When Quantum Goes Woo

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Hello, I'm Robin Entz.

And I'm Brian Cox.

And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio.

Enjoy it.

Hello, I'm Robin Inks.

And I'm Brian Cox.

And today we're going to be talking about quantum theory.

Quantum theory is one of the foundations of modern physics, a collection of theoretical ideas and techniques dating back over a century that provides the most accurate description we have of the natural world with the exception of gravitational interactions, obviously.

It is also, however, arguably the most misunderstood area of modern science, a gateway to pseudoscience, and to quote one of our panelists today, a theory which has had reams of drivel penned in its name.

In today's programme, we will be asking why this is the case.

What is it about quantum mechanics that makes it such a useful vehicle for woo merchants, snake hole sales, men and women, and new age healers?

Now, today's show is going to be very difficult for me and the panel because, due to the time Monkey Cage is broadcast, we're unable to respond in language strong enough to represent our true feelings about the misunderstanding and misuse of quantum theory.

So, we've decided to introduce some code words which we can use to indicate our anger or indignation without causing offence.

The code words are daisy flattener,

nose tingler,

merlin's bucket.

Now, in order to demonstrate their use, I'll read a quote from a non-mainstream practitioner of quantum theory, and Robin will respond according to the guidelines.

Our bodies ultimately are fields of information, intelligence, and energy.

Quantum healing involves a shift in the fields of energy information.

Gotta say, that sounds to me like a bit of a daisy flattener.

Now, interestingly, our producer said, Can you say it sounds to you like, because I don't want to get in any legal problems?

So, the idea that we might be taken to court for, and they accused me of my work being daisy-flattening, is a court case I was looking forward to.

Here's another real one.

If a quantum field holds us all together in its invisible web, we have to rethink our definitions of ourselves and how we interact with every facet of our lives.

I would have thought that's a nose tingler.

A field full of nose tinglers.

And one last one.

Although relativistic quantum field theories are built with causality in mind, the way causality plays out at the level of the particle dynamics is not so clear.

That is the biggest Merlin's bucket of them all.

It is, except it's taken from the abstract of a paper that I wrote with one of our panellists.

But you've got to admit, would you believe that?

So,

to help us through this fog of superpositions, we have three panelists, and they are.

My name's Ben Goldacre.

I'm an NHS doctor and an academic, and I write books about science like Bad Science and the recent facetiously titled I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That.

And my favorite form of bamboozlement is people who pretend for elaborate magical reasons that their fabulous intervention cannot, for some special reason, be tested in a randomized controlled trial.

I'm Jeff Fawchaw.

I'm a professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester, and I've written a book called The Quantum Universe with Brian.

I hate bamboozling people at parties, means I explained something in a particularly rubbish way.

My favorite fancy idea, though, is the idea that we can trace the evolution of the universe starting from a time when all of the matter in the visible universe was compressed to something about the size of a beach ball, and we can use our understanding of the universe at that time to predict the way the galaxies are scattered across the sky.

Still haven't got that first 10 to the minus 37 of a second on yet, have you?

Lazy?

That's where the woo merchants live.

Well, the woo lives in the first 10 to the minus 37.

That is where the Merlin's bucket lies.

Hello, my name is Sarah Pascoe.

I'm a comedian, but I got a double B at Science G CSE.

And yeah, so I'm meant to be here.

And I'm currently writing my first book, which is about a woman's body.

And I've been accused of quackery myself because I'm talking a lot on stage at the moment about sperm

and how basically men have got two kinds of sperm, kamikaze and egg getters.

And kamikaze is like 99%, and it's blockers and fighters.

And so I'm really fun at parties at the moment.

And this is our panel.

Ben, as the member of the panel who's probably been involved most in kind of investigating different medical and scientific claims, what would you define woo as?

Because someone I was arguing with says, oh, so anything that's unproof science is woo.

Now, I wouldn't say that that was woo necessarily.

What for you is woo?

I think it's about the reasons why people are doing it.

So it's the either deliberate or at best incompetent use of sciencey-sounding language or the appearance of science, wearing a white coat, using professional titles like professor or doctor or qualifications in order to give an appearance of being sciencey, in order to sell a product or a potion or a special healing system.

And what do you think it is about the ideas of quantum theory that are so alluring sometimes in that world of selling what may well be charlatanism and bamboozlement?

So, I think a lot of it is about the fact that it's if you want your quack idea to survive, it has to have various characteristics.

It has to be relatively resistant to debunking.

