A fine rant to keep everyone in line (link posted at the Kitchen by Anand).
Let me tell you a related story. When I was about 16 (1990? I feel so old), I went and joined the Sacred Heart College Library in Tirupattur (a dingy town in Tamilnadu). I was doing +1 at that time in Ramakrishna School (no connection to the Ramakrishna Mission). You are wondering what the hell was I doing in a college library while all my friends were cramming for the exams. I don't know. I needed to get an education and I asked the librarian if it's alright to join. It was alright, apparently. After reading through a whole lot of fiction and many weirdly fascinating adult books (such joyous times!), I chanced upon 'Mysticism and the New Physics' by Michael Talbot. The book is similar to 'The tao of physics' by Fritjof Capra (which I read after a few years while in college). I remember being clearly impressed with both the books. Impressionable I was.
Both authors went to great lengths to draw parallels between modern science and eastern religious ideas. At best mutually helpful connections between science and religion is a romantic notion that hopes to reconcile religion with science. Bluntly put, both books made futile and disingenuous attempts at extracting some meaning out of all the mystic mumbo-jumbo. Unbecoming of science. Very much.
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Dawkins
Another kind of marriage has been alleged between modern physics and Eastern mysticism. The argument goes as follows: Quantum mechanics, that brilliantly successful flagship theory of modern science, is deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Eastern mystics have always been deeply mysterious and hard to understand. Therefore, Eastern mystics must have been talking about quantum theory all along.
Similar mileage is made of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle ("Aren't we all, in a very real sense, uncertain?"), fuzzy logic ("Yes, it's okay for you to be fuzzy, too"), chaos and complexity theory (the butterfly effect, the Platonic, hidden beauty of the Mandelbrot Set--you name it, somebody has mysticized it and turned it into dollars). You can buy any number of books on "quantum healing," not to mention quantum psychology, quantum responsibility, quantum morality, quantum immortality, and quantum theology. I haven't found a book on quantum feminism, quantum financial management, or Afro-quantum theory, but give it time.
The whole dippy business is ably exposed by the physicist Victor Stenger in his book, The Unconscious Quantum, from which the following gem is taken. In a lecture on "Afrocentric healing," the psychiatrist Patricia Newton said that traditional healers "are able to tap that other realm of negative entropy--that superquantum velocity and frequency of electromagnetic energy--and bring them as conduits down to our level. It's not magic. It's not mumbo jumbo. You will see the dawn of the 21st century, the new medical quantum physics really distributing these energies and what they are doing."
Sorry, but mumbo jumbo is precisely what it is. Not African mumbo jumbo but pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo, down to the trademark misuse of the word energy. It is also religion, masquerading as science in a cloying love feast of bogus convergence.