From cancer cures to the Kama Sutra, the word "quantum" has been comprehensively hijacked. A book by physicist Chris Ferrie explores why and sets out to fight back
QUANTUM threads are said to connect us to the fabric of space-time and serve as a conduit for the universe’s energy. It is enough to make Chris Ferrie, a quantum theorist at the University of Technology Sydney, rage. Firstly, because quantum threads don’t actually exist, and secondly, because they are a clear example of his field of research being hijacked by opportunists keen to attach the word “quantum” to their product.
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| Opportunism might be an inevitable cost of quantum technology Wong Yu Liang/getty images |
Quantum Bullsh*t: How to ruin your life with advice from quantum physics offers readers the same playful exploration that Ferrie’s Newtonian Physics for Babies brought to 3-year-olds – but with much more colourful and less publishable language.
He takes aim at the kind of “profound sounding” quantum nonsense found on websites offering “access to the quantum universe via ‘meditation, hypnosis and credit card transactions'”. This could seem like a turkey shoot, but a few minutes on the internet provides Ferrie with ample justification.
Take the Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface, which claimed to use quantum energy to treat conditions including cancer. Though widely debunked, it is still being sold online. And when Ferrie simply types his job title into a search engine, he receives offers on crystal bibles that catalogue “new generation, high-vibration stones for healing and transformation”.
Ferrie places a moral question mark over articles covering such oddities as “quantum love”, and others that combine particle physics with the Kama Sutra. These turn out to be written by researchers with doctorates.
What elevates Ferrie’s book beyond a mere takedown of quantum quackery is how the author implicates his fellow physicists in some of the quantum BS. From early arguments about superposition to Albert Einstein’s conviction that God doesn’t play dice with the universe, all the way to current arguments over string theory, lack of agreement could explain why so many hawkers have moved in.
“Western culture has a love-hate relationship with science,” Ferrie observes, an ambivalence to progress unless it confirms our biases or saves our lives. Yet upcoming quantum technology must be “built up slowly and carefully through international collaborations of scientists”, he writes.
There may well be no way, explains Ferrie, for this kind of cutting-edge science to avoid opportunism and frankly odd speculation. He recounts how, when the first mechanical clock was invented, people argued about whether the human brain was in fact connected to the body in a cog-like fashion.
Quantum physics, he explains, is particularly attractive to opportunists because it seems to fly in the face of the idea of the universe as a series of interconnected systems – leaving a lot of room for invention.
Ferrie’s own scientific explanations are couched in humour. “I have to listen to you drone on about your yappy little dog and keto diet,” he writes under one set of figures. “So you are going to listen to me about this one tiny math equation for five goddamn seconds.”
He also offers some easy-to-follow explanations of the value of joules, sound wave patterns, Niels Bohr’s correspondence principle and why quantum power definitely isn’t a mystical energy that only a select few can harness.
Readers will emerge infinitely more protected against quantum BS than the many who have only seen or heard glancing references to it on the internet. That said, while Ferrie sticks to his task of debunking and clarifying throughout the book, at one point he asks himself whether it might have been smarter to write a quantum vegan cookbook instead.
Perhaps he would have become richer, and that version of him may well exist in one of the parallel universes outlined in his explanation of the many-worlds interpretation.
In this reality, however, we would do well to follow Ferrie’s advice and stick to more proven examples of quantum technology, such as MRI machines and telescopes that allow us to see deep into the cosmos.
Courtesy:
George Bass is a writer based in Kent, UK.
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