Solutions experiment part 3

Instead of disbelief, Mark chose incredulous humour. "Look, ma, no hands," he said.

Mark ran his hands up to and through where the mesh had been, expecting to knock it over and ruin the optical illusion. Instead, his hand proceeded through the area where the mesh had been, encoutering no resistance. A ghostly trail of white wispy fog swirled in the wake of his hand. He jerked backward instinctively.

"What the fucking fuck?" he yelled.

Sam took two strides and punched off the laser. The computer's high pitched tone sputtered, then stopped. The mesh reassembled itself from wavy lines of nothingness in the fog.

"Please refrain from using obscene language, as I told you before," said Sam. "I can't tolerate that kind of lanugage in my laboratory."

"Oh, hell no," said Mark. "That motherfucker is some freaky shit and I have no fucking clue what just happened."

"Calm down," said Sam. "I know that you children use a vernacular that is full of explitives and dumbed down jargon. But you're a graduate student seeking a Ph.D. so I think you should use some more adult conversation. Please."

"No way. What just happend?" he asked.

"I don't know. I've never seen that before. It's an optical effect. Maybe a reflection. Or an interference pattern that obscured the mesh. It could happen," Sam said.

"Oh no you don't. You can't expalin it away that easily. I put my hand right through the middle of it and didn't feel anything," Mark said.

"The track could have come loose and fell down," she said.

"Then how did it come back to life all oogly woogly boogly like that?" Mark asked. He waved his hands and hips to show how it had reappeared.

Sam laughed. "The scientific term is 'spooky action'," she said. She laughed again.

"Don't make fun of me. What does the computer say?" he asked.

Sam turned to the screen. "Good idea! Let me stop it." She touched the big red button that read "STOP". She answered that yes, she was sure she wanted to stop the collection. A turning hourglass showed that the computer was digesting information and needed time before it would be ready with results.

"We'll have some good answers in about five minutes," she said.

"Five minutes?" he asked. "Who wrote that software?"

"A few graduate students. It's really good. I published two papers with the results I got from this application. The two graduate students got their Ph.D.s helping me write this. We're going to open source it. The college and I."

"Let me help you with it. I can write it to work better," Mark said.

"Sure, maybe later. You're in comp-sci so you probably could add some features I need." Sam motioned to the door. Let's go take a break while it crunches the numbers."

"Okay, I need a break from that freaky sh... Stuff," he said.

As they walked down the hallway toward the stairs to the lobby, Sam said, "Don't worry about optical illusions. They happen all the time. Anyone can do a magic trick. The brain is easily fooled into believing something that can't possible happen."

"But how did we see the same illusion from different sides of the room?" he asked.

"Easy. The lenses sand mirrors could have setup a wave front or a diffraction scatter that would hit our laser glasses. This would block any other view of something in the middle since the laser light is being absorbed. It could also only be partially absorbed by the glass and some amount of the laser might even go into our eyes and temporarily blind us."

"Blind us?" he asked loudly.

"Temporarily. As in, not permanently. There isn't enough energy in a scattered laser, at least not the class 1 lasers that I use to actually do permanent injuries. Especially through these glasses that are tuned to the light I use." She put her hands to her face and realised she was still wearing her glasses. She took them off and waved at Mark to take his off.

They stopped at a vending machine. "Take a look at this vending machine," Sam said. "Once I came up to the machine and saw my favourite peanut bag snack in C5. I dropped in my money and pressed the C and the 5 button. I saw the correct letter and number appear here," and she pointed. "The machine whirred and I saw out of the corner of my eye that a pack of gum being dispensed." Here she pointed at the chips. "Sure enough, the gum in C7 was dispensed. Even worse, C5 was empty where I had previously seen peanuts."

Mark considered the vending machine and looked at the buttons. "The 5 and 7 buttons are far apart. They aren't above and below or diagonal," he noted. The 7 could appear very similar to a 5 on these red LEDs." He frowned.

"Very good," Sam said. "You're discounting my experience correctly and applying logic and analysis of the situation to try to determine what happened. What about my seeing peanut bags where they should not be?"

"That's what she said," he joked.

Sam stared.

"'Peanut bag. That's what she said, get it?" he asked.

"No. Should I say something else? Bag of peanuts?" she asked.

"That's better I guess," said Mark.

"So what about it? What about seeing a bag of peanuts that wasn't there?" she asked again.

"I guess you just thought you were going to see a peanut bag," here he giggled, "and you were used to seeing those bags of peanuts every day," here he giggled again, "so your brain filled in the details for you and told you that you saw something that wasn't actually there." Mark tried not to laugh.

"That's exactly what I think," said Sam. "It shows that the brain is fantastic at deceiving us and filling in information and also removing information to tell us what we want to see, or what we think we should see."

"So you saw a penis bag and instead got a wad of cum," said Mark, mumbling the words to disguise them.

"You mean peanuts and gum?" said Sam.

"Yes, of course," he nodded and smiled.

"If you speak to me like that again, I'll report you to the dean and fire you immediately," she said and turned to go back to the lab.