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Monday, September 1, 2014

Misguided uses of term quantum

The humor site Cracked has The 5 Most Misguided Uses of the Word 'Quantum' in Ads
Humanity's greatest minds know that no one fully understands quantum mechanics. Our worst minds took that as an excuse. Idiots scrabble to use quantum terms like they're living on a triple-word score, thinking that the words alone will make all their points for them. ...

#1. Deepak Chopra's Quantum Consciousness

Deepak Chopra believes that consciousness transcends reality, but you should still give him real money. He combines pseudoscience and pseudoreligion to create an alloy of assholery capable of supporting his tidal waves of bullshit. If a self-help book and a science textbook got merged in a transporter accident, it would sound like Deepak Chopra's theories on quantum consciousness. And he would still claim that the spiritual aspects were more responsible for what had happened. ...

One classic quote: "Consciousness may exist in photons, which seem to be the carrier of all information in the universe." ...

Luckily, true science is immune to such assholery. Quantum mechanics is humanity's greatest scientific achievement. It's the victory of the scientific method, revealing intellectual truths that contradict all our conceptions of common sense, because common sense was created to help a couple of meters of pork substitute have sex as often as possible and really doesn't apply to the fundamental laws of reality.
I would have listed quantum communications, cryptography, teleportation, computers, cat states, many worlds, and nonlocality.

Chopra seems like just a buffoon who parrots the goofy stuff that real physicists say. Here is his latest idea:
What forces such a radical change is reality itself, which science is obliged to follow. Reality has led us to the point where reductionism, a “bottom up” approach that seeks to build reality up from its smallest constituents, must give way to holism, a “top down” approach that accepts an undeniable fact: Reality is one thing. Up to now, reductionism has been successful in disguising the dualism that is threatening to become a fatal flaw. There is no credible bridge between classical and quantum physics, brain and mind, physiology and psychology. In effect, the march of science through theory and technology has yet to explain how atoms and molecules took the leap that produced human experience, our mental participation in the reality science is trying to explain. Science has relegated personal experience to the sidelines and at times even rejected that consciousness is a valid subject of study. The reason is obvious, because the scientific quest has been for objective findings, not subjective impressions. The split between objective and subjective lies at the bottom of every other duality. But without a top down, holistic framework, there will never be an adequate explanation of reality. The two big questions facing science (What is the universe made of? What is the biological basis of consciousness?) needs to be reframed. What’s at stake is actually “What is existence?” and “How is existence known?”
We do not even have a good definition of consciousness.

Here is a recent Dilbert cartoon on use of buzzwords.

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