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CHAPTER 10
Beware of Evil Squirrels:
Misuses of Quantum Physics
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I’m putting seed in the squirrelproof bird feeder when I hear a little voice above my head. “Pssst! Oi, human!”
There’s a squirrel perched on the branch of a tree, staring at me. I look around, but Emmy is on the far side of the garden, intently sniffing the base of the big oak tree. “What do you want?” I ask.
“How about you give me some of that seed?”
“I don’t think—what’s with your face? Is that a goatee?”
“It’s a fake. We wear ’em to confuse the dog—she thinks we’re from another dimension. Look, how about selling me some birdseed, then?”
“What’s a squirrel going to use to buy birdseed?”
“How does free energy sound, hmm?” Somehow, despite the fake goatee, fuzzy tail, and protruding teeth, he manages to look smug.
“Free energy?”
“Yes, we can tell you how to extract a nearly infinite amount of energy from ordinary water. That ought to be worth some birdseed, eh?”
“Really. Free energy.”
“You bet. We extract the zero-point vibrational energy from water molecules, leaving them in a lower energy state than ordinary molecules. You can turn that energy directly into electricity, and use it to power lights, or computers, or birdseed-making machines.” Looking closely, I see that the fake goatee is obviously held on by string.
“Sounds too good to be true. What’s the catch? Toxic waste products?”
“No, no—the only waste is still water. In fact, it’s better than water. It’s superwater!”
“What’s so super about it?”
“Well, it’s in a different quantum state, right? So it’s got, like, special properties and stuff. You can drink it, and it’ll cure diseases.”
“How does that work?”
“Well, you drink it, and concentrate on measuring your wavefunction to be in a healthy state. If you do it right, you can think your way to perfect health.”
“You don’t say.”
“Yes, we run some workshops and classes and stuff. I’m a hundred and six, and in perfect health. For just a handful of birdseed a week, we’ll let you in on the secret.”
“Really?” The dog is still on the far side of the garden, carefully checking the bushes for rabbits.
“You can also use it to power a quantum computer, but that’ll cost more than birdseed. For a jar of peanut butter a week, you can have the schematics of a quantum computer that you can use to crack the encryption on credit card transactions.”
“Crikey.”
“I know. Pretty cool, eh?”
“The dog was right. You are evil squirrels.”
“As if you wouldn’t do it if you knew how. So, how ’bout that birdseed?”
“Okay, I’ll give you some birdseed …” I put a little pile of seed down on the ground, about six feet from the trunk of the tree.
“Thanks, mate,” says the squirrel, scampering down the trunk. “You’re a star.”
“Don’t mention it,” I say, stepping between the squirrel and the tree. “Emmy!” Across the yard, her head snaps around. “Look! Evil squirrel!”
“Ooooh!” She comes charging across the yard, teeth bared. The squirrel tries to run back up the tree, but I block his path, so he turns and flees toward the maple trees at the back of the garden, with the dog snapping at his tail.
I spot something in the grass, and bend down to retrieve a tiny fake goatee. I drop it in the bin on my way back into the house.
In the preceding chapters, we have talked about a lot of weird and wonderful features of quantum mechanics. Wave-particle duality, quantum measurement, EPR correlations, virtual particles—so many aspects of quantum theory defy our everyday experience that quantum mechanics starts to seem like magic. None of the normal rules seem to apply, and it may look as though absolutely anything is possible.
This is a common misconception regarding quantum mechanics, and you’ll find it repeated in lots of places. A little time with Google will turn up dozens of sites offering “quantum” methods to produce energy for nothing, improve your health and well-being, or even amass wealth and power: lots of people out there are making money by peddling quantum mechanics as magic.
Quantum mechanics is not magic, though. No matter how unlikely or amazing it seems, quantum mechanics is a scientific theory that has to conform to the general principles of physics. The word “quantum” in the description of a phenomenon or device does not allow it to create energy out of nothing or send messages faster than the speed of light. These principles are built into the deep structure of the universe. Quantum mechanics is not only compatible with those rules, but in some cases, these rules arise from quantum behavior.
