The Woo is a Lie

It's hard to think of a stranger article than the recent piece by Dr. Robert Lanza which appeared in the Huffington Post.

Titled "What are we? New experiments suggest we're not purely physical," this piece might have offered some actual new experiments; instead, we are presented with tired, hackneyed cliches about quantum theory and how this, supposedly, proves the existence of something other than reality. It is quite simply nonsense.

While arguing, "part of us exists outside of the physical world," Dr. Lanza does not offer any real evidence of this. Instead, we're retold old stories about the spookiness of the quantum world, mixed with assurances the scientific community is "trapped in an outdated paradigm." Kuhn references are the last refuge of anti-science scoundrels.

Quantum mechanics is strange and counter-intutive. But simply because phenomenon occur in ways unexpected to our normal experience is not an argument against the nature of reality. Quantum mechanics simply is. Electromagnetic radiation exists both as a wave and as a particle. There is no why. Extrapolating from quantum mechanics to a New Age, woo-ish interpretation of the world goes far beyond what the evidence actually suggests.

Dr. Lanza writes:

The world was once wondrous.

And indeed it still is. Learning science should not reduce one's wonder about the world; rather, it is through science that we develop an appreciation for just how wondrous reality is.

Dr. Lanza philosophizes:

My colleagues tell me we're just the activity of carbon and some proteins; we live awhile and die. And the universe? It too has no meaning. They have it all worked out in the equations -- no need for woo.

Now we see the crux of the matter. If Dr. Lanza wants to argue that we are something other than carbon molecules, the burden of proof is on him to produce evidence for it. Perhaps there is "something else"--we cannot absolutely rule out such a possibility. But science does strongly suggest that there need not be anything else in order to explain the world and the things that live in it. Therefore to argue that some unnamed "new experiments" are producing reality-shattering paradigm shifts about the nature of reality is, quite bluntly, wrong.