And so, in my experience of having to write about these things, I mean, I did it every week for The Guardian for a decade, you end up having arguments with lawyers where they're going, Well, how can we really be sure that this stuff that they're saying really is nonsense and can you talk me through it?

And when somebody's used a lot of science-y-sounding language in a superficially plausible way, it's actually quite difficult to talk a lawyer around.

And then, also, worse than that, they'll say, Oh, well, you know, with Reynolds' defence, we have to give them right of reply.

So, you'd write what your best effort to give a clear explanation of why what they're saying is wrong, and unpicking their misuse of scientific terminology.

And then you're obliged by the libel laws to allow them to give you a paragraph of Daisy Flattener that you then have to put at the end.

And then you feel kind of that you don't you can't let that lie, and then you're caught in this endless circle of, well, I'm gonna have to explain why that's rubbish.

And then, so I think it's a survival strategy for creating a kind of hassle barrier to make it difficult for you to tear their ideas apart.

So, in a sense, it's that the perceived difficulty of the theory itself

allows a lot of wriggle room.

But but also, I think there's something very attractive about quantum terminology because it allows you to take I mean the recurring theme seems to be that people take quite banal observations.

Like there was a video that you sent round and in this video that Robin sent round, she's sort of saying, Oh,

we're all entangled, we're all socially connected, and we're all entangled together.

And that's a lot like quantum entanglement.

And it's almost as if, I think,

obviously, nobody's going to give you any money just for making the completely fatuous and obvious observation that we're all socially connected.

And if you want to make that proprietary and owned, and saleable, and special and unique, then you have to bolt on some nonsense.

And I think that's where the appeal of quantum stuff comes from.

It's a way of making banal, superficial observations somehow

more than just themselves.

Well, because that's why I don't know if you saw it as well.

Yeah, so which is a lot we say is very nice.

It's a nice, you know, we need to work together, we're all in this together.

But the problem could be that science is using words, and words is how we make stories.

That's the building block for fun narratives and mermaids and fairies and this great stuff.

And so because science is using them, we can then put them together in other ways, however, we want.

And maybe you guys should just use symbols all the time.

So, I was thinking

quantum could be like a fish's tail, and mechanics could be a wrench, and there's the pictures, and then we can't take that anymore and make better stories.

We see, yeah, if you'd kept it all just to your equations, which we haven't got a gift.

Yeah, we can't do that.

I mean, I read the easy guide to quantum mechanics, but the moment I actually get to now, like, oh no, this is just I become so.

If you'd kept it as your own little language of equations, everything would be fine.

Well, I should say, Jeff, I mean, so can you define, just so we know what we're speaking about, quantum mechanics in about a minute or so, what actually is,

it's a set of rules.

So, as far as we can tell, everything in the universe is made up of particles,

and it's a set of rules that explain how those particles hop around.

And it's a very simple set of rules.

It uh it usurped Newton's ideas on how the basic building blocks of the universe operated, largely in order that it should explain how atoms work, which it did with wonderful success.

And it's totally outrageous affront to common sense, which is why it attracts all of this stuff.

Because

it paints a picture of the world which is almost magical, which is why it's wonderful.

These particles behave exactly as if a single particle can be in more than one place at the same time.

And we have to keep track of all the possible things that a particle or a bunch of particles could possibly do.

We have to keep track of them all, and then keeping track of each possibility gives rise to a number.

We add the numbers up in the end, and that gives us the probability of a certain outcome in an experiment.

So, the output of quantum mechanics is probabilities of outcomes in experiments, and the way we do it is by thinking about the world in these remarkable ways.

I was just going to ask about the Sarah was saying, one of the things that with scientific language, I, as a non-scientist, which I've made patently clear over 11 series of this now,

I will hear a a beautiful idea of science and then not notice sometimes that it's connected to something that may well actually be nonsense.

That once we hear, once we start to be bamboozled by language,

there was another clip that I looked at over the weekend, people sent me a lot of stuff and it was someone talking about homeopathy.

And she started off, she said, well, you think if we take all the mass in the universe, it turns out once you take out all the empty spaces in it, all the mass just takes up the space of, I think it was a bowling ball.

And Einstein, of course, came up with an equation E equals m c squared.

But as you you realize in fact mass is so tiny perhaps we can ignore mass so really you could just say E equals C squared.

That was when I first became suspicious.

So

but you're still the mathematicians in the audience might notice the error there.

E equals m c squared, m is very small so we can ignore it and say e equals c squared.

