Jamie123

It may surprise some people to know this, but ai went through a phase where I behaved like this.  It was a selfish phase.  I could have gone out of my way (bend a bit like @scottyg was saying).  But my mentality was:The more I can get others to do for me the easier it is for me.  
It had nothing to do with what was right or what was more practical or any spirit of cooperation or personal responsibility.  It was wholely about what I could get out of it for as little effort on my part as possible.
Pretty selfish, right?  Yup.  I was.
I got out of that phase because enough people around me told me that this behavior was unacceptable.  And enough people refused to help me to the point that I realized I was on my own.
So I did things because no one else would do it for me.  I'd read enough stories of people picking themselves up by their bootstraps and succeeding.
If it hadn't been for both sides of that equation, I don't think I would have gotten out of that mindset.   Why would I?  What would have been my motivation.  If I could get by without doing anything I would have.
It was only after I got out of that phase that I truly began to understand that "vision" (think "Paper Dream") that I'd had for so long.  And more importantly how I was to achieve it.

Reading your post, I tend to want to commiserate rather than offer actual solution alternatives. So I'm of no help.
I have never seen such an attitude of entitlement as I see today. A year or so ago, my wife fixed a wonderful Indian dinner and, for various reasons, ended up with a lot left over. She advertised on a FB group that this was available for any who wanted it. Someone responded almost immediately, and my wife gave her the address. She told my wife that she didn't have a car, so couldn't pick it up, So my wife worked out a time FOR US TO DRIVE DOWN TO HER HOUSE AND DELIVER HER OUR FOOD WE WERE GIVING AWAY.
But wait. It gets better. So at the appointed hour, I (duly authorized by my wife) drive on down to the apartment housing where they live. The instructions on how to get to their apartment are absolutely horrible. I'm walking around this apartment complex, and no one is coming out to meet me or anything. I literally can't find the apartment (because, as it turns out, the instructions were completely wrong, as if given by a lost child), and after ten or fifteen minutes (!!) of looking, I have decided that I've had it, I'm going home. Just then, a car drives up (let me repeat: A CAR DRIVES UP) and parks. Out gets a very young woman and her boyfriend. They see me and ask me if I have the Indian food. They then show me to their apartment (because they can't be bothered to, you know, take the food from me) and instruct me to put it on the table. No thanks, no gratitude, no "tell your wife how much we love it". Nothing.
I was a people person until I met some people.

They could have at least had the decency to add a potassium layer on the outside.

Really cool.
If you have Google Ear th, here is the kmz file:  Blue Ponds.kmz

For @Vort and @dprh
The first is 20 and the second is 20 too!

Some time ago, I casually mentioned to my mom that reading an essay on some topic likely told you more about the author than about the subject topic. Her response was, "I hope that's not true!" But in my experience, it is.
I occasionally read old interactions on this forum, and sometimes feel uncomfortable about what I wrote. I expose myself a lot here [insert suppressed sneers and elbow jabs]. But I have a thin façade of anonymity here, which allows me some flexibility and a bit of license to be open to a degree I might not if my actual name were attached to my words. In any case, what I write is a reflection of who and what I am, so if people want to think less of me for it, so be it. At least I'm getting blamed for someone's perception of what I really am rather than for something I have nothing to do with, as is so often the case in our corrupt society.

Serious?  You had to go back 11 years to find a way to insult me?

He looks pretty happy, at least. That's good. I guess. Unless he's just thinking about how good people taste... He does have those front-facing, stereoscopic eyes placed for depth perception, so necessary for carnivorous hunters. The more I look at him, the less friendly he seems. Now I'm a little bit scared.

On a tangent from this...
There is a joke I heard in an old movie (which I've repeated on more than one occasion) that I've found is lost on too large a percentage of the population.  So, I have to be selective on the audience to whom I repeat it.
Too often, I hear the response:

Reminds me a bit of:
The joke is lost if you don't know about Waterloo Station in London.

