Abstract
The mysterious character of quantum mechanics has led to numerous abuses, misinterpretations, speculations and extrapolations, perhaps more than any other scientific theory. It would take an encyclopedia to cover all of them, so we limit ourselves to an overview of some of the interactions between quantum mechanics and our non-scientific culture.
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Notes
- 1.
In our jointly authored book, Fashionable Nonsense [180], Alan Sokal and I explicitly avoided criticizing non-scientists for the nonsense they might have said about quantum mechanics (otherwise the book would have been much longer), precisely because we were aware of the confusion spread by physicists on that topic.
- 2.
However, it should be mentioned that there is at least one famous physicist who mixes up homeopathy, parapsychology, mysticism and quantum mechanics: the Cambridge physics professor Brian Josephson who received the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics, but for work unrelated to pseudo-science (see http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/ for his work). He is usually regarded as a “crank” by other physicists.
- 3.
- 4.
But he also says that all of science is a metaphor, so it is not clear what this admission really means.
- 5.
For a (small) selection of other books written in a similar spirit, see [94, 160, 167, 185, 195, 208]. The Indian “eco-feminist” and anti-GMO activist Vandana Shiva manages to mix up global warming, quantum non-locality and indeterminism, and the butterfly effect (which is purely classical) with traditional ways of thinking in her video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cdFXKDAaQw (after min. 11).
- 6.
This is because the attraction between two bodies depend on their distance (it decreases like the square of the inverse of this distance) and moving my arm changes that distance. Moreover, in Newton’s theory of gravitation, this effect is “in principle” instantaneous, see Appendix 7.A.
- 7.
A poll published in August 2010, conducted with 16 members of the prestigious Collège de France in Paris showed that \(85\%\) thought that one could “reconcile” science and faith, although \(75\%\) of them did not believe in God.
- 8.
Here are a few examples of this “interaction” between science and religion:
There exists a large annual prize (worth $1,100,000), the Templeton prize, that “celebrates no particular faith tradition or notion of God, but rather the quest for progress in humanity’s efforts to comprehend the many and diverse manifestations of the Divine.” (http://www.templetonprize.org/purpose.html). This prize has been given to several scientists interested in “science and religion”, in particular to the physicist Paul Davies (in 1995), who wrote the influential book God and the New Physics [46].
The physicist Frank Tipler wrote books on “The physics of immortality and “of Christianity” [187, 188].
One of the most famous scientists linking science and religion is the English theoretical physicist and Anglican priest John Charlton Polkinghorne. On the back cover of his book, Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship [154], one reads:
Among the many parallels he identifies are patterns of historical development in quantum physics and in Christology; wrestling with perplexities such as quantum interpretation and the problem of evil; and the drive for an overarching view in the Grand Unified Theories of physics and in Trinitarian theology. Both theology and science are propelled by a desire to understand the world through experienced reality, and Polkinghorne explains that their viewpoints are by no means mutually exclusive.
The Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences of Berkeley organized a Conference exploring “the creative interaction among quantum physics, philosophy and theology” [166].
On the Muslim side, one finds for example Islam’s Quantum Question: Reconciling Muslim Tradition and Modern Science [97].
- 9.
Quoted in https://newrepublic.com/article/63388/seeing-and-believing. Actually, the reaction of Anatole France was closer to Hume’s argument against belief in miracles:
Happening to be in Lourdes one month of August, I visited the grotto where countless crutches were hung as evidence of miraculous healing. My companion pointed to these trophies from some infirmary and whispered in my ear:
“A single wooden leg would be much more convincing.”
That makes sense. But philosophically speaking, the wooden leg would be worth no more than a crutch. If a truly scientific spirit were called upon to observe that a man’s amputated leg was suddenly reconstituted in a pool or elsewhere, he would not exclaim: “It’s a miracle!” Rather, he would say: “A single observation suggests that in as yet undetermined circumstances the tissues of a human leg have the property of reconstituting themselves like lobster claws, crayfish legs and certain lizard tails, but much faster.”
Anatole France, [82]
.
- 10.
This is the notion that, if certain physical constants were slightly different from what they are, life would be impossible in our Universe. Hence, the argument goes, those constants must have been fine-tuned by a higher intelligence who was interested in our being able to exist.
