Funny actually. I just read
this story in the NY Times science section the other day entitled "Far Out, Man. But Is It Quantum Physics?" This crap seems to be just the kind of drivel they were talking about.
Physicists have been at war for the last century trying to explain how it is that the fog of quantum possibilities prescribed by mathematical theory can condense into one concrete actuality, what physicists call "collapsing the wavefunction." Half a century ago the physicist and Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wigner ventured that consciousness was the key to this mysterious process.
When it comes to physics, people seem to need to kid themselves. There is a presumption, Dr. Albert said, that if you look deeply enough you will find "some reaffirmation of your own centrality to the world, a reaffirmation of your ability to take control of your own destiny." We want to know that God loves us, that we are the pinnacle of evolution.
But one of the most valuable aspects of science, he said, is precisely the way it resists that temptation to find the answer we want. That is the test that quantum mysticism flunks, and on some level we all flunk.
Interestingly, religious interests always seem anxious to reward mysticism in science. Dr. John D Barrow, admittedly an excellent mathematician, but much less of an actual physicist, has just won the richest religious prize in the world, the $1.4 million
Templeton Prize that he will receive in Buckingham Palace on May 3.
Barrow is co-author of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle that is a thought-provoking consideration of all the seemingly improbable mathematical coincidences of the physical world and a book widely hailed (or criticized) by science philosophers as 'scientific mysticism' at its most mathematically elegant.
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