Sal Continues to Get Pummeled

Flavin over at Gateway Skepticism has picked up on my latest response to Sal’s grotesque misapprehensions of quantum theory and developed his own response. He catches a lot of things I didn’t, including taking apart that bizarre, hanging equation Sal reproduced several times prior (to be honest, I didn’t bother looking too closey, since Sal’s reasoning is so fatuous it seemed superfluous). I have some expanded thoughts from my previous post to add to the discussion.

Sal (or rather, those he copied his argument from) is playing the exact same game with quantum mechanics as New Age woo-woos. The latter takes the fact that, yes, the notion of measurement is more fundamental in quantum physics than classical physics, entanglement in quantum systems is stronger than classical correleation, etc., and expands them to mystical claptrap. No matter how many times you explain that entanglement doesn’t provide a plausible basis for ESP or that quantum measurement doesn’t imply that “consciousness creates reality”, the lies get repeated. Sal, on the other hand, is quoting 20 year old sources presenting a picture of quantum theory specifically geared toward justifying preconceived theological notions. It’s the perfect recipe for pseudoscience.

The argument seems to exploit the time-reversibility of quantum systems to state that there must be some external observer providing the “observations” that give us classical bondary conditions. The sheer depths of absurdity this logic inexorably leads to was illustrated by Erwin Schrodinger almost a century ago with his famous cat thought experiment, and nicely summed by Flavin in his piece:

I can only infer from this that Sal thinks before humans were around measuring everything, nothing in the universe is “actualized.” When we’re not looking, everything ceases to be.

In reality, the argument relies on notion of “observation” in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The only problem is that this notion wasn’t a rigorous scientific result, but a mechanismless handwave intended to accomodate experimental data into our experiences. Nowadays we understand the effect of measurement through quantum decoherence. We know, for instance, that building scalable quantum computers is a hurculean task because quantum systems are delicate and extremely prone to “leaking into” classical systems. It’s not simply because we can’t resist looking at them.

I don’t want to be stepping too far outside of my knowledge base here. Blake and Flavin are the physics grad students, I’m a stupid symbol-shifter who hasn’t attained his undergrad credentials yet. I’ll leave the physics to them from here on out.