While many of the predictions of quantum mechanics seem to defy our everyday intuition for how the world works, they do not suspend all the rules of common sense. In particular, they do not supersede the most important commonsense rule for dealing with the world: if something sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is.
We’ve spent the bulk of this book talking about the wonderful features of quantum theory, but I want to close on a cautionary note. There are a lot of people peddling a false version of quantum mechanics as magic, offering results beyond your most wildly unrealistic dreams. Some of them are con artists, and some of them are sincere but deluded, but they’re all wrong. The conmen are hard to separate from the merely confused, but it is not difficult to spot false versions of quantum theory, and in this chapter, I’ll point out a few of the most common problems.
A “QUANTUM” FREE LUNCH: FREE ENERGY
One of the two main areas worked by con artists abusing quantum theory is the field of “free energy.” Free energy fraudsters always claim to have developed a scheme that will produce huge amounts of energy for a trivial amount of work. This takes lots of different forms, but the basic appeal is always the same: you put a small amount of work in, and get a large amount of electricity out. All it will take is a small investment of cash to get the prototype system working, and soon you’ll be out from under the thumb of the power company forever …
This is nothing more than a claim to have invented a perpetual motion machine, and scientists have known for hundreds of years that perpetual motion machines are impossible. Quantum mechanics does not change that conclusion.
The most common fake explanation for a “quantum” perpetual motion machine is that it is tapping the zero-point energy of some system or another. This zero-point energy is the energy that quantum physics tells us is present even in a system in its lowest possible energy state. When you’ve extracted all the energy that you can from a quantum system—reduced the kinetic energy to its lowest possible value and removed outside interactions that would raise the potential energy—there is still some residual energy left in the system.
Con artists like to point to this zero-point energy as a resource to be tapped. “There’s still energy there,” they say, “and our device taps that energy to keep the perpetual motion machine moving.”
We saw in chapter 2 (page 52), though, that zero-point energy exists because matter is fundamentally wavelike, and quantum particles must always have some wavelength. For the energy of a system to truly be zero, it would have to be perfectly still at a specific position, and that is impossible for any system described by a wave. Zero-point energy, like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, is a consequence of the fundamental wave nature of matter. Just as there is no way to evade the limits imposed by uncertainty, there is no way to extract the zero-point energy to do useful work. Trying to use the zero-point energy is like asking for half a photon—it’s a request that makes no sense.
Probably the most successful proponent of free energy via bogus quantum theory to date is a company called Black Light Power. Bob Park of the University of Maryland and the American Physical Society has spent nearly twenty years debunking the claims of the company’s founder, Randell Mills, which is well covered in Park’s book Voodoo Science: The Path from Foolishness to Fraud (Oxford, 2000). Despite Park’s efforts, though, Black Light Power is still around, peddling a remarkable energy-generating process in which (according to their website) “energy is released as the electrons of hydrogen atoms are induced by a catalyst to transition to lower-energy levels (i.e., drop to lower base orbits around each atom’s nucleus) corresponding to fractional quantum numbers.” These mysterious lower-energy hydrogen atoms, called “hydrinos,” are claimed to have all sorts of magical properties, supposedly enabling new high-voltage batteries and miraculous light sources (none of which are available yet, but they’re promised any day now).
This sounds impressively science-y, but even a dog can tell that it’s nonsense. Hydrogen is the simplest atom in the universe, consisting of a single proton orbited by a single electron. The first quantum model of hydrogen was put forward by Niels Bohr in 1913, and a full quantum treatment was developed using the Schrödinger equation in the 1920s. Quantum electrodynamics was first applied to hydrogen in 1947, and modern QED models of hydrogen agree with experimental results to the same phenomenal precision as the measurements of the electron g-factor. The hydrogen atom is one of the best understood and most precisely tested systems in the universe.
Modern physics leaves no room for states “below the ground state” in hydrogen. For such states to exist, our understanding of fundamental physics would need to be so far wrong that it would be impossible to achieve the fourteen-decimal-place agreement between experiment and theory that we see with QED.
