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 wΣ
(k)πow!?
(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.
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