Image: BRAD HINES
In spring 2004 I appeared on KATU TV's AM Northwest in Portland, Ore., with the producers of an improbably named film, What the #$*! Do We Know?! Artfully edited and featuring actress Marlee Matlin as a dreamy-eyed photographer trying to make sense of an apparently senseless universe, the film's central tenet is that we create our own reality through consciousness and quantum mechanics. I never imagined that such a film would succeed, but it has grossed millions.
The film's avatars are New Age scientists whose jargon-laden sound bites amount to little more than what California Institute of Technology physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann once described as "quantum flapdoodle." University of Oregon quantum physicist Amit Goswami, for example, says in the film: "The material world around us is nothing but possible movements of consciousness. I am choosing moment by moment my experience. Heisenberg said atoms are not things, only tendencies." Okay, Amit, I challenge you to leap out of a 20-story building and consciously choose the experience of passing safely through the ground's tendencies.
This article was originally published with the title Quantum Quackery.
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7 Comments
Add CommentFree will is given to us by our "creator" is it not?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTherefore it has so many endless possibilities that if you controlled a mass quantity of minds on a specific topic then you really can control what happens and it is scientifically understandable that this is happening with governmental control of mass media. Although its no magic trick, we just happen to let it happen the way most would prefer it not for absolutely no reason...cough Fox News...cough CNN isnt it obvious that there is influence in popular opinion? If you have the mind to start it and keep it going that stretches far beyond what most people realize could potentially have the power to change. But its far too little of a reason to back up whats actually happening quantum mechanically. But free will could have something to do with the enormous gap, maybe humans arent capable of the mentality necessary to actually control things without further evolution? That sounds practical considering it only took...3 years was it? To map the human genome, and another year for them to find a way that it could make money.
P_young85@hotmail.com
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Edited by Anonymous at 01/16/2008 10:30 PM
Dear Michael Shermer,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyour response to Amit Gotswani does not appear logical at all. He did not say anything at all about consciously changing tendencies.
There is a high probability that Mr. Gotswani would not choose to follow your advice to leap out of the building, because he would consciously choose to avoid that experience (of not passing safely through the ground's tendencies, which with a very high probability would tend to stay solid).
For a perfect example of quantum flapdoodle, see this website: http://www.mindovermatter.ru/RVScience/supernaturalspirit/quantum_computing_possession_damnation.html. This quack even has the nerve to name Heinz-Dieter Zeh and Wojciech Zurek as sources for his insane ramblings.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"In reality, the gap between subatomic quantum effects and large-scale macro systems is too large to bridge."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThen how do you explain the development of quantum computers.
"In reality, the gap between subatomic quantum effects and large-scale macro systems is too large to bridge."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThen how do you explain the development of quantum computers?
"I challenge you to leap out of a 20-story building and consciously choose the experience of passing safely through the ground's tendencies."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat's a very ignorant and uneducated response that was not thought out too well.
It doesn't prove anything is real.
For example, in a video game. If you get hit in the game by a car "which none of it is real" then you're still going to die in the game. Just because the car is not real doesn't mean it won't have any effect or that you can just create your own realty.
If this is a virtual simulation that we are not aware of. How would we know it?
Same goes for a dream. Are dreams real? Only to the person experiencing it. If you get hit by a car in your dream you still die, or get injured or whatever. Not all the time as everyone's subjective dream is different but regardless of the result it doesn't make the dream any more real than if the person in the dream spontaneously turned into Godzilla. It's all still not real.
If this was a dream, how would you know it?
If this was a virtual simulation, how would you prove it? ... Maybe computer code in string theory?
I never could understand why people would want the objective reality to be real.