See also, the Pauli effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_effect
The Pauli effect or Pauli’s device corollary is the supposed tendency of technical equipment to encounter critical failure in the presence of certain people. The term was coined after mysterious anecdotal stories involving Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, describing numerous instances in which demonstrations involving equipment suffered technical problems only when he was present.
An incident occurred in the physics laboratory at the University of Göttingen. An expensive measuring device, for no apparent reason, suddenly stopped working, although Pauli was in fact absent. James Franck, the director of the institute, reported the incident to his colleague Pauli in Zürich with the humorous remark that at least this time Pauli was innocent. However, it turned out that Pauli had been on a railway journey to Zürich and had switched trains in the Göttingen rail station at about the time of the failure.
R. Peierls describes a case when at one reception this effect was to be parodied by deliberately crashing a chandelier upon Pauli’s entrance. The chandelier was suspended on a rope to be released, but it stuck instead, thus becoming a real example of the Pauli effect
I’ve wondered if mental state actually affects reality around us. Like some people who see paranormal shit are just more open to it or something while the presence of a skeptic prevents it from happening
And people who just don’t have confidence that tech will work can cause random issues just by being present, but sometimes when a tech confident person comes to assist them, their confidence gets it to work properly.
Maybe it has to do with particle/wave duality and the observer effect, and the simulation approximates things more when people aren’t paying as much attention or won’t likely investigate an issue closely after the fact, so the simulation gets sloppy because it’s approximating. But then when someone who will pay closer attention comes (or will come), the waves collapse into particles and it behaves as expected.
Maybe those cases where a user claims something usually works when they do it a way that is clearly wrong to the more experienced observer, the approximation works out in their favour, but the collapse to particles makes it break like it was supposed to the whole time.
Maybe Pauli understood some things about the technical equipment (and ropes?) that the others didn’t or was better at calibration and collapsed the wave more than usual.
Though my guess for the chandelier is that someone first thought of the dropping it when he entered joke but then realized that saying they tried to do that and it failed would be even funnier plus save them a chandelier and be much easier and safer to pull off.
Having worked in tech support for a system that I knew very well, I often saw problems vanish when users attempted to demonstrate them with me present
People would say my tech aura made it work
Really though people just take more care when an expert is present, and so avoid whatever error their earlier carelessness caused
I wonder if people who experience the opposite encourage less care among those around them
Yep. Ghosts in Machines are real.
I have witnessed it first hand multiple times.
At university there was an old 1st gen Makerbot 3D printer and if you took away one of it’s prints that were displayed around it, all of your prints would fail, even if you replaced it the printer held a grudge. And never EVER say a 100% certainty statement that the print would succeed like “it is printing ok, it will be finished in an hour”. Only say things like “the print is doing ok so far”.
The electronics lab was throwing out five old Cathode Ray Oscilloscopes so our little maker group took them in and two were working fine. The other three weren’t displaying the trace on the screen. One of our members, a chap from Romania who in his youth spent his time fixing old TVs in his home country, said to let him have a look. I swear down he plugged them in, leant his ear against it, said to the scopes “shh it’s ok, we’ll look after you”, and gave them gentle taps on top just behind the screen, and all three jumped back into life in perfect calibration.
And finally, my girlfriend at the time had a 1st gen iPod that would, at the most inopportune moments randomly wake itself up, play a few seconds of a random song, then shut itself down.
The Machine Spirit requires the utmost respect. Failure to do so is heresy of the highest order.
i was in a group call with 6 mathematicians, and it came time to order our names in the paper we were writing. in math papers, the names are always ordered alphabetically. we had to pull up a picture of the alphabet because none of us could remember which way the letters are ordered.
memorizing the order of the alphabet would take precious real estate that could instead hold a couple more digits of pi
You guys are mathematicians not letterematicians.
Also, I’m doing engineering shit and I still need to count using my fingers when calculating something on a multiplication table
As a math guy, obviously the order of the letters is: x, y, z, a, b, c, then the rest of them in whatever order I currently feel like.
As a CS guy, obviously the order is sort( [ set of all letters ] ).
You forgot i, j, k
It’s actually x, y, z, a, b, c, i, j, k, e, and then whatever, they don’t matter.
exactly!
and i am always in favor of counting with fingers. we were given them for a reason, might as well make the most of them. counting is hard enough as it is
No, counting with fingers is bad. Count with phalanges instead. It’s more efficient
Thought emporium said that microbiologists are the most super stitisous and that if it took sacrificing a goat to get better results they would
Just yesterday I had a CO2 valve close on me during an experiment while I was away for a moment. It takes effort to turn the valve so it couldn’t have just shaken closed or something. The valve was in the corner of the room and was blocked off by boxes, so nobody could have accidentally bumped it. And, besides, nobody was in the room anyways. Before the experiment I made damn sure that the CO2 valve was open, and even looking through the computer records (which records the CO2) says that the CO2 valve was open until I walked away.
I still have no idea how the valve could have closed on its own. Now, I’m not saying it’s a ghost, but I am saying that I cannot think of a single non-paranormal explanation. I’ve clearly angered the science gods and I would do well to sacrifice some more cells to the science gods to appease them
