Here is a topic that I've had floating around in the back of my head for a while. I wrote it back in September 2003, and I thought it was worth bringing up again now. There have been a few revelations on this topic since then, but I think the general ideas are still valid. There will undoubtedly be a post in the future that deals with these thoughts in more detail, but I would like to talk to more people about these ideas before then. Hereis what I posted:
So I was sitting in physics today, thinking about the wave properties of the world and everything in it. The general idea of it all is that when you get to the quantum level, whether or not a person is observing what is happening can change the result of the experiment. It's not even the watching that changes things, but the fact that a person is conscious of what's happening that changes it. This is more obvious in the shrodinger's cat example, where a cat is kept in a locked box. The question is whether the cat is dead or alive. (yeah, i'm oversimplifying here but that's the general point of it, isn't it?) The answer is that the cat is both alive AND dead, at least until the box is opened. Whether the cat is alive or dead can be called its wave function, albeit a simple one, and looking at it collapses its wave function. Weird stuff.
All that lead me to thinking about how exactly i can use this information to develop superpowers and rule the world. Yeah, that's the kind of stuff I think about in class. Anyways, apparently everybody has a wave function, an uncertainty to who they are, where they came from, and where they are going. I could be on Mars right now! But I'm not, because I am always thinking and observing myself to be here. Collapsing my wave function.
Even if I could go to Mars, I wouldn't, because there's nothing there. Besides, it would be very hard to do, because my probability of being on Mars right now is very small. What about if I tried collapsing the wave function of something else? Something not quite as big. Something like individual atoms and molecules. There's an idea...
Y'know all that stuff you were taught while you were little, saying how as long as you believe it can happen, it can happen? I guess there is some merit to that statement. As long as you collapse an event's wave function in the right way, that event could happen. The problem is making everyone else believe that it can happen. This is why science is such a useful tool. More on that in another post, I'm sure.
What if I want telepathic powers? Being able to do what Professor X and Jean Grey do could be very useful, to say the least. Let's approach these powers individually:
Telekinetics- Probably the easiest to understand, but the hardest to accomplish. Continually collapse an object's wave function in the direction you want it to go, and it goes there. Hardest to do because of the continued effort required and the fact that others think to themselves 'thats impossible' and collapse the wave function in the other direction.
Telepathy- This might not fall entirely in the realm of quantum physics. It probably has more to do with interference and diffraction patterns, and reading those patterns to determine the sources. What sources, you ask? The neurons and the atoms that make them up possess wave functions, too!
Mind Control- This, I think, is the most interesting of the bunch. Collapse the wave function of certain atoms in a person's brain, and you can change what they think. Of course, this leads to a debate over what exactly the human mind is, so I'm just going to assume that it's an intricate web of neurons that determines a person's thought processes. The thing about this is that you cannot control a person's mind to the extent shown on TV and in movies, but small-scale things are plausible. Like if a person's deciding between two things and you prod them in the 'right' direction. Like if you instill some weak emotions in a person at the right time to get them to do a certain thing. That way, nobody can tell you are controlling a person's mind. YOU may not even know. This brings new insight onto common perceptions of charisma and persuasiveness.
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