Most new age interpretations of quantum mechanics by non-physicists are MISinterpretations of it.
Skeptics are not the ones who are behind.
If you know anything about history you will see that we are supposed to be on the other side of the age of reason, in which we use the advanced methods of reasoning (a la the scientific method) to discover the truth and advance our thinking.
The new age and attendant movements are movements backwards into magical and superstitous thinking ... you know, the stuff the age of reason was supposed to be a movement AWAY from?
Praise pseudo-science and muddled thinking if you want, I am sure it feels good, but the thinking of most people who believe in superstition is not critical, rigorous, or advanced. In all reality it's rather primitive.
And just because hearing someone talk about quantum foam makes it SEEM like anything is possible and reality is just an ever shifting set of probabilities tending towards one outcome or another based on our perceptions, that doesn't mean that's what it is. The cat in the box IS either alive or dead. Our perception of it does nothing. The metaphor was intended to help explain our perception of events. It wasn't meant to be taken literally. Keep your wits about you. Quantum mechanics is just describing what we know to be true in new ways. It does not throw common sense out of the window, although it may appear to if you can't manage to keep your head on straight.
Just because we cannot measure location and speed of quantum particles simultaneously does not mean that a quanta does NOT have a location when we measure its speed or that it doesn't have a speed when we measure its location.
Give me a freaking break.
Did you know that a physics professor wrote an often quoted paper that, basically, proposed all the statements about the world that many would like to believe? It is a magical ever shifting morphic field subject to influence by will and yada yada yada. He did it to show how easily people can be made into fools. Its contents were completely erroneous. It was filled with glaring logical errors. But no one but hard scientists saw them, because what he said was pretty.
This essay is STILL being quoted. I wish I had a link to it so I could show you.
But, there you are. Deepak Chopra (his degree is NOT in physics, by the way) and others can talk about quantum mechanics all they want. The thing is, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and taking discoveries out of context can lead to a whole bunch of nonsense.
A lot of so-called support of various new age ideas is just drawing wrong conclusions from good science by pushing ideas outside of their proper contexts. For instance, many use that example of the rotation of one particle being affected by another over great distances to be proof of telepathy. Ummm, ok. The logic is: because it can be seen as analgous, it must be true. And that is NOT proof. It might be poetry, but it's not reason and not science.
Lets take the growing amount of evidence that everything in the universe is connected. The rotation example serves to support that. Some people say, "See! We are all connected, we are all one mind!" Well, that's a hell of a leap. I think we are all connected, more or less, but connected HOW is the question. And the examples from quantum mechanics do not answer that question. As far as I know, they don't know HOW it's all wired together, they just have evidence that it is. Adding the how because something is analogous is, again, not scientific and it's not scientifically proven. Sorry.
DesertSphinx,
Yes. And an example I use to explain a point is not my life.
I am not against planning and having goals. If you read what I have written you'll probably see where I agree that planning and pursuing goals is a good thing.
[This message has been edited by babayada (edited August 25, 2005).]