Yeah.

See that's what I wonder about because are the math you know mathematicians and scientists who come up with things like constants, are they always trying to come up with a big one?

Like Planck, was he really embarrassed when he went, oh my constant's really small?

It's just 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0.62.

Abigadro's got a huge one.

A rump.

Yeah, might as well take mine out.

You said earlier about when you start explaining quantum theory, and you use this term, like it's almost magical, it's counterintuitive, it's strange, there are strange concepts.

Actually, one of the letters we got from a listener says it provocatively, I'm suggesting that by constantly proclaiming that anything that can happen will happen, which is the subtitle of a well-known book on quantum physics that we wrote, it allows quacks to use this as a catch-all justification for improbable science.

The senses, and I know I've received some of this criticism when we talk about quantum theory, because the ideas are odd, it's thought that we are, by trying to explain the theory in language rather than symbols, enabling quackery.

Well, that's nonsense.

I mean, it is like everything that can happen does happen.

It's that wonderful.

We can't be responsible for people then just making stuff up, which is what.

But I suppose then that a plausible response from the

what's the word that isn't libelous that you could use instead of quack?

I don't know.

Anyway, these people, they may wish to misrepresent that and say, well, okay, therefore, my consciousness is somehow connected to the consciousness of someone because we're all made of particles, aren't we?

And they're quantum things and they all seem to be interconnected, and so therefore we're all interconnected.

Do we have a responsibility to try and prevent people from doing that, or is it our responsibility just to talk about this?

Well, we've got a responsibility probably to explain carefully when we write a book like that how it is that we understand words like that.

How do we come to make conclusions that the world behaves in this very strange way?

And perhaps also explain just how difficult it is to secure knowledge and how easy it is to be wrong.

I I tell my PhD students, Before you show me anything, just assume that what you've written is total rubbish.

Just start with that in mind and try and convince me otherwise, because I'm going to assume that.

And that completely changes the way that you

that's very much how we work in the arts, isn't it, Sarah?

But I suppose that's the obvious thing.

It's so difficult to get anything right.

That's the

that it's very, very easy to make things up, but so tremendously hard to sit down.

Similar to what Ben was saying about the framework within which ideas are difficult to challenge is almost a, I suppose, a meaningless framework or an unhelpful framework in a sense.

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that defines quackery is

avoiding critical scrutiny of your ideas.

And I think that's the spirit in which people are often deploying this kind of language, is to create a barrier to understanding.

It's to deliberately make themselves unintelligible and difficult to understand in order to make themselves seem like they're better and more powerful than you.

And actually, that's kind of the exact opposite of what I, for example, would try to do as a doctor.

When I'm seeing somebody and explaining their medication to them or their diagnosis, I'm going out of my way to make it as understandable as possible and to try and undermine and take away any kind of inherent power imbalance that may be a product of class or fear or anxiety.

And I think what quacks do is exactly the opposite of that.

They use language deliberately to confuse rather than to explicate.

Is it really deliberate?

Because I think being very outside this and actually much more dispassionate than all of you about just about this, not in general in life.

I'm proper fun, but I mean, I don't, this this isn't anywhere near my heart, so I just think it's really interesting.

So, being where I am, it looks to me like lots of people believe what they're selling or they're saying, and sometimes they've misunderstood something, or they've taken energy to mean whatever they want it to mean, and then they're regurgitating language.

But they all seem very good-hearted, it just seems like they're coming from a different angle.

From my position, probably like most people, absolutely knowing nothing about science, you just have to pick a side, really.

So, I've never seen any dinosaur fossils, but I think probably evolution is the best story.

And it's similar with this: if a person has a choice between you guys and someone else with crystals, they're just picking because they're not doing any of the investigation.

Isn't the thing about the picking of the sides, though?

You can still then check, say, the bibliography, you can still check how much, how deep you can go into.

So, I mean, I'm always interested again this weekend, people sent me so many links to various bizarre things, which really ruined the entire 48 hours.

And

the number of, you know, where I would watch, and I think, is this constantly a victory of cognitive dissonance?

Where you will see someone, for instance, talking about quantum behavior, and then they'll say, when they're challenged, they'll go, well, of course, I mean that as a metaphor.

And then they immediately slip back into saying, actually, I do mean that as real physics.

Oh, no, no, that's a metaphor.

And it's that bit of, I think you've talked about this, Ben,

the hassle factor, this thing of where you watch someone and you think, oh my god, they changed the terminology so many times.