My dad talks about the same problem: he can't spell for toffee, but he's nevertheless a walking dictionary. When he was a young man, people would ask him why he insisted on using such obscure words, or accuse him of "showing off" with them. This always irritated him because - from his perspective - he was not "showing off", but making optimum use of the English language.
English is so rich - a very educated person (like my father) can use that richness to great advantage - but only if he's talking to another very educated person. To someone with a poor vocabulary, it does come across (unfairly) as "swank".
There are a lot of English words which mean almost - but not quite - the same thing. Why for instance do we have the word "contrition" when we already have "remorse"? Those words are close enough in meaning to be confused with each other, but they are subtly different. A remorseful person is merely regretful of the wrong he has done, but does not necessarily have any intention to do better. A contrite person is regretful, but in a positive way - he wants to put things right.
(Some people say that "contrition" and "remorse" mean the same thing but in different contexts: "contrition" belongs to religion and "remorse" to the law. I disagree: I think lawyers and judges and rehabilitationists use the word "remorse" wrongly. They ought to say "contrition".)

My dad talks about the same problem: he can't spell for toffee, but he's nevertheless a walking dictionary. When he was a young man, people would ask him why he insisted on using such obscure words, or accuse him of "showing off" with them. This always irritated him because - from his perspective - he was not "showing off", but making optimum use of the English language.
English is so rich - a very educated person (like my father) can use that richness to great advantage - but only if he's talking to another very educated person. To someone with a poor vocabulary, it does come across (unfairly) as "swank".
There are a lot of English words which mean almost - but not quite - the same thing. Why for instance do we have the word "contrition" when we already have "remorse"? Those words are close enough in meaning to be confused with each other, but they are subtly different. A remorseful person is merely regretful of the wrong he has done, but does not necessarily have any intention to do better. A contrite person is regretful, but in a positive way - he wants to put things right.
(Some people say that "contrition" and "remorse" mean the same thing but in different contexts: "contrition" belongs to religion and "remorse" to the law. I disagree: I think lawyers and judges and rehabilitationists use the word "remorse" wrongly. They ought to say "contrition".)

Announcing my new avatar: Helping Henry!
Henry - the talking dining chair from outer space - was a kids' TV show from the 1980s. Most people don't believe it ever existed. But it did. I know because I can remember watching it. I'm not lying and I didn't dream it, and the Internet has now proven me right! So there!
This was the theme song:
So there you have it. Henry (or N3) was sent to Earth observe the  humans from the unobtrusive perspective of a dining room chair. He often talked - blinking his creepy eyes, moving his wooden eyebrows up and down and gesticulating with his "arms". Oddly enough he couldn't walk on his "legs" and had to rely on a little boy (the only human who knew about him) to push him around the room. At the end of every episode he reported his "findings" to his superiors (a blatant rip-off of Mork and Mindy) who appeared in the room as coloured floating clouds.  His observations on humanity were always wildly off the mark.  

Aliens in the dining room, disguised as chairs...makes you wonder about quantum mechanics, don't you think?
P.S. Youtube has it: Helping Henry TV Series 1988, compilation reel - YouTube

Perhaps it turned into a wave! 😯

Perhaps it turned into a wave! 😯

Perhaps it turned into a wave! 😯

Is this it? https://archive.org/details/MinisteringAngels

I've certainly never heard of anyone (disabled or not) getting free prostitutes on the NHS - though that's no guarantee of anything. If it ever did happen, I suspect the tabloids would have a lot of fun with it!
Tangential comment: This reminds me of a sci-fi story by C.S. Lewis called "Ministering Angels". It's set on a research station on Mars, manned entirely by male astronauts. The mission directors on Earth have decided that this is unhealthy, and have therefore sent women to satisfy the men's needs. However, only two women have volunteered: a rather prickly middle-aged academic who thinks only in terms of clinical necessity, and a very loving and compassionate career prostitute, a few years past her prime. It's a very short tale, but quite insightful.

meme.
 