Another commonly cited source of “quantum” free energy is the “vacuum energy.” This is just a variant of the zero-point energy scheme that purports to tap the zero-point energy of empty space—the constantly appearing and disappearing sea of virtual particles that QED shows must exist.
“Vacuum energy” schemes are no more possible than “hydrino” power. Empty space does contain energy in the form of virtual particles, but those particles appear at random, and disappear again in a tiny fraction of a second. We have no way of making electrons appear on demand, nor do we have any way of making them stick around to do useful work. Vacuum energy exerts a small but real influence on electrons and other particles, but it is not an energy resource that can be tapped.
Any claim of perpetual motion or “free energy” is essentially a claim that you can get something for nothing. Any dog knows, deep down, that that’s not possible—you don’t get treats without doing some sort of a trick. Throwing the word “quantum” around doesn’t change that basic fact: you can’t get something from nothing. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something.
“I thought you said virtual particles did become real, as in Hawking radiation?”
“Sort of. The idea is that an electron and a positron can appear right at the edge of a black hole, in such a way that one of them falls into the black hole, while the other escapes.”
“Right, so electrons are created out of nothing!”
“Wrong. When a virtual electron becomes real through the Hawking process, the black hole actually loses a bit of mass, to make up for it. The energy to make the real electron doesn’t come from the vacuum energy, it comes from the black hole, which gets whittled away to nothing, one virtual particle at a time.”
“So, I suppose it’s not much use as a power source, then?”
“No, not really. Even assuming you could contain and control a black hole, it would be consumed through the power generation process, just like anything else. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
“Yes there is. You never charge me for lunch. Or breakfast, or dinner, or snacks …”
“You earn your food by protecting the house from evil squirrels! Speaking of which …”
MEASURING YOUR WAY TO HEALTH: “QUANTUM HEALING”
The other main source of misused quantum mechanics is “alternative” medicine. Bookshops and the Internet abound with people pitching quantum mechanics as the key to health, wealth, and long life.
The most common form of these claims involves quantum measurement. Fraudsters note that in quantum theory states aren’t determined until they are measured. They then claim that the key to health is simply to measure yourself as healthy. You can live forever, in this line of thinking, by running a quantum Zeno effect experiment on yourself—if you’re always measuring yourself to be in fine health, quantum measurement will see to it that you never get sick.
The best example of this line of quantum quackery is Deepak Chopra, who even has a book titled Quantum Healing (Bantam, 1990), the first of a string of bestselling alternative medicine books. What is “quantum healing,” you ask? Chopra offers a one-paragraph explanation in a 1995 interview:
Quantum healing is healing the bodymind from a quantum level. That means from a level which is not manifest at a sensory level. Our bodies ultimately are fields of information, intelligence and energy. Quantum healing involves a shift in the fields of energy information, so as to bring about a correction in an idea that has gone wrong. So quantum healing involves healing one mode of consciousness, mind, to bring about changes in another mode of consciousness, body.*
He uses a lot of scientific-sounding terms, but this is just word salad. It has all the scientific validity of the technobabble on old episodes of Star Trek—all he’s missing is a call to “reverse the polarity” of something.
He expands on these ideas in Ageless Body, Timeless Mind (Harmony, 1994) whose subtitle promises a “Quantum Alternative to Getting Old.” His explanation of the physical basis of his ideas shows an impressive ignorance of history, boldly declaring that “Einstein taught us that the physical body, like all material objects, is an illusion, and trying to manipulate it can be like grasping the shadow and missing the substance” (p. 10). This is almost exactly the opposite of Einstein’s view, as we saw in chapter 7. Einstein was profoundly disturbed by the idea of quantum indeterminacy, which Chopra takes to an entirely new level, arguing that nothing actually exists:
Because there are no absolute quantities in the material world, it is false to say that there even is an independent world “out there.” The world is a reflection of the sensory apparatus that registers it … All that is really “out there” is raw, unformed data waiting to be interpreted by you, the perceiver. You take “a radically ambiguous flowing quantum soup” as physicists call it,* and use your senses to congeal the soup into the solid three-dimensional world. [p. 11]
While he acknowledges that this descent into solipsism may sound “disturbing,” perhaps because congealed soup sounds unappealing, he sees this as a feature, not a drawback, writing that “there is incredible liberation in realizing that you can change your world—including your body—simply by changing your perception.” (pp. 11–12) In other words, since nothing really exists, you might as well be healthy, wealthy, and youthful. It’s all just a matter of “perception,” which is to say, measurement.
