Jim Elvidge is, in my opinion, a goddamned genius. Here's his latest weblog entry. Whilst you're there go buy his wonderful book on programmed reality. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
'One of the keys to understanding our reality is found in a very unusual and anomalous experiment done over 200 years ago by Thomas Young. The philosophical debate that resulted from this experiment and its successors during the quantum era of the 20th century may hold the key to understanding everything - from bona fide scientific anomalies to cold fusion and bigfoot sightings.
'If you are unfamiliar with this experiment, please watch the Doctor Quantum cartoon on the Double Slit Experiment. It provides a good explanation of two paradoxes that have puzzled scientists for many years. In summary, here is the conundrum:
'1. If you fire electrons at a screen through a single slit in an otherwise impenetrable barrier, there will be a resulting pattern on the screen as you might expect - a single band of points.
'2. If you fire electrons at a screen through a barrier with two slits, the pattern that will build up on the screen is not one of two bands of points, but rather an entire interference pattern, as if the electrons were actually waves instead of particles.
'This is one paradox - that electrons (and all other particles) have dual personalities in that they can act like both waves and particles. Further, the personality that emerges matches the type of experiment that you are doing. If you are testing to see if the electron acts like a particle, it will. If you are testing to see if the electron acts like a wave, it will.
'3. Even if the electrons are fired one at a time, eliminating the possibility of electrons interfering with each other, over time, the same pattern emerges.
'4. If you put a measuring device at the slit, thereby observing which slit each electron passes through, the interference pattern disappears.
'This is the more mysterious paradox - that the mere act of observation changes the result of the experiment. The implications of this are huge because they imply that our conscious actions create or modify reality.' (The Universe Solved weblog & Doctor Quantum cartoon).media-underground.net