THAT DARNED PHOTON The photon is considered a massless particle.
   [I don't think it really is massless - nobody's figured out the
   NATURE OF MASS yet (I think I have, at least an explanation that
   works for me, but I'll get to that later)] Now when they talk
   about the uncertainty principle - either a quanta's location OR
   its direction can be measured, but not both at the same time -
   it's not so much that we change reality itself by looking at it
   - but rather it's more akin to watching a baseball get thrown:
   You throw a baseball. It arcs and lands in the pitchers mitt.
   You want to take some measurements. How did the ball travel?
   (direction) Well, let's say place you are throwing the ball is
   COMPLETELY DARK - you can't see the ball. So, you throw the ball
   in a gel substance and, after the fact, you work your way
   through the gel until you find the arc-shaped gap that the
   baseball made, and measure the empty space made in the gel that
   you can't see. This is akin to how they look for trails after
   they shash atoms - that can see which way the tiny particles
   went. But now you want to see WHERE the ball is located while
   it's being thrown. Again, you're in a pitch black area The ball
   is being thrown in a gel like substance. You want to find it
   where it is at any given time? You can throw ANOTHER baseball at
   it. (that's akin to the photon). You keep throwing the baseball
   at the travelling baseball until you hear a "click". You now can
   shine a flashlight through the hole made in the gel that started
   from your thrown baseball and stopped where the other baseball
   was travelling. Eureka! You've found where the ball WAS at one
   given point in time. But wait a minute! The ball didn't reach
   its original destination. Why? Because when you hit the ball
   with the other ball, you CHANGED THE BASEBALL'S DIRECTION AND
   SPEED. No longer is it traveling in that nice arc you had
   before. A wave/particle of light (photon) strikes the particle
   so you can see where it was. Or you follow its trail to see
   where its been (and can calculate where it's probably going).
   But you can't do both at the same time. But that doesn't mean
   that we change reality by looking at reality, because we're not
   throwing photons at things (our eyes do not eminate photons).
   BUT the SUN DOES, and artificial lights do. That's where skin
   cancer comes from. That's why colorful fabrics fade not only in
   the sunlight, but also under incandescent lights. Photons
   repeatedly striking something changes it, knocking off bits and
   pieces of it. That's what makes lasers so powerful -- organized
   photons, baby. It's ALL ABOUT THE PHOTON changing the structure
   of things, not about our minds. Observation=photons in that
   case. One badly chosen word in science leads to decades of
   misconceptions, many repeated by vaulted professors who don't
   look deep enough. I do believe that all of reality is has at
   least four spatial dimensions, which would explain protein
   folding (wanna blow your mind? Look up protein folding and find
   out what weirdness happens inside your own body when you chow
   down that 99 cent burger), why quarks seem to disappear and
   reappear, be in two places at once, etc. Physics is primarily a
   3 dimensional + time endevour, even particle physics. Something
   that moves at a 90 degree angle into the 4th dimension would
   seem to either disappear completely or be in more than one place
   at once (or in all places at once). We're at the point in
   particle physics, and physics in general, that the ancients were
   in when they saw the weird way that planets (wandering stars)
   travelled across the sky. They saw the weird ways that planets
   moved over long periods of time. They charted the movements.
   Straight line, squiggle, loop-da-loop, loop-da-loop, straight
   line loop-da-loop, loop-da-loop-, loop-da-look, squiggle.
   Somebody way back stuck a bit of math to the problem and figured
   out that these things weren't moving in weird ways across our
   sky but went OUTSIDE OF THEIR LIMITED PERSPECTIVE (which looked
   like wandering stars) and realized that the planets are all
   ORBITING. That was a MAJOR accomplishment, and I should track
   down who figured it out. I think the same thing is true with
   higher dimensions. This "weird behavior" will probably turn out
   to be higher dimensional particle physics. [can't say if it's 11
   dimensions ala String Theory but certainly at least the next
   higher physical dimension]. Gravity is already explainable in
   that way (remember the giant stretched out trampoline with the
   bowling ball in the middle to describe gravity?) . I think
   proteins seem to mysteriously fold into these critical shapes
   NOT due to some internal instructions based on DNA, but rather
   some kind of 4th dimension interaction - rather like slowly
   dropping a string into a bowl but WAY more complex. A 1
   dimensional string dropping into a 4 dimensional bowl might
   appear in the 3rd dimension as if they "know" what shapes they
   will fall into, when in fact, it might just be a property of
   folding in a higher dimension. Thoughts? _