A Little Big Mistake or A Big Little Mistake?

I made one of those, yesterday. A huge one or as our leader likes to say a “Yuuugee one.”

To be honest for you, it was an accident of intellectual gravity: I fell into the mistake while looking somewhere else, somewhere mundane.

The internet is a wonderful/crappy place, depending on what you’re looking at or for or…

See? It happened again, And exactly the same way: how can one thing be more than one thing or less than one thing, and not just ONE THING.

Walmart would not accept my credit cards online so I (logically) assumed an answer to the simple question “why?” could be found in the spider web/internet/darkweb world. On the Network. In the ether. Floating in space. Wherever it is answers live. My local Walmart had an object I wanted so I placed it in the cart and proceeded to check out…four different times. Four different credit cards were used, and each time Walmart immediately accepted the order, accepted the payment, gave an order date, listed pick up instructions, and then cancelled the order saying it “exceeded stock limits”***. All within minutes of each other. Maybe Ai was practicing, working out, building up its circular processing muscles? The first three times I went back and confirmed the number “in stock” at the store before repeating the process. As would any intelligent individual, the frustration ended at four tries. (Oh, you would have stopped at two? Right.)

Curiosity not only kills the cat but routinely kills hours of my life as once a mind is opened to the “wonderful/crappy” internet there is no anticipating where said mind will end up.

Mine ended up mired in the swirling, exciting, puzzling, enigmatic world of Quantum Mechanics (QM). This sub-atomic Rubik’s Cube of a land has snared my prying synapsis’ more than once, but this particular trap was set and tripped by the clickiest click bait of all time: “How to understand Quantum Mechanics in 5 Minutes.”

See? Again. Big/Little Mistake. You’re making one, now, by reading further. (PS NOT “farther”. Look it up.) Back to the article: was it click bait just to make me look or was it real, someone really explaining QM in 5 minutes? I was now entangled (remember that word from previous QM posts?) in the perfect QM Schrodinger’s Cat dilemma. Do I look or not? If I did would there be a truth or a scam? Enlightenment or disillusion? Knowing what little I already know about QM, (the “little”: NO ONE understands it), why was the decision a hard one to make? What was pulling me closer and closer to the event horizon of a clicked link?

Sadly, this post is about how we exist in macro and micro worlds (MM Universe? I like it.) I needed help with a macro Walmart Card issue and stumbled into the unsolvable micro world of the small and mysterious. Bet Andy Griffiths or John Wayne or John Wick or Liam Neeson never have this problem, at least the guys still alive, anyway, a clause added to make the preceding verb tense correct. Macro or Micro?

And it brings to mind another duplicitous word that lives dual lives (lives and lives, get it?) in the MM Universe: Faith. Every scientist/physicist worth his salt is aware of QM. But since it is so small, and so hard to observe and quantify, do the men of science have faith in what they see? What they think? What they theorize and postulate? Or do they just believe without proof?

Amazing. All this in one day. Thanks for coming along for the ride, but it’s time for a macro nap. In a few hours neurons will be calmed and all will be right with the MM world, again. Have faith.

Micro world? See ya next time and say hi to the Ai bots.

***I drove to Walmart and purchased the item earlier today and posted a strongly worded Macro letter to Walmart.