I am now lost.

But if you find the science confusing, that is what all of it is.

So, I think that's a really important and interesting question, actually.

Is

when they are speaking

using terminology inconsistently and coming out with what just sounds like burble,

do they really think that that's what we do for a living when we write scientific papers?

Like, do they really, really think that we're just kind of going, oh, confounding variables, prime factors, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

Can I have a PhD, please?

Well, I always think that's when they're designing aircraft.

You know, they really think the aircraft design is going with wings and

freedom cubic.

And I suspect they probably don't.

I think they probably know that there is a kind of subjective qualia of making sense to yourself, right?

There is something that it is like to

know what you're talking about.

And I think they must know that that's not

their

lived subjective conscious experience.

Like it's really difficult to get yourself into the head of somebody who appears to be using language in a completely inconsistent and verbally way.

Well, that's the power of, I think,

self-belief, believing you're right, and the instincts is that what sounds to you like a circular argument or a massive jump, or funny, like a lot of the stuff that we've been reading for this is hilarious if you know what they're getting wrong.

I think they believe it.

Everything I read seemed like someone who's entirely convinced.

I think what stops me being particularly generous is having had to deal with libel threats from people like this

where they get quite cross and not very generous, but also they are

notably unwilling to engage in a kind of serious discussion of the evidence for the claims that they've made.

So they'll leap immediately to

personal smears, they'll leap immediately to using the law to try and shut you up, to very to basically different forms of shut up.

And actually I think that this quantum terminology is being used effectively as just another way of saying, shut up, don't challenge me.

I know you don't, leave me alone.

Yeah, I think this is a similar thing.

I think that a large number of these people are very sincere.

I think that it's a kind of seduction that

trap that people fall into.

I mean, I fall into it when I like my ideas to be right, and I don't like being wrong, but I'm wrong nearly all the time.

So when

it's a case of

really interrogating and trying to be honest with yourself, fight that massive bias that you think you know something.

So, you think you know something, you've got a theory about the world.

That's a tremendously seductive position, especially when it gives meaning to your life.

And so, I think a lot of these people are swept away by that.

I think it's all human beings.

The mind creates a model very early in life about how things work.

It's like when people are brought up very religious, and then what happens is anyone who's trying to absolutely sweep away that belief, you see as an enemy, which I think is why you're you're experiencing so much aggression.

What I've enjoyed reading about recently is all these experiments they've done really cruelly with things like kittens.

They put kittens in their cage where they only showed them horizontal bars until they were six, so they're grown-up cats, and then they put in

horizontal ones and they all walked into the bars because they couldn't see them because it doesn't make sense to their world.

And I think, really similarly, if you believe in energy working in a certain way and you've used the language that you've learned, anyone who disagrees with you you think is part of some conspiracy because they don't they see you as the man, like trying to stop them getting to the real truth, the real spiritual happiness that we could all just have.

And what's so great about scientists is you have had to train yourself all the time with your minds not to ever let yourself go, I just feel this is right, I just know it's this.

Whereas everyone else, we function like that, I think.

So, I think it's worth interrogating why we find these people so spectacularly irritating.

And I think part of that is obviously that they are adopting our clothes and our terminology and trying to borrow authority that we kind of feel that we don't even particularly want to have, because science is actually quite anti-authority.

But

I wonder if it's also because

their projection of what they seem to think we are like feels so offensive.

Because what they seem to think we're like is

people who deliberately obfuscate, people who deliberately attempt to appear authoritative or

threatening or hierarchical, wear white coats, constantly refer to ourselves as professors, as Brian Cox does.

But maybe what we really dislike is that they're giving us an incredibly ugly reflection of ourselves, which we are adamant that we are not.

But is it also the case that, and Carl Sagan often made this case very strongly, particularly in the demon-haunted world, is science as a candle in the dark.

The idea that because we live in a society that's based on science, and particularly in your field of medicine,

respecting evidence and

society supporting evidence-based treatment, supporting vaccination programmes, etc., etc., these things are very important.

And so it's more than just it hurts scientists' feelings to have these people out there.

The more that it becomes acceptable to say, well, there are alternative ways of looking at reality.

So, whilst you, as a doctor, may say this is the best treatment, my guru over here says this.

That actually can be dangerous and can indeed undermine public health programmes.

I think that's right, but I think not so much locally.

So I think I'm not particularly upset or worried that individual people might be harmed because they go and get their cancer treated by some quantum energy guru.

