Just Add Woo

8 Responses to Just Add Woo

1. vasaroti says:

   July 7, 2011 at 10:42 am

   I think the public was already hopelessly confused about subatomic physics due to pop culture like the TV show “Quantum Leap.” Chopra hitched his (Hindu) cart to books like “The Dancing Wu Li Masters” of 1979, which was widely talked about, much less widely read, and still less understood. It will take a lot of good programs like “Through the Wormhole” to separate physics from woo.

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   • Yoav says:

     July 7, 2011 at 12:41 pm

     It may be a case of sampling bias since I only got to watch part of a single episode but what I saw of “Through the Wormhole” had quite a lot of woo.

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2. UrsaMinor says:

   July 7, 2011 at 10:49 am

   “Quantum” is a magical word that means whatever you want it to mean.

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   • Hamish Milne says:

     July 7, 2011 at 1:09 pm

     In physics, a quantum (plural: quanta) is the minimum amount of any physical entity involved in an interaction.

     I’ve heard a lot of stick for quantum mechanics et al recently. I’ve spoken to some people who know about it: as I see it it’s basically that people have observed subatomic particles doing weird things (being in two places at once, jumping around etc.); they want to find out why they do it and see if it can be practically applied. For example: if we can find a way to observe quantum entanglement without it disappearing, we can create an FTL communications system. It’s esoteric, but that doesn’t mean it’s all garbage. And I don’t see any link to ‘psychic’ homoeopathic type stuff.

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     • UrsaMinor says:

       July 7, 2011 at 9:35 pm

       To scientists, ‘quantum’ does of course have a precise meaning. To the other 99.999% of the population (i.e., most of the people who use the word, in practice), it does not.

       The scientist-layman language gap extends well beyond this. For example, to scientists, a ‘theory’ is not a ‘guess’, and data are plural.

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3. Michael says:

   July 7, 2011 at 12:31 pm

   The thing is that even most people who think they know a lot about quantum mechanics really don’t (and what they think they know is usually wrong), and that’s a pretty small percentage of people. It makes total sense that crackpots use fancy-sounding nonsense to attract customers. I wish I could say Chopra was one of the worst there, but he isn’t even close.

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4. arrakis says:

   July 7, 2011 at 4:42 pm

   “You keep using that word…I do not think it means what you think it means.”

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