“Wave size ends up being a matter of local consensus. A given wave, transferred intact somehow from Hawaii, where it was considered six feet, to Southern California, would be called ten there. In Florida it would be twelve, maybe fifteen. In San Francisco, when I lived there, a double overhead wave was reckoned, for no good reason, to be eight feet. A triple overhead wave was ten feet. A wave four times the height of a rider was twelve feet. Five times was fifteen feet, more or less. Beyond that the system – if you could call it a system – disintegrated. Buzzy Trent, an old-time big-wave rider, allegedly said, “Big waves are not measured in feet, but in increments of fear.” If he said that, he got it right. The power of a breaking wave does not increase fractionally with height, but as the square of its height. Thus a ten-foot wave is not slightly more powerful than an eight-foot wave – because the leap is not from eight to tan but from sixty-four to a hundred, making it 50 percent more powerful. This is a brute fact that all Surfer’s know in their bowels, whether or not they’ve heard the formula. Two waves of the same height, for that matter, may differ enormously in their volume, in their ferocity. Then there is the human factor. As a variation on the old maxim has it, “Big waves are not measured in feet, but in increments of bullshit.” Barbarian days. William finnegan. P 293. Penguin. New York. 2016. Paperback
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/02/06/flight-of-the-concord The microphones and the piano face each other like enemies. The piano is a very finicky instrument to record, with an existential problem: attack followed by decay, every note a death. You want to capture the ping, the clarity of the beginning of each note, but you also want to get the ephemeral singing tone that remains. It’s a complicated balance: the souls of the piano and of the pianist hang in it. The microphone’s distance from the piano is a key variable, affecting the roundness of the sound, and how much room you get versus how much piano. And since the piano is harp-shaped, tapering from long, thick bass strings to teeny treble strings, the precise angle of the microphone determines the sound’s shape—fatter or thinner, squeakier or burlier. Finally, the microphones themselves are not absolutely neutral; each one is like an ear, with its own propensities.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613092/a-quantum-experiment-suggests-theres-no-such-thing-as-objective-reality/ Wigner imagined a friend in a different lab measuring the state of this photon and storing the result, while Wigner observed from afar. Wigner has no information about his friend’s measurement and so is forced to assume that the photon and the measurement of it are in a superposition of all possible outcomes of the experiment. Wigner can even perform an experiment to determine whether this superposition exists or not. This is a kind of interference experiment showing that the photon and the measurement are indeed in a superposition. From Wigner’s point of view, this is a “fact”—the superposition exists. And this fact suggests that a measurement cannot have taken place. But this is in stark contrast to the point of view of the friend, who has indeed measured the photon’s polarization and recorded it. The friend can even call Wigner and say the measurement has been done (provided the outcome is not revealed). So the two realities are at odds with each other. “This calls into question the objective status of the facts established by the two observers,” say Proietti and co. That’s the theory, but last year Caslav Brukner, at the University of Vienna in Austria, came up with a way to re-create the Wigner’s Friend experiment in the lab by means of techniques involving the entanglement of many particles at the same time. The breakthrough that Proietti and co have made is to carry this out. “In a state-of-the-art 6-photon experiment, we realize this extended Wigner’s friend scenario,” they say. They use these six entangled photons to create two alternate realities—one representing Wigner and one representing Wigner’s friend. Wigner’s friend measures the polarization of a photon and stores the result. Wigner then performs an interference measurement to determine if the measurement and the photon are in a superposition. The experiment produces an unambiguous result. It turns out that both realities can coexist even though they produce irreconcilable outcomes, just as Wigner predicted.
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