I mean,

harm might be done, but I'm almost willing to see that as a kind of consent issue or

Darwinian.

Exactly, yeah, sort of sadistic.

Yeah,

voluntary, self-administered tax on scientific ignorance with the price of death.

But I think some game show, isn't it?

But I think what's actually more worrying is that when

the value of science and evidence and evidence-based practice, whether it's in medicine or social policy, is undermined by people saying, well, actually, it doesn't really matter if you do evidence-based practice properly or not.

You can just make up these flowery-sounding words.

I think that's really corrosive because that undermines all of our efforts to try and get more evidence-based practice in medicine, in social policy, in education, in crime, everywhere.

And that's, I think, what the real danger is.

Not that some idiots go to talk to some other idiots and exchange cash.

Well, that's what I want to ask.

Because sometimes when you say woo merchants, etc., we may well have very specific ideas of these kind of gurus.

But I mean, some things that I've read as well, in terms of in general practice, et cetera, you know, for a lot of the 20th century, a lot of the things that we would have received from

people that we would consider to be the experts, from doctors, even within mainstream medicine.

Are there still, you know, were there areas and are there still areas of woo there?

Oh, definitely.

I mean, you know, I think that so, firstly, we weren't actually very good at evidence-based practice in medicine until fairly recently.

So, we didn't need to be very good at trials in the era of medicine when what we had either worked or didn't work, sort of very dramatic, life-saving things.

And we didn't have to be very good at evidence-based practice in the days when nobody really had anything much that worked.

So, in the time when homeopathy became very popular, for example, a lot of what mainstream doctors did was actively quite harmful, like bloodletting.

And actually, there are some, there's like, there's like, I think there's a cholera outbreak where people treated in the homeopathic hospital do better than people treated by the medics for the simple fact that at least they were only handing out sugar pills.

And so,

I think historically, we've been quite bad at evidence-based practice, even now.

You know, I write all the time about about the shortcomings in evidence-based medicine, how we've failed to implement the noble principles of evidence-based practice.

But the difference is, at least, we have these noble principles that we are attempting to manifest in our daily practice, whereas quacks don't.

Jeff, I think one of the problems, to get back to quantum theory, is that it's a theory that has

interpretations.

For example, so it's an unusual theory in the what it what it means

it you know it makes predictions that agree with experiment, but the meaning of the theory that there's the Copenhagen interpretation, the many worlds interpretation.

So the impression is that there's space there for debate, and it's space into which the

quacks

can move.

That's a that's right.

That's true.

Um and it but it is true that we

that there is a

we don't know we certainly don't know what really is going on in the quantum world.

We can't say that it's definitely the case that this particle is both here and there.

Is it here in one universe, there in another, and there are all these extra universes?

Or is this just a bootkeeping device for some phenomenon that we can't conceive, that we don't really understand?

You know, we're trying to shoehorn a picture of the universe into something which is just not doesn't fit in our heads.

And And the theory itself, in large part, doesn't require, doesn't demand that we do that.

It says, look, you just do what these rules say, and you will get the answers to your experiments.

But

there is something called the measurement problem, which sits at the heart of quantum mechanics and which is unsolved.

And that

is

more or less interesting, depending on your position, but it I think most people would accept that it's a problem, right?

And so that we don't have a complete theory of quantum physics.

That idea is has been invoked by really reputable physicists, people like Roger Penrose, in order to talk about quantum phenomena and the

and the emergence of consciousness.

So it's it's not completely it's not very easy to dismiss that as a as a statement that you know this this is quackery.

There's a bit of quantum mechanics that we don't understand,

and it may be an interesting area of research that could lead to

insight into

it's speculative research, extremely speculative research.

In the spirit of your one-minute introductions, can you give a one-minute summary of the measurement problem?

Well, I'll try.

How many people know what unitary evolution is?

That would speed things up a little bit.

We have a theory which essentially says that a system that we're attempting to describe is described by something called a wave function.

It's a mathematical function that describes a system.

It could be anything.

It could be a single particle, it could be a bunch of particles.

And we have an equation called the Schrodinger equation which essentially tells us how to check how that wave function changes as a function of time.

And then we when we carry out an experiment, we use that wave function to tell us the likelihood of getting a particular result.

But after we've got the result of the experiment, the universe has changed completely.

It is now the state that was characterized by the measurement that we just made.

And then everything starts again.

And the question is, what happened?

What happened

when you came in and did the measurement to change the world so that the subsequent evolution in your world is in accord?

