It'd be easier to meditate if this silhouette would stop kicking me in the eye.
When I saw that the Body, Soul, and Spirit Holistic Wellness and Spirituality Expo was coming to Vancouver, I knew I had to clear whatever plans I had for that weekend. The website promised a roller-coaster ride of conspiracy, pseudoscience, and New Agery – from Jesus as a Tibetan quantum wizard to instructions for ascension to the next plane of consciousness, it’s all there. So last Saturday I met up with fellow Simon Fraser University Skeptic Josh Grant and took the plunge into the unknown. We decided to present ourselves as somewhat informed, very curious, and minimally snarky, in hopes of getting as much information as possible.
Due to the sheer amount of material coming out of this expo, I’m splitting it up into a few different posts – in the first installment, I’ll look at some of the wonderful applications of quantum physics, that wonderful branch of modern science that describes how the universe is basically a giant psychic vending machine that takes wishes instead of coins and dispenses huge wads of money and cancer-cures instead of experimental Dorito flavours and expired Snickers bars.
One of the first exhibits I went to was a largish booth with a gaudy red-on-blue display, helpfully searing into my retinas the fact that I could SUPERCHARGE CARS WITH QUANTUM NANOTECH MAGNETS. One of the guys running the exhibit explained to me how they work. When applied to the battery and engine block of a car, the wonder-magnets cause all of the atoms inside (gas, oil, even those tricky electricity atoms) to helpfully line up in single-file, vastly increasing the engine’s efficiency and power.
The car magnet guys also sold these.
“These are the result of years of research into quantum nanotech theory,” he said, handing me a couple to try out. “They work great! In fact, you don’t even have to put them directly on your car – my boss over there can just put the magnets on a picture of your car, and it’ll be supercharged!”
I pulled the magnets apart and let them snap back together. “That’s pretty strong. Neodymium magnets, right? But they have nanoparticles or nanobots in them or something?”
“No, it’s just the structure, the way they’re manufactured. Very specific, precision engineering. Quantum.”
I noticed that a largish chunk had broken off of one of the magnets, and pointed it out. He shrugged. “Eh, it should still work fine.”
Moving on, I came to a booth advertising Scalar Quantum Pendants. These are basically the forbidden love-child of Masuru Emoto and Nikola Tesla, and serve all kinds of different functions: they protect the body from electromagnetic radiation, cure all known diseases, and “improve cell permeability.”
The last one caught me off-guard. “Isn’t increasing the permeability of all your cell membranes kind of dangerous? It’s a very fine biological balance…”
This pendant is a quantity without direction.
“Oh no, of course not,” said the woman attending the booth. “These can only have positive effects. They just improve the balance of your system. Most people aren’t balanced anyway, if they’re not wearing one of these.”
She went on to demonstrate the efficacy of the pendant via applied kinesiology – I would hold my arm out and she would try to push it down, and it would be easier to do so if I had something “bad” going on, like holding a cell phone, not wearing the pendant, or professing my undying love for Adolf Hitler. (I’m pretty sure she just pushed harder on my arm then. At one point she audibly grunted and complained that I was resisting too hard.)
Much later, while Josh was getting his fortune told by a tarot reader, I wandered into a booth advertising quantum DNA reprogramming. The woman running the place was very nice, with the smile of an aid worker unloading a truck full of rice in the midst of an African famine, and gladly took time to explain the process. In essence she intuitively senses her client’s needs, talks it over with them, and when ready, psychically reprograms their DNA accordingly.
“I aborted a fetus with it once,” she chirped, the beatific smile still on her face.
“Wh– you performed an abortion with quantum DNA reprogramming?”
“Right. Well, not a fetus. Really just a, uh, germinating cell.”
“That sounds safer than a regular abortion.”
“It is!”
I later asked her if she went down to the molecular level and changed, say, thymine to guanine. She frowned for a second. “I don’t know what any of that is.”
Quantum was in the air at the Body, Soul, and Spirit Expo. There were many more quantum-based services being offered – a lot of them were along the lines of the ones I’ve described here, while others stuck fairly close to The Secret and related mythology about the “Law of Attraction” – think positively and the universe will give you whatever you want, because of quantum.
But there are some common threads. In no case was there an actual explanation of quantum physics – no Feynman diagrams, no investigation of electron spin or hybrid orbitals. Rather than a quantifiable mathematical concept, quantum is a winsome universal force that can be courted and appeased with the proper charms, prayers, and sacrifices, like a pagan deity or a pixie that lives in the forest.
Others, with better blogs, have said that applying the word “quantum” to something gives it a scientific sheen. While that’s true to some extent, I think it’s important to note the word also carries with it an air of magic and mysticism. The one thing that everybody knows about quantum is that it somehow involves uncertainty. This gives the whole quantum-pseudoscience industry a paradoxical feel. True, uncertainty is the oldest justification in the book for trying alternative medicine: how do you know this doesn’t work? Well, you don’t know for certain… so why not try it out, anyway? It also helps to drive people to seek out alternative ways of figuring out the world – one could infer that science, unable to find a fully deterministic way of explaining the universe, has failed, and that we must turn to mysticism to discover the hidden order behind things (this, of course, neglects the possibility that there is no hidden order – that what looks random is just that).
But while uncertainty may drive people to adopt a pseudoscientific view of quantum physics, it is quickly resolved – there’s little tolerance for “I don’t know.” Rather than random happenings governed by the laws of probability, in this philosophy quantum events are determined by our own thoughts – we can make a waveform collapse just-so by thinking the right thoughts at it, and in doing so bend the universe to our will. If we clap hard enough, we can bring Tinkerbell back to life. That’s how awesome we are.
I think that this dichotomy between uncertainty and surety, between predestination and agency, between being in control and being controlled, between revering the self as a near-omnipotent god and imagining humanity to be essentially helpless, carried through history by forces beyond our control and destined to meet a particular end in a few years’ time, is at the heart of much of the conflict in the sub-subculture exemplified by this expo.
I’ll probably get into this more in later posts, but for now I’ll leave you with a picture of another exhibit at the expo – a feminine hygiene product that involves negative ions somehow. It has nothing to do with quantum, but you should see how much blue liquid one of those things can suck up.
Seriously!
Tags: alternative medicine, new age, pseudoscience, quantum
Mike,
reading your post was the most fun I’ve had on a Friday morning in a long time. Have a great time in United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
- Jeez, they really got to shorten that down some.
Be well.