Physics Today: Letters
Teaching physics mysteries versus pseudoscience
November 2006, page 14
http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-59/iss-11/p14.html?type=PTALERT
Physicists properly join today's arguments involving the teaching of
Darwinian evolution. There is, however, a social issue closer to the
responsibility of physicists: Quantum physics is increasingly invoked
to promote pseudoscience.
Such promotions may start with correct statements of the intriguing
implications of quantum mechanics, move to legitimate hyperbole, and
then go off into complete hype. Take a recent "international hit"
movie as our case in point. It's strangely titled What tHe #$*! Do
w\u03a3 (k)\u03c0ow!? (What the Bleep Do We Know!?) An article in
Time magazine described it as "an odd hybrid of science documentary
and spiritual revelation featuring a Greek chorus of PhDs and mystics
talking about quantum physics."1
Early on, the movie illustrates the uncertainty principle with a
bouncing basketball being in several places at once. There's nothing
wrong with that. It's recognized as pedagogical exaggeration. But the
movie gradually moves to quantum "insights" that lead a woman to toss
away her antidepressant medication, to the quantum channeling of
Ramtha, the 35 000-year-old Atlantis god, and on to even greater
nonsense.
Most laypeople cannot tell where the quantum physics ends and the
quantum nonsense begins, and many are susceptible to being misguided.
According to polls, well over half of the people in the US and
England have significant belief in the reality of supernatural
phenomena. Robert Park states the problem well. "Many people . . .
seek a certainty that science cannot offer. For these people the
unchanging dictates of ancient religious beliefs, or the absolute
assurances of zealots, have a more powerful appeal. Paradoxically,
however, their yearning for certainty is often mixed with a respect
for science. They long to be told that modern science validates the
teachings of some ancient scripture or New Age guru. The purveyors of
pseudoscience have been quick to exploit their ambivalence."2 We
should not underestimate how persuasively physics can be invoked to
buttress mystical notions. We physicists bear some responsibility for
the way our discipline is exploited.
The human implications of quantum mechanics that fuel popular
discussion arise in the measurement problem and in entanglement.
Those terms are at least how we refer to the topics in a physics
class, where we rarely go much beyond their mathematical formulation.
Elsewhere, the same issues are legitimately discussed more broadly in
terms of the nature of reality, universal connectedness, and
consciousness. But we don't distract physics students with excursions
into issues that extend embarrassingly beyond the boundaries we
define for our discipline. Science historian Jed Buchwald notes that
physicists "have long had a special loathing for admitting questions
with the slightest emotional content into their professional work."3
Accordingly, unlike the biology student able to defend evolution
against intelligent design, a physics student may be unable to
convincingly confront unjustified extrapolations of quantum
mechanics.
It's not the student's fault. For the most part, in our teaching of
quantum mechanics we tacitly deny the mysteries physics has
encountered. We hardly mention Niels Bohr's grappling with the
encounter between physics and the observer and John von Neumann's
demonstration that the encounter is, in principle, inevitable. We
largely avoid the still-unresolved issues raised by Albert Einstein,
Erwin Schrödinger, Eugene Wigner, David Bohm, and John Bell. Outside
the classroom, physicists increasingly address these issues and often
go beyond the purely physical. Consciousness, for example, comes up
explicitly in almost all of today's proliferating interpretations of
quantum mechanics, if only to show why physics need not deal with it.
The many-worlds interpretation, for example, is also referred to as
the many-minds interpretation, and a major treatment of decoherence
concludes that an ultimate understanding of the implications of
quantum mechanics would involve a model of consciousness.
The Copenhagen interpretation is, of course, all we need to describe
the world for all practical purposes. And for a physics class,
practical purposes are all that generally matter. But a physics
student confronting someone inclined to take the implications of
quantum mechanics to unjustified places will find Copenhagen's
for-all-practical-purposes treatment an ineffective argument.
We are unable to present students with a "reasonable" picture for
what's going on in the physical world, one that goes beyond merely
practical purposes. But a lecture or two can succinctly expose the
mysteries physics has encountered, reveal the limits of our
understanding, and identify as speculation whatever goes beyond those
limits. Such a presentation is possible even in a physics class for
non-science majors and would enable students to effectively confront
the quantum nonsense. Physics's encounter with the observer and
consciousness can be embarrassing, but that's no reason for
avoidance. The analogy with sex education comes to mind. References
1. D. Cray, Time, 16 August 2004, p. 22.
2. R. Park, Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, Oxford
U. Press, New York (2000), p. 39.
3. J. Glanz, New York Times, 21 May 2002, p. F4.
Fred Kuttner
(fkuttner@ucsc.edu)
Bruce Rosenblum
(brucero@ucsc.edu)
University of California, Santa Cruz
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