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Cake day: April 28th, 2024

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  • Part of the reason the show works is that we never really see Federation life outside of Starfleet. Mostly this is for practical budget reasons; what does a post-scarcity egalitarian society actually look like? That’s difficult to depict in a show designed to recycle the same set every episode and only very occasionally go outside to film.

    So what little we see of the civilian federation looks… a lot like the US. There’s a president. Member states planets. Constant references to US history. A military that operates how Americans like to think their military works, rather than what it actually historically has done.

    Newer shows take this even further. Section 31, as it was first introduced, was supposed to be a highly illegal, unsanctioned conspiracy acting in the shadow of the proper Federation. Now they’re presented as the ultra official, coolest badasses who are the only reason any of the egalitarian principals are able to survive.












  • AppleTea@lemmy.ziptoScience Memes@mander.xyzobserves your slit
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    3 months ago

    gonna keep banging this drum every time this comes up:

    When physicists say “observe”, they actually mean “measure”. And to measure a photon of light, you have to interact with it somehow, there is no passive way to do so.

    The post’s header image implies that the interference pattern goes away just by looking at it. If that were the case, we would never see the interference pattern, never know it was there in the first place! In the actual experiment, they put a sensor at one or both of the slits. But to “sense” a single photon, you have to interact with it in some way. Otherwise you wouldn’t know it was there.

    Again, this is where the language trips us up. Rather than “sensor”, would really be more accurate to say they put a photon-touch-er at the slits.

    So, what we actually get is “Touching the photon changes the photon’s behavior.” The universe doesn’t magically infer when we happen to be looking at it, there is no spooky action-at-a-distance!