The idea of “quantum healing,” using the active nature of quantum measurement to ensure good health, suffers from two major problems. The first problem is that Chopra and other authors are applying quantum ideas to systems that are far too large to show quantum effects. As we’ve seen again and again throughout this book, quantum effects are extremely difficult to tease out, and the larger the system being studied, the harder it is to see quantum effects. The largest object ever seen in a quantum superposition state is a collection of about a billion electrons (see chapter 4, page 101), while the quantum Zeno effect (chapter 5) has only been demonstrated with single particles.
The bigger problem, though, is that quantum measurements are fundamentally random. The state of a quantum system is indeterminate until a measurement is made, and the specific outcome of an individual measurement cannot be predicted. It doesn’t matter whether you subscribe to a Copenhagen-like interpretation in which the wavefunction collapses to a single value, or a many-worlds-like interpretation in which you simply perceive a single branch of an ever-expanding wavefunction, or even Chopra’s congealed soup interpretation: there is no way to know in advance how a given quantum measurement will turn out.
There may very well be a branch of the wavefunction of the universe in which every dog enjoys perfect health and an infinite supply of fat, slow rabbits, but there is no way to influence measurement outcomes to reach that universe. Meditation doesn’t help, positive thinking won’t get the job done, drugs don’t do any good—there is no known way to influence the quantum structure of the universe to generate a particular outcome of a quantum measurement, and no scientific study has ever detected a hint of one. If it were possible to achieve great things simply by wanting them badly enough, physicists would have a much easier time demonstrating quantum effects,* and dogs would never lack for steak, cheese, and rabbits.
Meditation may lower your stress level, and thinking positive thoughts may improve your mood, and either of those things may make you feel better about your lot in life and thus help you find the energy to catch that rabbit. There’s nothing quantum about that, though, and you’re not tapping into the deep structure of the universe in any meaningful way.
“You’re right about the meditation thing. Meditating really helps me lower my stress level.”
“Since when do you meditate?”
“Since always. I have Buddha nature. I like to meditate in the sun in the garden.”
“That’s not meditating, that’s sleeping. Your eyes are closed, and you snore.”
“That’s not snoring, that’s … a mantra.”
“You’re ridiculous. What stress do you have, anyway?”
“Oh, my life is very hard. I have to worry about whether to sleep in the living room, or the dining room, or the office. I worry about why you’re not patting me, why you’re not giving me treats …”
“Okay, stop it. You’re giving me a headache.”
“You should try meditating!”
SPOOKY HEALING THROUGH ENTANGLEMENT: “DISTANT HEALING”
Another common form of quantum quackery is claiming quantum nonlocality as a basis for “alternative” or “traditional” medicine. The claim is that the correlations seen in Bell’s theorem and the Aspect experiments show that there is some deeper, “transcendent,” level of reality. This supposedly produces a connection between all living things, and practitioners can use this connection to diagnose problems or even heal people without actually touching them. It’s also the alleged basis for all sorts of ESP phenomena.
The most extreme variant of this idea is found in books like Distant Healing, by Jack Angelo (Sounds True, 2008), which proclaims:
Quantum mechanics scientists believe that the unified field theory connects everything in the universe including gravity, nuclear reactions, electromagnetic fields, and human consciousness. Modern physics, then, supports the finding of Distant Healing that thought forms, such as ideas and information, are able to travel from one part of the human family to another via a network of consciousness. [pp. 180–81]
Again, this is Star Trek–level stuff. There is no “unified field theory” in physics—indeed, the lack of a unified field theory is one of the great challenges of modern physics. Even if there were a unified field theory, “human consciousness” is not one of the elements it would include.
