Welcome to I Found This - a weekly competition between two old friends, your hosts, James and Keith. Here each week, you’ll decide who’s find made your eyebrow raise higher.

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 Happy Monday!

Under the Quantum Hood

Someone’s watching.

You know the feeling. The air turns thin, the hair on the back of your neck stands at attention, and your eyes start to dance across the room. Apparently, light itself knows the feeling as well.

In the 19^th century, Thomas Young seemed to prove that light is a wave rather than a collection of particles with his Double Slit Experiment LINK. The A students who sat next to you in your high school physics class might have heard about this when you were conked out at your desk. To spare some of the more technical details that The Royal Institution can explain to you better than I LINK. Thomas sent light through two slits in a metal sheet onto a screen. What he found showed some serious wave-like behavior. Checkmate, particle punks!

 A century later, scientists were able to send each photon of light through the slits individually and found, to their surprise, the light still behaved like a wave. But the true shock came when they took a peek under the quantum hood to watch where the particles passed through each slit. As soon as they did, the wave-like pattern on the screen was replaced by a particle pattern. Thomas Young’s big discovery had been undone in the strangest way. Somehow, light knows when it’s being watched and just like you and I, it behaves differently under the microscope.  

 Stranger still, here we are at the tail end of 2023, and no one has been able to adequately explain why. - Keith

Buying Happiness

This past Friday was “Black Friday”. Typically this is the day that retailers in the US count on a jump in consumer spending(~70% of US GDP) to move their P&L statements that have ben in the red into the black. All this consumer spending begs the question, “Why do consumers spend"?” At the risk of sounding like a hedonist, a key driver is happiness. I am happy when my friends are impressed with my BMW or my fancy clothes washer saves me time. So how much do money do you need to accumulate to be happy?

Well as it turns out, your answer to that question may correlate with when you were born:

LINK

And because I often wonder how these blocks are defined, below is how the University of Southern California defines these generations:

• The Baby Boomer Generation – born 1946-1964

• Generation X – born 1965-1979

• Millennials – born 1980-1994

• Generation Z – born 1995-2012

Interestingly, the number is negatively correlated with age with Gen Z being the outlier. With Gen Z being ages 11-28yrs, it’s possible that these folks just haven’t entered the workforce yet and don’t have a strong tie between money and outcomes. Let the consumer spending marketing machine commence!

It’s all about the happiness cough money - James