Because before that, anything could have happened.

The outcome of your measurement at your experiment could have been one of many possibilities.

But after you've performed the experiment, you've got one particular outcome.

And

it's that issue which is not understood.

So you can see that

well, this is how this is how

you get people, these sort of quantum gurus, say things like, Well, therefore, because I can look at the world and change it, I can look at my cancer and remove it, so I can I can think my way into a different state of being.

This is the sort of thing that

you're all confused for electrons, which is that, you know, I don't know this, right?

But you know, when we see the behavior, the double-slit experiment, probably one of the most famous experiments in terms of showing, you know, something behaving as a wave and a particle.

And

if you don't see, you will know these incredible things where they go.

And when I'm observed, it appears that the particle goes through both slits, neither slits, individual of this kind.

Now, if I'm left in a room with two doors and a screen at the back, right, if you're not observing me,

I presume that I don't then behave like a wave until observed, when you then see me splattered against the screen at the end.

Right, I don't know, though.

That's what I'm saying.

Because a lot of what I see in the when I see synchronicity is going, because electrons behave like that, all matter in the universe has got electrons in it, therefore, there is electron behavior in everything, and therefore the way we view the world is the same way that we might view an electron in a double-slit experiment.

Well, I mean, it's obviously nonsense, isn't it?

You walk through one door or the other.

I might not, I might be playing a trick.

In any given universe, you walk through one door or the other.

The possibility that in one universe you might walk through one, and in another universe, you might walk through the other, is something which is conceivable.

That the many worlds interpretation would have that

as a possibility.

The fact that it subsequently down the line might affect the results of an experiment, the fact that you did both, is just even in the many worlds picture, statistically,

so highly improbable as to make no difference.

But

when one electron goes

in one, let's use the language of the many worlds, goes through one door, one slit,

and the other one in two separate universes, then the actual probability of us making a measurement of where the electron's gone, and if we keep repeating it,

it's as if the calculation was as if it went through both, and we had to remember both possibilities in order to compute the way that electrons hit that screen.

See, now the way you said that, now, if I was making a film like what the bleep do we know, I would go and, as Jeff's shown, they're full ghosts.

You know, it's it, but what's interesting, I think, is that

they tend to leap between different explanatory levels.

So, you'll get quantum entanglement described, for example.

And then

there's a paper written by a homeopath, published in a homeopathic journal, which amazingly doesn't just have one letter in a very blank,

in which they try to say that

what happens in the relationship between a homeopath and their patient is quantum entanglement because they have a relationship and they're kind of entangled in that relationship because they've talked to each other.

And it's this very clumsy redeployment of language from the level of particles up to the level of social interaction that

I think feels to me as if it's not even trying very hard

to manifest itself as quantum theory.

Well, I was going to, Sarah, throw something at you, which is, as we were saying, we're both non-scientists, therefore, when this is from

a book which deals, amongst other things, with quantum healing.

And I'll ask you, first of all, this is about people who have had sometimes when an occasional spontaneous remission of cancer occurs.

And the reason for this is such patients apparently jump to a new level of consciousness that prohibits the existence of cancer.

This is a quantum jump from one level of functioning to a higher level.

Now, when you first hear that,

I just wondered what you know, what is your initial reaction?

Well, first of all, I was cured of cancer, thank you for that.

And I think this is the thing, right, with not knowing certain things and how uncomfortable that feels.

So, for most people, if you get very sick or somebody that you know and you care about gets very sick, that is as senseless as anything.

Lots of things that happen in the world, we can't fit into making any sense.

How is this fair?

And then, when something com even more unexplainable, like that going away when your doctor or many doctors told you that it wouldn't,

I can understand again, I'm just trying to be empathetic.

If you're living in a grey area, it doesn't make you an idiot, it doesn't make you stupid, it makes you leave you're feeling with emotions and then you're finding explanations or picking anything that makes sense.

That to somebody will make more sense than we don't understand why your cancer went away.

One of the things that I find is most often misunderstood about science is that research scientists certainly operate on the edge of the known and the unknown, on the dividing line between the two.

That's the point.

That's why you do research science.

So being comfortable and delighted with not knowing is perhaps not a natural state, as Sarah said there.

But you want a narrative, you want explanations.

I was

that very same same thought came

when Sarah was speaking.

I really

like to be, it's a very important thing for me to be in a position where I don't know things.

So

being on that precipice,

because it gives me an opportunity to

learn something.

