#acollerastro and dr becky are great practicing physicists who also do youtube lectures on the side

[corbinite]

Disclaimer: not a physicist, I just like to listen to physicist

ok so everybody who has any interest in physics with 52 minutes to spare go watch acollierastro's video "string theory lied to us and now science communication is hard" because it has some excellent insight into (one facet of) why science communication is so difficult now and why so many people distrust science and equate it with magical thinking, but also I have my own little tidbit to add to the equation and it's about the observer effect, which is where observing a phenomenon changes its outcome

Unlike acollierastro's video, this isn't about a hypothesis that doesn't follow the scientific method, because the observer effect is a real thing that we can test and demonstrate unlike string theory. Rather my problem is with how the observer effect is taught to lay people. And when I say how it is taught to lay people I mean on *every* level. If you are not a practicing physicist and you don't actively search out information on this subject, you definitely have completely the wrong idea of what the observer effect is. Hell, even if you do search out information you probably have that same wrong idea

See the way we're all taught about the observer effect in highschool and on, frankly, social media, is that if you are studying the behavior of matter on the subatomic level, it will act completely differently depending on whether you are "watching" it happen or not

and that sounds like magical thinking

So you ask your professor what that means because the bit about the observer effect in your AP Chem textbook really only has that one line, and maybe a blurb about how it was discovered which doesn't offer much insight to a highschooler. But the teacher doesn't really have anything else for you, they just say "yes it's true, watching subatomic particles changes how they behave!" and you just kind of have to accept that that's the answer

So a lot of people go through highschool and their adult life hearing this and they go one of two ways. Either they think "that's ridiculous, that sounds like Toy Story, physics is just a bunch of humans coming up with ideas and seeing what sticks and apparently what sticks is just whatever is the most attention grabbing" (physics is not about ideas it's about math all the way down), OR, they think "wow, the human mind really is incredible, our brains can literally change reality, can you imagine what we could achieve if we used 100% of our brains instead of 10%? We're in a simulation, reality is divine geometry, the particles know we're watching" it goes on. And it just doesn't get corrected

And you end up with two camps of people who either reject or think that they embrace science, but either way they think that physics is a bunch of people coming up with ideas to explain the world when it's not, that's how mythology works, physics is math. Einstein didn't predict relativity by thinking hard about it and having the right ideas, he predicted it through math, the math came first. Physicists aren't just a bunch of people making things up to stay relevant, nor are they a bunch of gnostics recieving divine inspiration from above. They're goddamn mathemeticians and experimentalists. They do math, see what the math predicts, then set up a plan for how to test that math (see acolierastro's video for a more thorough explanation of what makes a theory of physics a theory of physics)

And this ties into a lot of other cases of poorly explained concepts in science that have people asking "but how do they know that? Scientists are just making things up/the universe is magic" but the observer effect is probably the most likely to push people into magical thinking (others are the fact that we know about earth's internal structure because we can use sonar to measure it, we know about the big bang and the accelerating expansion of the universe because we can use the speed of light and the doppler effect to measure not only how celestial bodies are moving right now but how they were moving in the past and track that through time, and we can observe that distant galaxies are moving in ways that would indicate that they contain more matter than we can observe and that yet unknown phenomenon has been dubbed dark matter which is an admittedly overly mysterious name)

Anyway I should probably circle back to the observer effect, so let's ask what it means to observe something. Well, on our macro scale, observing something usually means seeing it. But in order to see something, light has to hit it, cause a momentary disturbance in the energy of the thing's electrons, eject back out from the object, and go into our eyes. Observing could also mean to hear something, but in order to hear it it has to bump into air molecules or other matter and send rippling physical vibrations out. We could smell it! But to smell something, volatile particles have to leave that thing (slightly reducing its mass), enter your nose, and slot into your olfactory receptors. You could touch it! That one's self explanatory. What do all of these things have in common? That object you are observing has to interact with the world around it in order for you to observe it. Whether it is interacting with light, the air, or your actual fingers, the object you are observing has to effect and be effected by the outside world around it. If something is completely inert, and not currently interacting at all with light or other matter or gravity or electromagnetism or etc, you cannot observe it. So how do we observe particles at the scale necessary to demonstrate the observer effect? With lasers

With lasers

We shoot lasers at it

That certainly does something to the thing we're observing

And that doesn't have to be the only way to observe matter at subatomic scales. But there is not any way to observe matter without interacting with it, either directly or indirectly. It isn't that our consciousness effects the outcome, it isn't about us. When physicists say that observing something changes its behavior, we are not always the observer, the observer could also be a nearby atom which "observes" the particle in question by creating interactions between them. Nothing to do with conscousness

The observer effect, very roughly, means that while a particle or system is not interacting with anything, it behaves probabilistically, but when interacting with its environment, that probability solidifies into an outcome. If And to be clear: that's still wild! It doesn't mean that there's a magical universal consciousness, and it doesn't mean that "particles break the laws of physics when we aren't looking at them", especially because we do already have extremely robust and experimentally testable models for how unobserved systems behave, so it's not breaking the laws of physics, it's confirming them!

So yeah, all this to say, modern science is not a competition for who can come up with the best ideas or who can be blessed with the most enlightened perspective. If something cannot be observed measured or tested then it is not a scientific theory or even a hypothesis it is just a thought. And thoughts are great! But thoughts are not physics. And we need better science education that does a better job at simplifying complex topics nondestructively