As a being whose body contains billions of atoms, I follow certain rules. To go through the front door, you must first open it. If you throw your jacket onto a chair, it will move in the direction and speed you threw it and stay on the chair until you pick it up again. Bouncing a tennis ball in New York cannot affect the movement of a tennis ball in China.
In the quantum world, where physicists study the behavior of individual atoms and their even smaller parts, these laws are do not apply. Particles of matter sometimes behave like waves, pass through solid object. The properties of one atom can be linked to the properties of another even if the two atoms are far apart.
Around the turn of the 20th century, physicists began to understand that the behavior of the tiniest parts of our world could not be explained by the classical laws of physics governing macroscopic solids, gases, liquids, and forces. . Act on them. But as the field has developed, it has taken on another surprising role. It is used as a touchstone in the alternative health and wellness space to justify manifestations, energy healing, and other fringe claims and products. This phenomenon is called “quantum woo,” “quantum mysticism,” or “quantum flapdoodle.” This is both a misappropriation of scientific thinking and a strangely elegant way to explain the psychological forces that drive people to alternative medicine. Many health trends reflect a desire for alternative, contrarian explanations for the inner workings of the human body and mind, what quantum mechanics provides for the inner workings of the physical world. As interest in alternatives spreads,medicine practice and new age beliefsmore people may be at risk of getting caught in a flapdoodle.
Physicist Matthew R. Francis once wrote “Perhaps no other field of science has generated as much nonsense as quantum mechanics.” Quantum bullshit: How to ruin your life with advice from quantum physics. “Just like calling you, dishwasher detergent Quantum, that just sounds cool,” Ferry told me. It’s easy to find a practicing “quantum healer” within a few miles of my home. His YouTube and Instagram accounts offer learning advice. quantum jumping;You can read books about falling quantum love. You can also purchase Quantum for $99 water bottle “Charged” with special healing frequencies or quanta crystal kit It helps “remove any negative vibrations you have picked up.”
In a 2020 episode of the Netflix show goop lab with Gwyneth PaltrowAn energy practitioner named John Amaral told Paltrow that the double-slit experiment, a pillar of quantum mechanics, suggests that “consciousness actually shifts, reshapes, or alters physical reality in some way.” “It shows that we will do it,” he said. What kind of experiment is it actually? demonstrate That is, when a photon is shot through two open slits, it can act as a wave or as a particle, depending on whether it is measured. This finding is puzzling. How does matter behave as waves, and why does recording a photon change its behavior? Physicists still actively working Although they debate how quantum behavior permeates the larger world, they agree that the human body is a solid body and that people do not behave like photons.
Amaral’s comments are typical of quantum woo in that they apply the uncertain state of subatomic particles to people and expect them to behave like photons. “By influencing the frequency of energy in and around your body, you can change your physical reality,” Amaral said. goop lab. in secretIn her best-selling manifesto, Rhonda Byrne referenced quantum physics. Claim That thoughts and emotions are intertwined with outcomes in the outside world. Her explanation has similarities to the quantum theory of entanglement, the idea that pairs of particles can behave in correlated ways even when separated. physics, energy, frequency reference Measurable properties of elementary particles and waves. In New Age and wellness parlance, these terms are more complex and usually refer to something inarguably immeasurable, such as vague thought patterns, life force, or chakras.
The close relationship between quantum physics and mystical thinking has sometimes advanced science. In 1975, two students in the theoretical physics department at Lawrence Berkeley Lab formed the Fundamental Fysiks Group. This group frequently linked quantum mechanics with Eastern mysticism, psychedelic drug experiences, and telepathy. Their explorations into parapsychology failed, including receiving funding from the CIA to test “remote clairvoyance” (in short, whether one person could receive telepathic messages from another). But David Kaiser, a quantum physicist at MIT and author of the book How hippies saved physicstold me that the group’s radical questions about the quantum world and its limits “helped move the broader community, who then started taking some of these questions more seriously than they had before.” . For example, a group’s thought experiment Research on entanglement has led to the “non-copyability theorem,” which states that certain quantum states cannot be copied. This has become especially important for quantum cryptography, which takes advantage of the fact that encrypted messages cannot be copied without being corrupted.
Importantly, the Fundamental Fysiks Group combined Eastern religious or psychic ideas with practical physics know-how and put the concepts to scientific tests. In contrast, the quantum wellness and health industry exhibits a fundamental misunderstanding of what quantum physics is. “Quantum mechanics has a lot of strange and counterintuitive features,” Kaiser says. However, the quantum state is extremely delicate and very different from the state in which humans live. To perform quantum experiments, physicists typically need to place atoms in a vacuum or expose them to temperatures close to absolute zero. “By the time you get to something as large as a few thousand atoms, the pure quantum essence is lost,” Philip Moriarty, a physicist at the University of Nottingham in England, told me. “When you get to something as big as a human being, there is no quantum essence left.”
Quantum mechanics arose because classical physics was unable to fully describe the microscopic universe around us; scientists discovered experimental situations that defied the physics they knew. I did. It suggested that beneath the world of cause, effect, and consistency, secret alternative strategies were hidden in plain sight. Applying that hint of fantasy to the world on a human scale has proven too appealing for the wellness market, and for many consumers, to resist. Deepak Chopra is a popular figure in alternative medicine and “ quantum healingdeclares on his website, “You are a mystery that requires a quantum answer.” Many people’s emotions and bodies actually feel like puzzles that we haven’t been given all the pieces to solve, so it’s hard to believe that the missing bits exist somewhere in the quantum realm. is fascinating.
Adam Aronovich, a medical anthropologist at Spain’s Rovira y Virgili University, said the wellness industry often reflects larger concerns about health, food and environmental safety. There is also a history of using words that sound scientific but are scientifically incomprehensible to maintain legitimacy. Quantum Wellness is no exception. Quantum water purifiers, for example, are appealing “not just because of the quantum mysticism behind them, but because people have real concerns about microplastics,” Aronovich said. “If you have enough money to buy this quantum filter that comes with Deepak Chopra’s stamp of approval, you don’t have to worry about microplastics in your water. Mysterious, magical, agnostic. filter out all the bad stuff.”
A quantum world may exist around us, but humans and our anxieties live in a classical world. Most people are primarily concerned with how to keep their bodies healthy and take care of their emotional states amid social and environmental situations that make it difficult. These issues have macro-scale implications. You cannot rely on a single atom to solve a problem.
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