So, I was checking to see that last night’s Baby Blogging post had posted properly, when I noticed something unpleasant in the right column:
I recognize that this is the price we pay for being ad-supported, here at ScienceBlogs. It’s unreasonable to expect every ad company on the Internet to perfectly screen all their content before serving ads to our blogs, especially given the sheer number of crank ads that are out there.
I am within my rights, however, to call out garbage when I see it. Particularly quantum garbage (though I’m no fan of fly-by-night Internet pseudo-universities, either), so let me take this opportunity: These ads are garbage. The photons and electrons used to transmit them to your eyes would have been better served by carrying pornographic images to closeted religious zealots.
The “Law of Attraction” in all its many variants is a rotting pile of weasel carcasses. It has absolutely no basis in quantum mechanics, no matter how many vocabulary words the authors have managed to pick up by browsing the indexes of physics textbooks. It’s trivial to prove that quantum mechanics does not provide the key to “attracting” wealth– I can do it in one line:
Professional physicists still write grant applications.
If it were possible to “attract” wealth in some quantum manner through wanting things really badly, Dave Wineland wouldn’t be acknowledging funding agencies at the end of his papers. The people in the world who know the most about quantum physics want money like you wouldn’t believe, and they don’t get it by magic. They have to scrimp and save and work for cash just like everybody else.
Whatever you call it– “The Secret,” “The Law of Attraction,” “I Bet I Can Make a Million Idiots Send Me a Dollar”– it’s a scam. There is nothing in quantum mechanics that allows you to affect the state of the universe with your mind. You cannot “attract” wealth by wanting money and you cannot “choose” or “jump to” a universe in which you are wealthy, any more than you can turn a department-store mannequin into the perfect partner of your preferred gender by wishing on a star.
There is one and only one easy way to obtain money through quantum wishing, and that is by writing deceptive self-help books peppered with phrases lifted from modern physics books and selling them to the unwary. Which is undeniably effective, but about as socially valuable as running updates of the Spanish Prisoner over email.
Quantum mechanics is not magic. The sooner people learn than and take it to heart, the sooner we can put these scammers to some more productive labor, like digging deep holes and filling them in again.