{"id":4946,"date":"2010-08-12T12:55:44","date_gmt":"2010-08-12T12:55:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2010\/08\/12\/crazy-and-dishonest-physics-up\/"},"modified":"2010-08-12T12:55:44","modified_gmt":"2010-08-12T12:55:44","slug":"crazy-and-dishonest-physics-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2010\/08\/12\/crazy-and-dishonest-physics-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Crazy and Dishonest Physics Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

The problem with writing about fake physics<\/a> is that once you start, it’s hard to stop. And there’s always something new and disreputable to find, such as this hideous bit of scammery<\/a>. As I said in How to Teach Physics to Your Dog<\/cite><\/a>, if quantum physics really<\/em> allowed you to amass vast wealth just by wanting it, Dave Wineland’s publications<\/a> wouldn’t need to acknowledge funding from a handful of acronyms– he’d be able to bankroll his own research out of his personal fortune..<\/p>\n

Quantum physics is not<\/em> magic. It allows many things that seem weird and counterintuitive, but those effects are very sharply limited in scope, in ways that are well understood. There is nothing quantum underlying New Age mysticism, and anybody who claims there is is either horribly misinformed or a scam artist. If they ask you to pay money to learn about how quantum physics justifies their New Age nonsense, they’re most likely scam artists, and should be avoided, unless you’re working on either a documentary about flim-flam or a fraud investigation, in which case, go nuts.<\/p>\n

Again, quantum physics is not<\/em> magic. If something sounds too good to be true, it’s almost certainly not true, and adding a few quantum buzzwords doesn’t change that.<\/p>\n

The other big area of physics that is unequivocally true and not magic is Einstein’s relativity, which draws the ire of the folks at Conservapedia. I can never quite decide whether this site is a genuine expression of an unmedicated neurochemical imbalance or an inspired bit of performance art, but they apparently have a page of anti-relativity bullet points<\/a>, having decided that any theory that sort of sounds like “relativism” must be some kind of PC delusion. Happily, Dr. SkySkull has a nice breakdown of why they’re wrong<\/a>, and Tom at Swans on Tea corrects them on the rotation of the Earth<\/a> and catches a blatant distortion about GPS<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is, of course, more mental energy than either the Quantum Cookbook or Conservapedia deserves, but alas, somebody has to warn people off this sort of nonsense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The problem with writing about fake physics is that once you start, it’s hard to stop. And there’s always something new and disreputable to find, such as this hideous bit of scammery. As I said in How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, if quantum physics really allowed you to amass vast wealth just by… Continue reading Crazy and Dishonest Physics Update<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[270,7,141,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kookiness","category-physics","category-relativity","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4946\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}