Wait! That's Not All!

Posted on November 6, 2009 by swansont

Rhett’s got a post up on parallax, and how you can use this effect to measure distance: Parallax, what is it good for? He’s got some pictures showing the effect of viewing from different vantage points.

The other thing you can do with such photos is to make stereograms, and I’ve taken the liberty of doing so with Rhett’s image, though I didn’t try and take out the dotted lines.

Rhettparallax

Cross your eyes and you can make the image take on depth. In case you want more, here’s the optics layout stereogram I posted a while back.

It's Been Real. Hasn't It?

Posted on November 6, 2009 by swansont

What is reality?

“What do we really describe in physics?” he [Zeilinger] asked. “Do we describe reality? Is it out there?”

Classical physicists would have said yes, resoundingly. Studying physics reveals nature’s workings, providing an explicit map of reality’s subtleties. Those subtleties would be there whether we figured out how to question and extract them.

But in the early part of this century, quantum mechanics put that happy belief on the chopping block. Quantum mechanics, for all its ability to describe the atomic and subatomic world, blurs the distinction between the observer and the observed. As a result, it calls into question the essence of scientific curiosity and inquiry.