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By Talon "Ah, General! Glad you could make it, please sit down. Would you care for some hot chocolate? No? Ah yes, I see. You must be quite sick of chocolate by now. No, actually, I never do get tired of the stuff, and yes it really is the only currency I will accept for my services. Down to business already, is it? Well, the payment has been made, and your merchandise is waiting to be picked up at this address. Six crates of high-powered hand lasers, and three crates of Chameleon stealth suits, as per your order. You know, all this work with the stealth suits has got me thinking about the way people perceive things. Take the flower on the table here, we both agree that it is blue, right? But how do we know that what I perceive as blue and what you perceive as blue are actually the same colour? What my optical nerves are telling me is a blue flower may actually by my definitions appear to be pink if I was able to view it through your optical network. And yet we would both define this shade of the spectrum as blue, because that is what we have always perceived blue to be. Yes, I know this sounds rather trivial, but it does have a higher relevance. Take a look at light itself. It can behave as a wave, or as a particle, but not as both at the same time. What causes it to behave in one way, or the other? Believe it or not, General, it is the way in which we perceive the light that is the deciding factor. You don't believe me? Astronomers can look at a star, which is many light-years away, and study the light that is radiating from it. Simply observing the light radiating from that star, it appears that the light is arriving here on Earth as a spread out wave. However, if you introduce specific instruments into the observation, which are designed to carefully measure light, it no longer appears to be a wave. The light now functions as a particle stream of photons. Now, say that there is a gravity well located between the star and the observer. This stream of photons is capable of curving around the gravity well on the left side, or on the right side. How do the photons choose? It has actually been proven, General, that it is the observer who makes the choice and not the photons. Remember, without the specific instruments to make the measurements, the light is travelling in a straight line as a wave and arrives at the observer as if it had curved around both sides of the gravity well. If you observe the light in more detail, the light travels as a photon and arrives from either the left or the right side of the gravity well, depending on how the instruments are set up to detect the photons. How can light that was radiated from a star billions of miles away, and has been traveling through space for millions of years change from a wave traveling in a straight line to a particle curving to one side or the other? The only external variable is the way in which it is being perceived by the observer. Do you not agree that, based on the documented evidence, the very nature of that light was decided by the way somebody looked at it. The fundamental rules of physics, which govern the behaviour of light, change simply by looking at it in a different way. From this evidence it is easy to conclude that the very fabric of reality is based on how we perceive the universe around us. A good example is the laser pistol you are now pointing at me from under the table. A laser deals damage by focussing all of the light it emits into one concentrated stream of photons. Yours is a particularly nasty specimen. It does away with the massive power supply needed to generate all those photons by using a charge pack of Bose-Einstein condensate with a few giga-joules of pre generated photons trapped inside it. A relatively low-powered energizing laser is all it takes to render the condensate transparent, and all those photons escape in a concentrated beam and kill me, right? And yet, as we have just discussed, the very nature of light can be altered by the way we observe it. I do not observe any photons streaming out of your pistol and boiling away my flesh, as evidenced by the fact that you just pulled the trigger and I am still sitting here speaking with you. I do perceive a specific look on your face, which indicates that you have observed the large pointy stick that is now in my hand. You perceive that you will experience a brief moment of extreme pain when I thrust it through you sternum, and then from your perspective, the entire universe will cease to exist. Fascinating, isn't it?" |