I don't think entropy is relevant here. Entropy is essentially a measure of the number of microstates of a system, e.g. the number of different possible position/velocity combinations for all the different particles in a gas, corresponding to that system's macrostate, e.g. the temperature of that gas. (Well, to be precise it's actually the logarithm of that number.) You're right in so far as that in a closed system, entropy always stays the same or increases - in practice this implies a "spreading out" of energy; a hot object cools by heating up its surroundings, until temperature is uniform across the system and entropy is at its largest possible value. This is how heat engines work - by harnessing the flow of energy between "hot" and "cold" to do work.
But energy can still flow in both directions - just so long as the overall entropy (when you consider the whole system) does not decrease. You could run an electric current through the heating element of an electric fire to convert electrical energy into heat, and then have some of the heat radiation fall upon a thermocouple, from which you could extract electrical energy. A pitiful amount compared to what you put in, of course, but nevertheless this "something" we call "energy" has turned from one form to another and then back into the first.
We take energy for granted these days, but until the 18th and early 19th Centuries no one thought in those terms. Before then, different kinds of energy had quite different names and were considered to be different things. For example, heat was called "caloric", which was considered to be something quite different from "vis viva" (what we nowadays call "kinetic energy"). The idea that both are manifestations of the same interchangable thing was quite a revolutionary concept - just as it seems revolutionary now that something described by a wave could be an alternative manifestation of something which can also be described as  particle. So I don't think the analogy is as bad as you claim.
Again, that's probably the same argument the original proposers of energy faced. "Caloric may behave as vis viva bit it's a different thing..."
Bombadil says this in reply to Frodo asking "Who are you?" He retorts that he's been telling Frodo his name (and what a "merry fellow" he is) since they first met. The point Tolkien makes through Bombadil was that although naming a thing is a poor way of explaining what it is, it's sometimes the best we can do with words. Bombadil is who and what he is, and if you want an answer to "who he is" all he can do is say his name. The reality behind the name is something which escapes words - and that applies as much to Frodo as to him. The thing behind the different forms of energy, as behind the waves and the particles, may be the same. (I don't know that I necessarily agree this is true, but it's a thought.)
You speak as though things which exist only in metacosms (such as Tolkien's legendarium, or the Harry Potter universe) have no wider value or applicability. Metacosms are created by people, and they express fundamental truths as perceived by those people - or through those people by the societies that raised them. Or (if you're into Jung) by the archetypes they have inherited from the collective experience of mankind. Or even from the God who originally made mankind. Just because its not "real", does the boggart (or Tom Bombadil for that matter) have no relevance to our "real" world?

IMO: No. I don't think it's mere coincidence that string theory, which was all the rage 30 or 40 years ago, seldom gets mentioned any more. It's not falsifiable and you can't make predictions with it. That ain't science, at least no kind of science I'm aware of. (Science fiction doesn't count.)

I read an article some years ago reporting an experiment where they detected wave interference properties of large organic molecules, and also of "buckyballs" (large spherical molecules of 60 carbon atoms). As I recall, they found the wave properties disappeared as the level of vacuum was reduced - suggesting that a wave function collapses as it interacts with its environment. (No conscious observer needed.)
I think this is because protons and neutrons are not elementary particles. Each is composed of quarks, a proton being two up quarks and a down quark, a neutron being two down quarks and an up quark. (The quarks have "colour" as well, but I forget how that works.) The individual quarks on the other hand do have zero dimensions like the electron.
Or do they?
The string theorists reckon that elementary particles do have a finite-sized structure - a vibrating string which gives each particle its properties. A heavy particle like a quark is a rapidly vibrating string, while a light particle like an electron vibrates slowly. These strings however are so tiny - even by subatomic standards - that no experiment could ever be performed to study them. Hence the theory is not falsifiable...so is it really science?
Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory is supposed to be a string theorist.

I'd recommend Wolfgang Smith to you as well. I posted a short review of "The Quantum Enigma" on this site a couple of years back, though take what I say about it with a pinch of salt.
Also I definitely recommend you read "The Quantum Enigma" before you attempt to read "Physics and Vertical Causation". The former is much easier-going, and the latter is hard-going even if you do have the grounding from the first book.
 

You ought to read Wolfgang Smith. I have 2 of his books - "The Quantum Enigma" which I've finished, and "Physics and Vertical Causation" which I'm still battling through. He's very heavy reading, but he does have some interesting views on  this.