“It’s happening, but I don’t believe it!” Katherine exclaimed as her eyes filled with astonishment at what she was witnessing. “It’s completely inexplicable….” The awe in her voice was enough to lift George from his seat, the origami he had been folding collapsing onto the lab’s pristine countertops.
“Are you serious?” He asked, not quite willing to believe that their efforts could have really brought about the results they had so desperately wanted to confirm. “You’re telling me that these findings were real? I’m going to look on that screen and see two straight, vertical lines?”
“See for yourself,” She turned the computer monitor towards him and heard his gasp. There on the monitor were two straight, vertical lines, marking the spots where every single electron had landed. “No interference pattern! They went straight through, and the only difference is that we were watching those little devils.”
“There’s no way,” his eyes were bulging, his mouth agape, “How can it be possible that by the mere act of observation we have changed the behavior of these particles, and not just any particles mind you, but some of the most fundamental particles in the universe?” The double-slit experiment they had performed had shown that, by simple observation, the motion of electrons being blasted through the two slits changed from that of a wave to that of individual particles. It was as though the physical properties of the universe had been affected by the device used to measure the location of each electron.
“Do you think it’s true, then?” Katherine inquired of George.
“Do I think what is true?”
“A watched pot never boils. A watched clock never ticks. What if the way we see things isn’t just in our heads. What if by looking at something we are actually altering its behavior?
“But how could that be?” George began to retort.
“How could this be? What is causing this? Should it be any more possible that we can change the very nature of an electron with our gaze than it is that we might slow down time, or stop the transfer of energy from one body to another?”
George had to think about this. These thoughts clouded his mind and he could feel the weight of a thousand questions begin to bury him. His brain was becoming a tumultuous landscape of new ideas and possibilities. All that he had once thought was certain now became an endless sea of unknowing. “So what does this teach us about the world we live in?” He wondered aloud.
“It teaches us nothing. All we now know is that there is so much more to learn than we ever thought before. The world, as we had previously seen it, is not the world we live in. The mysteries are now more bountiful than ever!”
“Well that was a waste of time.” George propped up his origami paper and continued to fold.