Glenn Bradford <gmbbradford@netscape.net> wrote:
Richard Dawkins, in a Forbes article written three years ago, speaks his
mind on the notion, popularized by Fritjof Capra and others, that the
science of quantum mechanics is converging with religious mysticism.
DAWKINS:
[A] kind of marriage has been alleged between modern physics and
Eastern mysticism. The argument goes as follows: Quantum mechanics, that
brilliantly successful flagship theory of modern science, is deeply mysterious
and hard to understand. Eastern mystics have always been deeply
mysterious and hard to understand. Therefore, Eastern mystics must have
been talking about quantum theory all along.
Similar mileage is made of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle ("Aren't we all,
in a very real sense, uncertain?"), fuzzy logic ("Yes, it's okay for you to be fuzzy,
too"), chaos and complexity theory (the butterfly effect, the Platonic, hidden
beauty of the Mandelbrot Set--you name it, somebody has mysticized it and
turned it into dollars). You can buy any number of books on "quantum
healing," not to mention quantum psychology, quantum responsibility,
quantum morality, quantum immortality, and quantum theology. I haven't
found a book on quantum feminism, quantum financial management, or
Afro-quantum theory, but give it time.
The whole dippy business is ably exposed by the physicist Victor Stenger in
his book, The Unconscious Quantum, from which the following gem is taken.
In a lecture on "Afrocentric healing," the psychiatrist Patricia Newton said that
traditional healers "are able to tap that other realm of negative entropy--that
superquantum velocity and frequency of electromagnetic energy--and bring
them as conduits down to our level. It's not magic. It's not mumbo jumbo. You
will see the dawn of the 21st century, the new medical quantum physics really
distributing these energies and what they are doing."
Sorry, but mumbo jumbo is precisely what it is. Not African mumbo jumbo but
pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo, down to the trademark misuse of the word
energy. It is also religion, masquerading as science in a cloying love
feast of bogus convergence.
--NARGESS:I did not understand if all of these speeches were from Dawkins or not .but anyway I think all of these attempts to join quantum mechanics to Eastern mysticism is resulted from little knowledge of QM and mysticism ,both.It is as an enthusiasm of a person after gaining something to say about a complicated subject.Everything is related to the other by an invisible string ,because sience is the creature of man to understand the work of God.so there is no strangeness if a person mentiones some of these relations of the branches of human's creature.(if U can mention the relation of EPR paradox in QM and THAO RULES in Eastern mysticism I will accept your speeches and become Schrodinger's cat :-)
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