I’m going to endeavor to post whatever thing or things really fascinated me in a given week on Fridays.
This week, it was a Radiolab Short: I listen to this excellent podcast while I do my workouts. In this 16-minute short, a scientist describes a phenomenon called the decline effect: in essence, the phenomenon in science whereby the at-first dramatic results of a scientific study become less and less dramatic, gradually, over time as the experiment is repeated, even under the same rigorous conditions.
The scientist concludes with a radical hypothesis he is extremely reluctant to even make: that the act of observing reality may in itself change it.