And that sense of embracing

ignorance and a lack of knowledge and really liking it, really wanting to be there.

I wonder where that came from, because I'm sure that wasn't like that when I was a six-year-old boy.

I'm sure I thought I knew everything when I was a six-year-old, and probably certainly as a teenager.

And I think it's come about having done lots of physics, so having kind of been gone into physics and seen how it works, and then seeing that there is a type of knowledge which you can secure with hard work and and seeing how it how it delivers big ideas like quantum physics that have completely changed my world.

It c My perspective on the world has been transformed by it.

And I don't want, having secured that kind of certain knowledge, to maybe this is perfect answer to what Ben was saying as well, about it just terrifies me, the concept of peddling or embracing ideas that are wildly speculative.

And

I'd rather just assume everything is wrong and

enjoy the knowledge that I can secure.

Certainty, there's a very famous passage in Bronofsky's Descent of Man, where he says that science is the most human of disciplines because it's the only discipline that acknowledges its own fallibility.

In fact, it celebrates its own fallibility.

And perhaps that is the difference.

What Sarah was saying about

the fact that

it's easy to characterise science as being rather sterile and rather

inhuman in a sense, whereas the other ways of looking at things are a bit more human.

Well, in fact, what I think Bronowski was absolutely right, that in fact acknowledging your fallibility and saying that these are the things that we don't know, therefore we will say nothing about them, but we will do research, is actually the more human response.

Well, and that and actively welcoming criticism.

I mean, you know, the QA after a work in progress seminar or a conference presentation is often a bloodbath, but it's all consensual, and in general, people don't take it personally.

It's a kind of consenting intellectual SM activity, and

we know that it's good for our soul, and we welcome it, and we want it because we know that that's how we will purify our ideas.

I think beyond your ideal picture of what scientific knowledge and discovery looks like, there's also the kind of dirty reality.

And I can't help thinking when I listen to you talking about quantum theory, for example, Jeff,

I glaze over a little bit, I can catch some of it.

I don't fully get it, but I trust that you're right.

And I think it's quite an unusual form of trust that I have for you.

So I know that there are social structures and systems in science that catch when people are wrong and call them them out.

So, for a start, I know that if you were ridiculously wrong, or if the theories that you're describing were ridiculously wrong, then there would be an extensive literature demonstrating that they are wrong.

I think also it's a bit like

I can see that you operate in the same epistemological frameworks that I do, where ideas are shot down.

But also, I'm aware that there are things which I trust on the grounds that I once understood them but can no longer remember them.

So I'm not sure that this is holding together, but so I use logistic regression, for example, in my work as an epidemiologist.

And

to do that, really nowadays, I just type in the command in stata, the stats package that runs some logistic regression on some data.

There have been two occasions in my life when, for about 36 hours, I feel like I've had a pretty good understanding of likelihood theory, which is the principles underlying logistic regression.

I definitely couldn't explain it to you now.

I have no recollection now of how likelihood theory worked, but I remember what it was like to have a fairly kind of vertical, deep understanding of it.

And I trust, therefore, that it's not complete rubbish, because I put a lot of effort in on two separate occasions, forgot it both times, two separate occasions to fully get it.

And so I trust that.

And in the same way that I trust myself in retrospect, looking back at that effort and the subjective sense of the light bulb going on that I had then, I kind of trust that you have that sense yourself, and so I'm willing to sort of project that trust over onto you.

Have you ever been logistically regressed into a past life?

Well, that's the thing, isn't it?

I mean, that's exactly like what quantum entanglement people, what the quiets would do when they use quantum entanglement to describe a relationship rather than

past.

My trust in other scientists comes from,

and I often ask this when I'm doing like PhD exams.

So, what did you do to demonstrate this is wrong?

How much have you tried to break what you've done?

So,

I trust that professional scientists have spent a lot of time, and I expect the answer to that to be, oh, yeah, we tried everything,

it just won't be wrong.

It's stood up to, and then there will be list, a long list of tests that they performed, which

verify the

and if you have a similar conversation with somebody who pushes kind of quantum woo or bamboozlement,

you'll often find that their answer to the question, what have you done to check if you're right or wrong?

Their answer will be, well, I'm very, very open-minded.

And that feels a little bit superficially like it's the same thing.

But actually, in science,

we start off by being open-minded to the possibility that we're wrong, but then we start doing some very specific stuff to try and show that we're wrong.

We don't just keep our minds so open that our brains fall out.

Healings.

