I've spent my last two days watching popular science shows. I've started with the very bad and time wasting "What we still don't know" and ended up with the marvelous "Stephen Hawking's Universe". I've always had this fantasy of doing something that matters, maybe become proficient in the things I really like, but rarely do, like writing, or science. And, in the good old trandition of Sierra games, I've thought of a "So you want to be a ..." series, where average everyday people like myself could be shown how to become something they always wanted, in the shortest time possible. Something like a career guide on speed.

Well, I am certainly not the only one to have come up with this idea: Dr. Michio Kaku wrote an article about becoming a physicist. Well, he basically tells you you cannot become a physicist if you've already lost the train. But I disagree. If you really want something, you can achieve it, at any age, only you can't do it with support from others.

So, what do I want to become? I've written in my todo list to check out calculus, topology and noncommutative geometry. That is almost certain not to go well, but at least I plan to try (trying). Damn, I like to think of stuff and never do anything about it. I only like whinning more! But the question is: what do you want to become? Don't waste your time. And I am not talking about carrers, I am talking about the things that makes one define himself on. Like for me, I am a C# programmer. That defines me at this moment. I certainly am glad there is more to add to that, like other achievements or "I am a good person" or "I have felt true love", but I still wish I could add more. Maybe being a part time garage cosmologist wouldn't hurt. Dreams ARE important and they are surely unachievable only when you don't even try to achieve them.

Just now I watched a little youtube.com video that explained the two slit experiment. Basically, what happends is that a pattern emerges if you use waves and another when you use particles. Then you fire electrons in the thing, and wave patterns emerge, even if you fire one electron at a time, therefore the single electron is interfering with itself! But even stranger, when you put an observer to see what slit the electron goes through, the pattern changes into a particle pattern. This proves that observation changes what we observe.

Wait a minute! But isn't science supposed to be based on observation? This very experiment has been observed, for crying out loud. So what does it mean? If you demonstrate something by scientific experimentation, therefore using observation, doesn't that mean you only demonstrate what happends when you look at something, rather than what that something is? Since the same experiment has been observed using eyes and it behaved differently when they use a finer tool, then it means the type of observer alters the result. Would things start behaving differently if an alien was to come on Earth? This is mind boggling.

Links:
YouTube video -< it was removed from YouTube
Another YouTube video
Wikipedia on the double slit experiment
Cool java applet on wave interference