The Science (or Lack Thereof) Behind The Secret (Part 2)

Posted by Harmony Rousseau on Apr 3, 2007 in Secret Movie | 0 comments

Continuing with my previous post.

But what about the references to quantum theory and “science”? What about Fred Alan Wolf who claims that “Quantum physics really begins to point to this discovery. It says that you can’t have a Universe without mind entering into it, and that the mind is actually shaping the very thing that is being perceived.”

I’m not sure why Wolf believes you can’t have a Universe without mind entering into it. For most of the earth’s history, there were no humans to think up all sorts of creations. So, in that regard, it certainly seems like yes, you can have a Universe without mind…

In regard to the mind shaping what is being perceived, philosophically, neither you nor I can have the exact same experience. Even if we each undergo the exact same event, you will experience it differently based on all your past experiences up until now than I will – because of my own past experiences. But that doesn’t mean that because I am experiencing it one way that it changes the reality of what just happened.

In other words, we’re not talking about the questions Schrödinger was trying to address in his famous thought experiment. We’re talking about the answers he was trying to get.

If you’re not familiar with the experiment, here’s the quick summary from PhysicsWeb.org.

In his original thought experiment, Schrodinger imagined that a cat is locked in a box, along with a radioactive atom that is connected to a vial containing a deadly poison. If the atom decays, it causes the vial to smash and the cat to be killed. When the box is closed we do not know if the atom has decayed or not, which means that it can be in both the decayed state and the non-decayed state at the same time. Therefore, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time – which clearly does not happen in classical physics.

The problem with equating this to the real world is, as Skeptico explains, that:

Schrödinger’s Cat is a thought experiment only. Thought experiments can be useful to explain a complex idea, or to get people to question assumptions, but a thought experiment cannot by itself prove or disprove anything. To prove or disprove something, you have to perform a real experiment. Schrödinger’s Cat has never actually been performed as a real experiment, and in my view could never even in principle be performed as a real experiment. The reason should be obvious. Schrödinger’s Cat says the cat is both dead and alive until we look at it. But we cannot tell if the cat is dead or alive until we look at it. It’s Catch-22: to perform Schrödinger’s Cat we’d have to look at the experiment without looking at it. Clearly impossible. So it proves nothing.Of course, this also means that Schrödinger’s point wasn’t proven either: since we can’t say for sure that the cat isn’t both dead and alive, we can’t say if Copenhagen is right or wrong. The “consciousness is necessary” interpretation of QM is unfalsifiable.

But just because we can’t perform the experiment to test the claims doesn’t mean that by default, the people in The Secret must be right – or it is even a possibility. This isn’t an either/or argument. As Steve Hansen Smythe explains at eSkeptic

Furthermore, the leap from being able to influence an electron going through one of two slits to being able to influence an entire mail-order universe is unquantifiably vast. Surprising effects that work reliably well at the very small (such as electron tunneling, the foundation of semiconductors) utterly fail to work at the very large (such as BMW tunneling, in which a fully-formed BMW disappears from the factory and appears in your driveway, merely because you asserted that you wanted one).”

read part 1 | read part 3

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