I've got a close relative who's ill, and he's been undergoing healing for a long time, and to the point that now he has a guru and

he can travel out of his body, he goes into space, he sees things, he understands things, and that is a really real experience to him.

So we could all argue against him for the rest of our lives and the rest of his life, and he would still think these people are

enlightened by what I've seen, by where I've been, because I was open-minded.

Quite recently, I had dinner with him and his family, and he said, and it's probably one of my favorite things anyone's ever said, and he said that his guru works with David Icke.

And the thing is, if David Icke wasn't right, why is everyone always trying to say that he's wrong?

And that's beautiful.

Like, why is everyone always trying to disprove him if he's not onto something, if they're not covering up?

And this is the beautiful way that the human mind works.

And this is why, in a way,

you have to find fun in disagreeing with people rather than anger.

And I guess you guys have to take the moral high ground with that.

What I loved, I read again, like the cat study, they did cat scans actually on people's brains and they gave them a list of

exactly the same of positives and negatives about their favorite politician.

This is in America.

And then they scanned the brain and they found and then asked, so it was exactly an equal amount of criticisms and nice things about their favoured politician.

And asked them afterwards, was that a positive or negative list?

And they all said positive, like virtually every, because we ignore what we don't want to see, and that's how non-scientists work all the time.

That's how we create the world.

Do you think, Sarah, that there is a problem here?

Do you think we're here on Monkey Cage that scientists lined up going?

It's terrible, these people who are misrepresenting our science.

Do you think that there's a problem?

You've outlined, in a sense, that there may be benefits if you've got a terminal illness, let's say, and it makes you feel better.

Is there a problem then?

I think what's so important is allowing, and it's difficult because you're a scientist and this isn't what you need to allow, so it's not me.

I mean, as people,

that other people choose what works for them.

And that doesn't mean that you don't guys don't set out all of the facts as clearly as you can, because that gives people the option all the time, and that's the fairest and best thing you can do.

Do you need to argue with them?

Do you guys need to go and stand outside with placards outside a homeopathic clinic?

No.

Well, actually, I mean,

what I think is actually quite gracious about most of the quack-busting activity in the UK, at any rate, is that for the most part it's about principles rather than people.

And actually,

I'm not a consumer journalist.

Like, I don't want to stop people going to see quacks.

I'm actually not bothered by that.

I find it more interesting than I do dangerous.

And I think it's really interesting because the fact that people buy into this stuff, spend money on it, but also spend time and invest emotional energy in it, is really interesting because it tells us a lot about the role of science and medicine in culture and the challenges that we have to meet in explaining medicine better.

But I don't think I actually want to stop people doing it because I kind of find it more interesting than dreadful.

There's also a lot of books in it.

If they stop doing it, that's the end of your book career, isn't it?

Good season.

This is not going to be a good idea.

I've got other fish to fry.

So we asked the audience a question as well.

Particles can be entangled with each other.

We are made of particles, therefore, we must be entangled with each other.

So, who would you like to have a three-legged race with and why?

Please show working out.

So, what have we got?

Kylie Minogue, because she called me her mini-me.

What?

Someone said that?

How small must someone be to be the mini-me of Kylie Minogue?

Schrodinger's cat, we'd be at the beginning and the end at the same time, as long as no one looked.

The Emily J, the surfer, Laird Hamilton, he'd always be ahead when the waveform collapses.

I felt that deserved more, but it's been a long recording.

Angelina Jolie, why worry about winning the race?

Saucy.

Don't you say that?

Oh, yeah, Brian Cox, because his hair is so perfect, he could never become entangled, but it's so loose as well.

He'd go through.

He had his old hair stolen at Christmas.

Anyway, so the...

He's decided.

Robbie's now decided that I have a wig.

I think it is.

It's a really wig.

Because your face is very smooth.

Because there was a quote that we saw, which was all about...

in, I think, one of the books about.

What is it?

There's a book which is all about

using quantum to defy aging.

And I thought, what a load of rubbish.

Then I looked at you and I thought, he does look young, doesn't he?

And it's where he works.

That's his area, isn't it?

So, thank you very much to our guests, Sarah Pascoe, Jeff Forshaw, and Ben Goldacre.

Next week, we are discussing what's the point of plants.

I know, but I don't know where we came up with that subject.

Let's get rid of the plants, says Radio 4.

Angry caps, lock emails arrive.

Thank you very much for listening and goodbye.

In the infinite monkey cage.

Till now nice again.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be hosted.

Winner, best store.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.