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    • Spacehooks@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Gene stealer cultists

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    • somename@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Engineering is the most chud of all academic fields. Beyond the engineering stemlord aspect, there’s a lot of military money floating around.

      There’s some similar things with bio fields and pharmaceutical/bioengineering money.

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  • Mandy@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Oh no, the orks became smart enough to he scientists, the green tide is too big to stop now

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    • Mango@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Eyyy, I understood this reference!

      I accidentally expressed interest to a fan once.

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      • Mandy@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        There are only two types of fans.
        Those who tell you 50 books worth of lore the moment you have the smallest of interest.
        And:
        “Cool”

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  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I have some low-level projects where I am responsible for every byte of code running on very simple hardware.

    There’s still problems where I throw my hands up and say “Nope, haunted. I’ll try again later.”

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  • LaunchesKayaks@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I work at an MSP and we all have little shrines of random shit on our desks that we’ve collected. The one guy has a mini filing cabinet under his desk of tech shit that’s nearly as old as I am (I’m 27).

    If we are ever told that we can’t have our shrines, we’ll all be devastated.

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  • captain_oni@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Either that or the lab equipment is infused with the souls of children.

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    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Orpheus: “It’s powered by a forsaken child?”

      Dr. Venture: “I didn’t use the whole thing!”

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  • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Ponder and his fellow students watched Hex carefully. ‘It can’t just, you know, stop,’ said Adrian ‘Mad Drongo’ Tumipseed. ‘The ants are just standing still,’ said Ponder. He sighed. ‘All right, put the wretched thing back.’ Adrian carefully replaced the small fluffy teddy bear above Hex’s keyboard. Things immediately began to whirr. The ants started to trot again. The mouse squeaked. They’d tried this three times.

    Ponder looked again at the single sentence Hex had written. +++ Mine! Waaaah +++ ‘I don’t actually think,’ he said, gloomily, ‘that I want to tell the Archchancellor that this machine stops working if we take its fluffy teddy bear away. I just don’t think I want to live in that kind of world.’ ‘Er,’ said Mad Drongo, 'you could always, you know, sort of say it needs to work with the FTB enabled… ‘You think that’s better?’ said Ponder, reluctantly. It wasn’t as if it was even a very realistic interpretation of a bear. ‘You mean, better than “fluffy teddy bear”?’ Ponder nodded. ‘It’s better,’ he said.

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  • HawlSera@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Our magical thinking is going to pay off when we finally discover magic’s real.

    It’s gonna happen… eventually

    After all, any science that is differentiable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.

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  • Mango@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Well now I gotta build a shrine in my lab. The COF tester, GC, and our UPC tester are all behaving badly.

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    • MeowZedong@lemmygrad.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      You need to treat them nicely and maybe show a bit of romance. Poems, flowers, even a printed picture of flowers, something nice that will last is all it takes and your instruments will work perfectly for you. Each person may need to contribute individually to the shrine.

      I swear, some damned tech came in on a PM and removed my poem from my favorite HPLC and now it’s been acting up for me nonstop.

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