Member-only story
We’re all familiar with the observer effect in Quantum physics. That is not a leading sentence you read every day is it? I’m not sure it’s even true. For those of you who haven’t read books on Quantum Physics and/or watched every episode of the Big Bang Theory, there is an accepted principle of physics that a particle can be affected by the act of observing it.
Now for those who have ever struggled with a less than stellar credit rating you may be aware that applying for a loan or credit card negatively impacts your credit rating because of…reasons. How dare you contemplate filling out one of the applications credit card companies rain upon you in an endless deluge of invitations for debt? Because it’s their world, they make the rules.
Where these two concepts found themselves juxtaposed is when a friend was given the ‘opportunity’ to buy the condo they had been renting. I say ‘opportunity’ because the alternative was a sweet little eviction. So, choosing the less unpalatable prospect, she applied for a loan. But she just missed the low tier rate available for those cloaked in the auerole of a credit rating of good or above, 720 or higher I think she said, because her credit rating of, let’s say 725 was knocked down to 715 or so…by the act of applying for the loan in question!
That is some very macro application of the ‘observer effect’ heretofore mostly noted in the quantum realm influencing subatomic particles. Of course a credit rating might be argued to be just as ephemeral for anyone who has not experienced the albatross around the neck effect of a low credit rating.Then it seems as dense as your average singularity.
And you thought you didn’t need to study physics in college because it wouldn’t effect you in real life.
