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
You might be on to something
Particle don't have anything todo with a person observing it, it collapses if you try to observe it because the only way to observe a particle is launching another particle to it, and that changes the particle state
Interesting, I seem to have the opposite condition - something breaks, then they ask me to look at it and by the time I get there it's working perfectly again.
Is this a corollary to the Pauli Exclusion Principle?
The article I linked says they're unrelated.
The Pauli effect is not related to the Pauli exclusion principle, which is a bona fide physical phenomenon named after Pauli. However the Pauli effect was humorously tagged as a second Pauli exclusion principle, according to which a functioning device and Wolfgang Pauli may not occupy the same room.
What if these people are actually bad people and we just can't know why?
This is glorious
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.
People with little mechanical sympathy definitely have less luck with equipment
The Machine Spirit requires the utmost respect. Failure to do so is heresy of the highest order.
I like to think the praying is a pep talk for the machine spirit.
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I can verify that Makerbots are both fussy and haunted.
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
Are you in Trazyn the Infinites museum by chance, specifically as an exhibit.
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
Exactly. That's why I refuse to do algebra.
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
Mother Nature is a prankster. She was just having a little fun.
Now, I'm not saying it's a ghost, but I am saying that I cannot think of a single non-paranormal explanation.
See, it's not superstition. Scientists all say so.
We have a ghost living in our microwave. We've been sitting there, in the middle of a meal, and the damn thing turns itself on. Probably doesn't help that half the town was built on an Indian burial ground.
isn't that what fetal bovine serum is for?
Oh man, do you think spilling some FBS once is what cursed me? I think that might be what cursed me.
Science is about empiricism, so i would expect scientists to try out the occult from time to time.
Pascal's wager with respect to machinery, maybe the toys don't help, but what if they do?
They may filter incoming air, but I doubt it
They may filter incoming air, but I doubt it
My occult phase was from a different angle: I really enjoyed immersing myself in something I didn't have to explain or justify objectively, where I could just enjoy the vibes and not think too hard.
I think of it as analogous to how some of the people who are most into being submissive in a BDSM/sex context are people who seem the opposite of that in their careers/regular life. The contrast is a relief.
Knowing what works is more important than knowing why that works.
Anyone who builds their own PC kit knows about the Blood Sacrifice
That's why there is always that one sharp edge on the housing.
Khorn really stepped up his game once we started rounding the edges on our PC cases.
So scientists are warhammer orcs?
More like the Mechanicus. The machine spirit will be displeased if we dont give it the required stuffed animals and proper awakening rites.
Whatever you do, do not touch that one BNC cable. Just trust me on this.
RF isn't magic. It is awfully finicky though, so don't touch the BNC cable
My PI: "Oh, we don't use that microcentrifuge, it will ruin your results" Me: "Oh damn, how long has it been broken for?" PI: "No, it's not broken. It's cursed "
I thought this was just exasperated hyperbole, but nah, there's a lot of superstition here.
Oh no, the orks became smart enough to he scientists, the green tide is too big to stop now
I work at an MSP and we all have little shrines of random shit on our desks that we've collected. The one guy has a mini filing cabinet under his desk of tech shit that's nearly as old as I am (I'm 27).
If we are ever told that we can't have our shrines, we'll all be devastated.
In the corner of our office we have an old Win2k workstation. It is our pinball machine and the glue that holds our department together
That's hilarious. We had a desk dedicated to Datto devices. It was the Datto Desk. We were really upset when it had to be cleared for a new employee. Now we have another desk dedicated to empty phone boxes and tissues.
We are moving to a new building next year, so I'm sure we'll come up with all new stuff to enshrine.
I have some low-level projects where I am responsible for every byte of code running on very simple hardware.
There's still problems where I throw my hands up and say "Nope, haunted. I'll try again later."
Can verify: I work at a research laboratory and I can't tell you how many Trump stickers I have seen on bumpers. These are people who mostly have either an engineering masters or a science PhD, and they still believe in fairy tales like voting works.
Gene stealer cultists
Engineering is the most chud of all academic fields. Beyond the engineering stemlord aspect, there’s a lot of military money floating around.
There’s some similar things with bio fields and pharmaceutical/bioengineering money.
Either that or the lab equipment is infused with the souls of children.
Orpheus: "It's powered by a forsaken child?"
Dr. Venture: "I didn't use the whole thing!"
Ponder and his fellow students watched Hex carefully. 'It can't just, you know, stop,' said Adrian 'Mad Drongo' Tumipseed. 'The ants are just standing still,' said Ponder. He sighed. 'All right, put the wretched thing back.' Adrian carefully replaced the small fluffy teddy bear above Hex's keyboard. Things immediately began to whirr. The ants started to trot again. The mouse squeaked. They'd tried this three times.
Ponder looked again at the single sentence Hex had written. +++ Mine! Waaaah +++ 'I don't actually think,' he said, gloomily, 'that I want to tell the Archchancellor that this machine stops working if we take its fluffy teddy bear away. I just don't think I want to live in that kind of world.' 'Er,' said Mad Drongo, 'you could always, you know, sort of say it needs to work with the FTB enabled... 'You think that's better?' said Ponder, reluctantly. It wasn't as if it was even a very realistic interpretation of a bear. 'You mean, better than "fluffy teddy bear"?' Ponder nodded. 'It's better,' he said.
Well now I gotta build a shrine in my lab. The COF tester, GC, and our UPC tester are all behaving badly.
You need to treat them nicely and maybe show a bit of romance. Poems, flowers, even a printed picture of flowers, something nice that will last is all it takes and your instruments will work perfectly for you. Each person may need to contribute individually to the shrine.
I swear, some damned tech came in on a PM and removed my poem from my favorite HPLC and now it's been acting up for me nonstop.
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WTB 1 toaster.
Our magical thinking is going to pay off when we finally discover magic's real.
It's gonna happen... eventually
After all, any science that is differentiable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
