I’m watching ‘what the bleep do we know‘, a documentary about reality and how we perceive it. If for example time isn’t linear and a cause can also have an effect in the past, how will that influence the way a geoscientist observes his/her surroundings? Will the observation affect the observed? And if so, how will the observation affect the observed?
Assume for example a satellite orbiting the planet Mars takes an image from the Martian surface and beams it back to Earth, then will this image, which is of course information in the form of a regular 2D grid of brightness values, be independent from the observer and his/her expectations? Or is the image connected to the observer? The latter would mean we influence, at this moment, the geological history of Mars.
We are then not only building a picture of Mars’ history in our minds, writing it down in the form of scientific papers, abstracts and books, we are also building Mars itself. Mars does not exist without us, only when we look at it, observe it, it exists. But what does this mean? And if this way of thinking will some day be common good, how will geoscientists look at their endeavor to better understand their surroundings?
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