Scott Adams does it again!

[pyesetz]

"There's plenty of scientific evidence that reality is created on the fly by the act of observation, at least in the small world of physics.  So perhaps the elemental particles literally did not exist until the first scientists detected them.  And so it follows that we can cause the elemental particles to have substructures, or not, by how hard we try to detect that sort of thing.  And that process of looking for, and therefore creating, substructures of substructures can be infinite."
--(link)

He's right, you know.  The idea that the laws of physics have never changed is just a convenient but unprovable assumption.  Did Einstein's theory *actually* predict the cosmic microwave background radiation *before* it was discovered, or did the discovery cause changes to the past so that of course the theory must always have described the universe as we see it now?  If the first CMB experiment had been done slightly differently, would we be living in a slightly different universe today with slightly-different physics from what we observe on our own causality/time-line?

If we can get a grip on this, we can start designing our experiments to increase the likelihood that they will have convenient side-effects on the laws of the universe.

Random other links:
• Enough drugs to stupefy a rhinoceros (or: "I didn't get that F, I earned that F.")
• I escaped from the prison you call home.