MYSTICAL AND BOGUS PHYSICS!!

Mystical Physics had its start in the days of the Counterculture, the 1960s. Two main early gurus of the movement were Fritjof Capra and Fred Alan Wolf. The basic thrust of this movement had two prongs: (1) Modern theoretical physics was clearly demonstrating that the religious traditions of the Far East were entirely valid and completely consistent with the fundamental concepts of physics. (2) All "paranormal" phenomena had a scientific basis, especially provided by very "recent" developments in quantum physics and quantum field theory. Thus, for example, many therapies dismissed as medical quackery could be shown to be able to actually cure patients, because they had a firm basis in quantum physics! In fact, "Quantum Healing" soon became an explicit form of medical quackery, spinning off from this nonsense... and it is totally indeed all nonsense, with no basis in fact.


These ideas came at precisely the wrong time... that is, they were inspired by a completely wrong concept of fundamental physics, usually attributed to Geoffrey Chew. At the time, thousands of "fundamental" particles were being discovered, with hundreds more added each year. No one at the time had any correct notion of how to deal with this situation, including Chew. His idea, called "Nuclear Democracy," was that such particles were not made of anything, had no constituents. The problem was solved by the great theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who came up with the quark model for baryons and mesons. The work of many other great physicists, awarded many Nobel prizes over the years, led directly to the Standard Model of particles and fields, which has been the basis of all further progress in fundamental physics for the past half century! It has met every experimental test with flying colors. The mystical physics gurus were inspired by a wrong and sterile physics idea. But there was still no connection between this wrong idea and any form of mysticism or religion. The world's many Holy Books were written by people who had no idea what happened to the sun at night. They knew (and cared) nothing about how the world might work. Such ancient, multi-authored works do not contain anything recognizable as physics. In fact, religious people today generally consider physics and biology the greatest enemies of any and all religion.



The US population is woefully ignorant of all aspects of science, and especially of physics, a fact that has been lamented at nearly every level of society since 1957. I would shudder to guess at what percent of the population has any factual knowledge of quantum physics, since only junior-level physics majors at large universities ever get a detailed introductory course in that vital topic. But one of the most common tactics of pseudoscience is appeal to ignorance. The pseudoscience advocate can safely assume that his or her intended audience knows nothing factual whatsoever about quantum physics, and can safely misrepresent it in any way convenient for the purpose.  For the same reason, most anything you see on the internet about quantum physics is ignorant nonsense, unless it comes from a university professor of physics, or a researcher at a national laboratory.  Here are some common bits of nonsense:

Like the Bohr model of the atom, this is a holdover from the pre-quantum era, 1900 - 1925. Since quantum physics was established, we have known that the basic descriptive thing for a quantum system is the state function, ψ(r,t), a field defined over all space, which serves to supply a complex number at every point in space. The physical meaning of the state function is that its absolute value is the probability of finding the system at the point r, at time t. There are no classical particles or classical waves in quantum physics. A quantum particle is described always by the appropriate state function, which is the solution to an appropriate dynamical equation. There are also no trajectories in quantum physics, which is inherently non-local. Crackpots like to use this muddled idea to claim that there is no problem when two statements mutually contradict one another... they can both be true!  Nope.


Does "observing" a quantum system cause it to "change"? This idea has nothing to do with physics at all, much less quantum physics. One of the basic facts of quantum physics is that physical systems can be represented as superpositions of states representing the results of all possible measurements. This looks like ψ = ∑i ciψi. Here i stands for a particular possible result of the measurement, for example a specific total energy Ei, and the absolute value of the coefficient ci is the probability that the measurement yields result i. What is a measurement? A measurement couples the quantum system to a measuring device, a detector, which is a classical system which is always in a definite state. This coupling, or interaction, because of the fundamental laws of conservation of momentum, angular momentum and energy, freezes the quantum system in a definite state corresponding to the result of the measurement. In other words, the state function instantaneously over all space changes from ψ to ψi! This is what Einstein didn't like about quantum physics. He called this change a "spooky action at a distance." But it is in fact what actually does happen, and it is an unavoidable consequence of the probabilistic nature of quantum physics.


To illustrate the meaning of measurement in quantum physics, the great physicist (and terrible human being) Erwin Schrodinger invented the famous thought experiment he called "the hellish machine," but is usually called Schrodinger's Cat. Suppose we have a closed box in which a quantum process, with 50 percent probability, in the next 2 minutes, will release a poison gas. We place a cat in the box and seal it. Now we wait 2 minutes. Is the cat in the box still alive, or now dead, or is it in a superposition of dead and alive states, which will not settle down into a state of either dead or alive until we open the box and look?  The point Schrodinger was trying to make is that (1) a classical system can never be in a superposition of states, and (2) the cat is the detector. It is the classical cat system that records the result of the "hellish" experiment. Opening the box just lets us see the detector, which is always in a definite state, before and after the measurement.


Rory Coker in about 1970
A crackpot claim once upon a time found among a couple of physicists is that measurements in quantum physics always must involve a conscious observer. The problem with such a claim is that we have no idea whatsoever what "consciousness" is--- it is not part of physics in any way--- and it is clear that the people who made this claim have never done a real physics experiment. Since the late 1960s, in almost all experiments in nuclear physics, all data are recorded by computers. When the technology and detectors improved, all experiments in all fields of physics were recorded by computers. Accelerators such as the LHC produce such enormous numbers of recorded "events" that no human ever looks at the raw data. Instead computer programs are used to pick out the special and often very rare events the researchers are interested in studying. If you claim computers are all conscious, even the very primitive ones of the late 1960s which were little more than memory systems in which to store data, you have a very confused concept of consciousness.



Another concept used without any contact with reality in pseudoscience is "quantum entanglement." It is actually neither very surprising, nor in any way "supernatural." Imagine you have a favorite pair of socks, unique in some way, with special meaning to you. When going on a fairly extended trip, you always try to make sure these socks are in your suitcase. But suppose on one trip, when you first open your suitcase and unpack, only ONE of the socks is to be found. At that instant, you know that the other sock is still back in your sock drawer at home, no matter how far you have traveled from that home. Before you looked in the suitcase, you assigned the probability that both socks were in the same place to be 100%. The instant you find only one sock, the probability that both socks are together changes to 0%. This is just probability at work. An update of information instantly updates probabilities. In physics experiments two photons are placed in a state where their intrinsic spins are opposite, but as usual in quantum physics, this state is a superposition of (1/2){photon 1 spin up plus photon 2 spin down} and (1/2){photon 1 spin down plus photon 2 spin up}. The instant you measure photon 1's spin and find it to be up, you know the other photon, no matter how far away it is at that time, is spin down. This happens because the essence of quantum physics is probability. Measurements always create information that did not exist in nature before the measurement.  Of course in the sock example, the socks are classical objects and never in a superposition of states, but like the photons they are a correlated pair,  and in the travel situation, observation of one sock instantly gives you new information about the other sock, which is not present, just as in the actual experiments with two correlated photons.

In 2020 less than 40% of the US adult population reported a “great deal” of confidence in scientists. The news media tend to report, not progress in basic fields of science, but rather sensational and obviously wrong speculations by various strange individuals. This is particularly an acute problem in the reporting of advances in physics. The average American has almost no knowledge of physics, other than the near-nonsense that is presented by the mass media. This makes it very difficult for physicists to communicate the basic facts we know about the universe we inhabit, and how it works.





Quantum Mysticism is all mistakes!

MYSTICAL AND BOGUS PHYSICS!

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