When the MeToo movement took off across the globe in 2017, it changed how we think about artists and their art.
As victims of sexual harassment and assault spoke out, the public became more aware of the behaviour of well-known people, including successful artists. Audiences immediately began to view these artists’ work through the lens of their actions.
As a result, many of our favourite books, songs and art works became irrevocably tainted by the transgressions of their creators.
Admiring the work of Pablo Picasso — the cubist artist who burned his partner Françoise Gilot’s face with a cigarette (and painted it) — or Alfred Hitchcock — the film director who tried to destroy actress Tippi Hedren’s career when she rebuffed his advances — became a less straightforward proposition.
“In the aftermath [of MeToo], people were left wondering what to do about their heroes,” US critic Claire Dederer writes in her new book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma.
Yeah, I hate the field of quantum physics, because it sounds like a fucking religion, trying to convince itself that these things are truly random, when, as far as I can tell, there is no evidence for that.
What is the case, is that this is the first time in human history that we cannot measure without significant impact on the real world.
Like, imagine a dark room and you’re wearing earplugs and somewhere in the room is a medicine ball. You can throw tennis balls around and observe whether they bounce back to figure out where in the room the medicine ball is.
That’s classical physics. Those tennis balls are photons.
But do the same experiment, except replace the medicine ball with a baseball, and obviously, you’ll have a problem. Your tennis ball will still half-bounce away from the baseball, but the baseball will half-bounce away, too. Your measurement has significant impact on the thing being measured.
The traditional physics method of measure→change→measure collapses. Everyone panic! We have to refer to this as quantum physics, because it’s obviously a completely different field! And let’s convince ourselves that this one is truly random, because can’t measure it, so it obviously has to be throwing dice at all times.
Alright, rant over. That is maybe taking the shit out a bit too much. Me hating the field means I’m not actually deep enough into it, to make most of these claims.
Especially e.g. quantum entanglement and wave-particle-duality, I don’t know enough about, to truly claim that they’re not new.
Also, to be fair, much like with computer science’s pseudo-random, in many cases, quantum physics might as well be truly random. Unless we find smaller balls to throw around, it is physically impossible to predict.