- 11.
This comes from a private letter, but we will return to Pauli’s ideas in Sect. 11.7.
- 12.
The ontological argument consists in defining God as a Being endowed with all qualities. Then one argues that existence is a quality and thus that God exists. Others argue that God is the cause of everything or that life, or human life, or consciousness, cannot be explained naturally and thus require a supernatural designer.
- 13.
For example, long before Darwin, the French thinker Denis Diderot answered in the following way the issue of the chicken and the egg:
If you are troubled by the question of whether the egg came before the hen or the hen before the egg, that’s because you assume that animals were originally what they are now. What foolishness! We don’t know any more about what they were than we do about what they’ll become. The imperceptible earthworm which wriggles in the mud is perhaps in the process of developing into a large animal, and an enormous animal, which astonishes us with its size, is perhaps in the process of developing into an earthworm and is perhaps a particular momentary production of this planet
Denis Diderot [59]
The point of this quote is not that Diderot somehow anticipated the theory of evolution (he didn’t get it quite right) but that one can answer the argument from design without knowing the theory of evolution, by simply saying: “we don’t know”, but one can always think of other answers than “God”.
- 14.
One of the participants in the movie, the well-known philosopher of science David Albert, has bitterly complained about the fact that the film-makers have selected parts of his interview in order to misrepresent his views.
- 15.
The Vienna Circle was inspired by the work of the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach. The members of the Vienna Circle included Rudolf Carnap, Philipp Frank, Hans Hahn, Ernest Nagel, Otto Neurath, and, in a similar circle in Berlin, Carl Hempel and Hans Reichenbach. There was some proximity, at least in the minds of the logical positivists, between them and Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, Bertrand Russell, and the early Ludwig Wittgenstein.
- 16.
The historian of science Paul Forman argues in [81] that the hope of a German victory in WWI was based in part on the ingenuity of German science, and that hope was still alive at the beginning of the summer of 1918. When everything collapsed, including the Empire, in the fall of 1918, the shock was unprecedented and its effect on the period after the Great War produced a general anti-scientific climate during the Weimar republic. Forman sees the anti-causal approach in quantum mechanics as an adaptation of scientists to this hostile cultural climate.
- 17.
We will not discuss the ideas and the nuances of these authors in detail, see e.g. Chap. 4 of Fashionable Nonsense [180] for a more detailed discussion.
- 18.
The reader can find examples of that literature in Alan Sokal’s article: “Transgressing the boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity”, and in the references given there [179, 181]. This article was actually a parody of postmodernist nonsense that the American physicist Alan Sokal managed to publish in 1996 in the rather fashionable journal Social Text, but the quotes cited here are authentic. Moreover, the article starts by praising some of the most subjectivist sounding quotes of Bohr and Heisenberg.
Sokal made an analysis of the links between postmodernism and pseudoscience in [181, Chap. 8].
For a critique of the postmodernist use of quantum mechanical antirealist rhetoric by a philosopher who used to be sympathetic to postmodernism, see Norris [133].
- 19.
This book was just a collection of personal notes that Engels never published. They were only published later in the Soviet Union, and sometimes worshipped by Communists.
- 20.
See [146] for a detailed description of the relationship between Bohm and Krishnamurti
- 21.
Clauser’s experience is similar to mine, but in a very different place. See also Gisin’s book [90] for several examples of how, even not so long ago, people who raised questions about the foundations of quantum mechanics were silenced.
- 22.
This subsection is largely based on an article by the historian of science Mara Beller: The Sokal hoax: at whom are we laughing? [16]. We will limit ourselves to examples of extrapolations due to famous physicists, because they are sufficient to illustrate what are the problems with these extrapolations.
- 23.
The reader can find several favorable references to Jungian psychoanalysis in Chaps. 17 and 21 of Pauli’s Writings on Physics and Philosophy [145]. See also [4, 117] for Pauli’s views on religion and “deep psychology”.
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Bricmont, J. (2017). The Cultural Impact of Quantum Mechanics. In: Quantum Sense and Nonsense. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65271-9_11
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