Skeptic: Viewing the World with a Rational Eye by Michael Shermer

Author:Michael Shermer [Shermer, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781627791397
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2016-01-12T05:00:00+00:00

42

Quantum Quackery

A surprise-hit film has renewed interest in applying quantum mechanics to consciousness, spirituality, and human potential

In spring 2004, I appeared on KATU-TV’s AM Northwest in Portland, Oregon, 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 and created a cult following.

The film’s avatars are New Age scientists whose jargon-laden sound bites amount to little more than what Caltech physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann once described as “quantum flapdoodle.” University of Oregon quantum physicist Amit Goswami, for example, says, “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 twenty-story building and consciously choose the experience of passing safely through the ground’s tendencies.

The work of Japanese researcher Masura Emoto, author of The Message of Water, is featured to show how thoughts change the structure of ice crystals—beautiful crystals form in a glass of water with the word “love” taped to it, whereas playing Elvis’s “Heartbreak Hotel” causes a crystal to split into two. Would his “Burnin’ Love” boil water?

The film’s nadir is an interview with “Ramtha,” a thirty-five-thousand-year-old spirit channeled by a fifty-eight-year-old woman named J. Z. Knight. I wondered where humans spoke English with an Indian accent thirty-five thousand years ago. Many of the films’ producers, writers, and actors are members of Ramtha’s “School of Enlightenment,” where New Age pabulum is dispensed in costly weekend retreats.

The attempt to link the weirdness of the quantum world (such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which states that the more precisely you know a particle’s position, the less precisely you know its speed, and vice versa) to mysteries of the macro world (such as consciousness) is not new. The best candidate to link the two comes from physicist Roger Penrose and physician Stuart Hameroff, whose theory of quantum consciousness has generated much heat but little light in scientific circles.

Inside our neurons are tiny hollow microtubules that act like structural scaffolding. The conjecture (and that’s all it is) is that something inside the microtubules may initiate a wave function collapse that leads to the quantum coherence of atoms, causing neurotransmitters to be released into the synapses between neurons and thus triggering them to fire in a uniform pattern, thereby creating thought and consciousness. Since a wave function collapse can only come about when an atom is “observed” (i.e., affected in any way by something else), neuroscientist Sir John Eccles, another proponent of the idea, even suggests that “mind” may be the observer in a recursive loop from atoms to molecules to neurons to thought to consciousness to mind to atoms.…

In reality, the gap between subatomic quantum effects and large-scale macro systems is too large to bridge.

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