The Gremlin Theory of Everything
On the true cause of systematic error of measurement.
I firmly believe the laws of physics are, in fact, wrong, and everything you were taught in physics class is a useful fiction. Why do I think this? It’s because I have personally observed the true nature of reality.
Everyone who’s ever been in a lab setting, asked to measure some physical constant, has had the following problem: you did the experiment perfectly—you know you did—and your measurement is off by, like, 50%. Something way outside your tolerances. You may vividly recall your very first lab class back in undergrad, where you measured g to be 15 m/s^2, despite the fact that you had a timer, a laser, a photodiode, a calibrated slope for the ball to roll down, and knew the right answer from the start.1
Why is this? Are you simply bad at your job? No, of course not. It’s actually because of the gremlins that live in your equipment.
Yes, the true underlying reality—especially when you’re in a lab—is that gremlins live inside your instruments, and they are actively malicious, and they want your experiment to fail. They are watching you, always, and they are cleverer than you are. That’s what makes your job so difficult, and every paper published is a small victory against the gremlins in a larger war you will almost surely lose.
Why do you think power cycling fixes so many computer problems? It has nothing to do with rebooting; it’s because the gremlins live in the power line and slowly infiltrate your system while it’s on. Once they’re in, they feast on 120 V / 60 Hz, and reproduce. Cutting the power temporarily kills them, so you’ve got a short window of time after reboot before they filter back in. I’ve heard stories that European gremlins eat different voltages than American ones—this is why you cannot plug a European device into an American socket, the different factions fight it out in the transformer and make a wasteland of your instrument.
Gremlins have mystical properties. They are anti-statistical. They resist normal error propagation, indeed, they actively correlate the measurement errors. That’s why you measured g to be 15.
Another interesting feature, especially of electronics gremlins, is that they like to smoke—Cuban cigars, I believe. This is why, when your electronics fail, the magic smoke escapes. It’s not you that burned the op amp. That was Dave, the head gremlin, smoking his morning cigar, and getting a little excited. Nothing you could’ve done, really.
The postdoc who trained me, an eminent gremlinologist, clued me in on likely locations to look if you suspect you’ve been overrun.
Windows Update.
Antivirus software.
These actively generate gremlins, like a diabolical nursery.
Python virtual environments.
These can sandbox different gremlin factions, to prevent interaction effects, but the gremlins are smarter than you and always find a way to infect your global install.
Your principal investigator, or indeed any important observer, an investor, your boss, exerts a gremlin-attracting field. I’ve been working hard on an effective field theory of this, so that I can quantify how much, exactly, the presence of your boss will sink the gremlins into your equipment, and how short your window of time is before the gremlins cause a heretofore unseen malfunction in your otherwise perfectly engineered device. This is the real observer effect—forget quantum mechanics, that’s not real anyway. It’s gremlins all the way down.
Unfortunately, I haven’t yet managed to get my GUT (Gremlin Unified Theory) to work. But I’m pretty sure I know why…
And you would really think experimenter bias would fix this, but no.
This makes so much sense, I think Gremlins are nudging my pen when I least need it
Yes, the same thing also applies when trying to predict human behavior*. It's gremlins all the way down!
* Unless you are defending a miracle, in which case the holy spirit bestows you with the gift of psychologically ruling out explanations.