So, I was checking to see that last night's Baby Blogging post had posted properly, when I noticed something unpleasant in the right column:
I recognize that this is the price we pay for being ad-supported, here at ScienceBlogs. It's unreasonable to expect every ad company on the Internet to perfectly screen all their content before serving ads to our blogs, especially given the sheer number of crank ads that are out there.
I am within my rights, however, to call out garbage when I see it. Particularly quantum garbage (though I'm no fan of fly-by-night Internet pseudo-universities, either), so let me take this opportunity: These ads are garbage. The photons and electrons used to transmit them to your eyes would have been better served by carrying pornographic images to closeted religious zealots.
The "Law of Attraction" in all its many variants is a rotting pile of weasel carcasses. It has absolutely no basis in quantum mechanics, no matter how many vocabulary words the authors have managed to pick up by browsing the indexes of physics textbooks. It's trivial to prove that quantum mechanics does not provide the key to "attracting" wealth-- I can do it in one line:
Professional physicists still write grant applications.
If it were possible to "attract" wealth in some quantum manner through wanting things really badly, Dave Wineland wouldn't be acknowledging funding agencies at the end of his papers. The people in the world who know the most about quantum physics want money like you wouldn't believe, and they don't get it by magic. They have to scrimp and save and work for cash just like everybody else.
Whatever you call it-- "The Secret," "The Law of Attraction," "I Bet I Can Make a Million Idiots Send Me a Dollar"-- it's a scam. There is nothing in quantum mechanics that allows you to affect the state of the universe with your mind. You cannot "attract" wealth by wanting money and you cannot "choose" or "jump to" a universe in which you are wealthy, any more than you can turn a department-store mannequin into the perfect partner of your preferred gender by wishing on a star.
There is one and only one easy way to obtain money through quantum wishing, and that is by writing deceptive self-help books peppered with phrases lifted from modern physics books and selling them to the unwary. Which is undeniably effective, but about as socially valuable as running updates of the Spanish Prisoner over email.
Quantum mechanics is not magic. The sooner people learn than and take it to heart, the sooner we can put these scammers to some more productive labor, like digging deep holes and filling them in again.
- Log in to post comments
I think University of Phoenix took out all the ads in attempts to make themselves look like the most intelligent option on the page.
Especially given, if I'm going to jump into another universe, I expect more than simply having money to be the reward.
A great one line proof. You've made my morning.
At a guess (I don't usually see those links because they are far enough to the right that I would have to use the horizontal scroll bar to see them), that first ad is about sex, not money. But the same principle apples. "Big Bang Theory" notwithstanding, most physicists don't find large numbers of beautiful young people of the physicist's preferred gender swooning over them. These advertisers are just counting on a few thousand desperate fools to buy their version of Love Potion Number Nine.
It could be a good thing that these people are advertising on scienceblogs - they'll be wasting their money on a less credulous audience.
Ah, the sweet bliss of AdBlock Plus!
Aha! So that's what's normally in the large, empty rectangle labelled 'advertisements' (and why I love AdBlock).
On the other hand, if you want to read an interesting SF novel about what happens when somebody *does* figure out how to control which eigenstates physical systems collapse into when they are measured, read "Quarantine" by Greg Egan.
Note that the F in SF stands for "Fiction".
But quantum mechanics, like particle physics in general, is a linguistic avoidance to accusations of magical thinking. We name these particles with fancy scientific nomenclature in order to mask the fact that their referents are identical with traditional magical thinking (unseen forces holding things together, unseen objects, gnostic notions that things aren't as they seem, etc.).
NS
The underlying problem is that for too many people, science is equivalent to Clarke's "sufficiently advanced technology"
The issue lies in the fact that many feel that practicing the LOA, which has its basics in quantum physics, spirit, Source, God, or whatever invisible force that the human being cannot even fathom, or you can begin to explain in your column, is a simple practice.
Christ, Buddha, Lao Tzu. Einstein, Edison. The most wise, the most brilliant people in the history of mankind all speak of an Invisible Force that knows all, that performs all, which is beyond the ken of our knowing.
Do you know how electricity works? Neither does any human being. But we use it to our benefit everyday. Nobody fully understands the law of attraction, or exactly how it works, but the people who have invested their LIVES studying it, in whatever form you'd like, do miraculous things which non-believers go out of their way to disprove.
Thought causes all. Whether you believe in Spirit, quantum physics, or the Invisible, thoughts lead to feelings which form an attractive or repelling force. These forces are what is commonly referred to as life, or our human experience.
When I thought it was a bunch of psycho-babble, my life was a game of chance. When I began to study, investigate, and believe in the this stuff, my life became a game of choice. I am not here to convert anybody ;), just state my take on the matter.
Thanks for sharing your insight and have a great day!
Ryan Biddulph
You can see why both uneducated fools and highly educated fools are easily led to believe that Quantum Mechanics is Magic by considering one aspect of Entanglement.
As wikipedia reminds us (neglecting to mention the origin in the writings of Scottish anthropologist Sir James Frazer [1854-1941]):
"The law of contagion is a type of magical thinking that suggests that once two objects have been in contact, they continue to affect each other even when their contact is broken. This law is the basis for the belief in things like voodoo dolls..."
Fine. Now we have two photons that start from the same point in space-time, speed away from each other at the speed of light, circularly polarized in opposite ways. The instant that we measure one's polarization, we know that of the other. Looks like Magic to someone well-versed in the Soft Sciences, who doesn't know enough of the Hard Sciences to realize the trickery in misrepresenting the superficial similarity. "Law of Similarity" being, after all, another rule of Magic...
Do you know how electricity works?
Um, yes.
I'm not licensed to wire a house, or anything like that, but I understand the basic principles by which electricity operates. I have a Ph.D. in physics, after all...
The number of people who understand how electricity works is certainly in the millions, world-wide. Unless you're working from a very different definition of "human being" as the rest of us.
And that reminds me, you need to lose your URL lest somebody click on it via my comments.