Wednesday, April 22, 2009

New Religions!


Quantum Theology and Quantum Spirituality!


Something hinted at by the great fraud Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (Transcendental Meditation inventor, parasite of Beatles fame) is now becoming more widespread. The book review for "Quantum gods don't deserve your faith" by Amanda Gefter on New Scientist Opinions is revealing.

Maharishi claimed that transcendental meditation gave practitioners access to the "quantum field of cosmic consciousness". This, he said, was identical to SU(5), the model physicists were then investigating in their search for a grand unified theory. Sadly for cosmic consciousness, real experiments later falsified SU(5).

As for the notion of creating our own reality, this relies on brains in some sense operating quantum mechanically - and there is no evidence for this. As Stenger says, the scales of distance involved in brain processing are more than a thousand times too large for quantum effects to necessarily come into play. Likewise, physicist Max Tegmark has shown that the timescales of events in the brain are 10 or more orders of magnitude longer than the timescales of "decoherence", the process by which quantum effects "leak" out of the quantum system.


Let's get real! Let's not grab any new idea and flex it into our needs for imaginary food without some verification or validation...

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