The idea is fleshed out in more detail, with more erroneous justifications, in Tiffany Snow’s Forward from the Mind: Distant Healing, Bilocation, Medical Intuition & Prayer in a Quantum World (Spirit Journey Books, 2006):
Entanglement (sometimes called nonlocality) is where a faster-than-the-speed-of-light signal is instantaneously communicated between two particles which somehow remain in touch with each other no matter how far apart they are. What happens to one instantly happens to the other, even across a galaxy, through the entangled waveform connection. And if we look at the beginning of the universe through a “Big Bang” theory, we see all energy (which includes us) was entangled in the very beginning, so we all have an indent [sic] with each other now, even though we may be far apart. Very simply, what one of us does, does affect all others. [p. 31]
This starts off with an explanation that is only slightly wrong, but it goes completely off the rails by the end of the paragraph.
As we saw in chapter 7, entanglement does, indeed, allow for nonlocal correlations between the states of entangled particles. However, these correlations must first be established through local interactions—the photons in the Aspect experiments were initially produced by the same atom, for example.
The quantum connection between these entangled particles is extremely fragile, and it’s easily broken by interactions with the rest of the universe, leading to decoherence. Physicists have to work very hard to produce an entangled state that lasts even a tenth of a second. No entanglement-based connection could possibly survive the fourteen billion years since the Big Bang.
Since there is no residual entanglement from the Big Bang, there is no inherent connection between separated objects. I can easily arrange for the states of two dogs to become correlated, as discussed in chapter 7 (page 143), but only by bringing those dogs together and allowing them to interact with each other. If the two dogs are always separated, there is no way for them to become entangled. Similarly, even leaving aside the fact that human organs are far too large to show quantum effects, there is simply no way to establish a connection between, say, the liver of a patient and the hands of a “healer,” without some contact between them.
Entanglement is also invoked as an explanation for homeo pathy. In homeopathic treatments, minute quantities of herbs or toxins are placed in water and then diluted to a point where there should not be a single molecule of the original herb or toxin in a given water sample. Homeopaths claim that the water “remembers” the presence of the original substance, though, and acquires some of its properties, which supposedly enables the water to heal patients who drink it. Entanglement is sometimes cited as an explanation for this “memory” effect, with the claim being that the interaction between the water and the herb or toxin establishes a connection along the lines of the correlations seen in the Aspect experiments.
The absolute pinnacle of the quantum-entanglement explanation of homeopathy is presented in the work of Lionel Milgrom, who theorizes that it involves not merely entanglement between water and toxin, but a three-way entanglement between the patient, the practitioner, and the remedy (he calls this “PPR” entanglement). Milgrom has a wonderful ability to ape the jargon and notation of quantum physics, and writes in a 2006 paper:
[I]t should be possible to use notions of quantum entanglement (and by implication, information processing) to illustrate certain features of the therapeutic process in homeopathy and other CAMs.* Consequently, the effects of investigating homeo pathy and other CAMs using blinded trial procedures should also be amenable to such illustration. Thus, in double-blinded provings, each of the components in the PPR entangled state may be thought of as two-state “macro-qubits” … and, therefore, by implication, the homeopathic process might be considered to involve macro-quantum “teleportation.” … However, it is only the entangled state which contains information about the whole system. Thus, anything which breaks the entangled state will necessarily lead to loss of information about the integration of function of the systems as a whole system. Clearly, this could happen in [double-blind randomized control trials†] of homeopathic efficacy, where either the remedy or patient and practitioner are removed from their entangled therapeutic context.*
This is a truly breathtaking application of “quantum” reasoning. Not only does Milgrom attribute the curative effects of homeopathic remedies to this “macro-quantum ‘teleportation,’ ” but in a lovely bit of logical judo, he uses this argument to explain away the failure of homeopathic remedies to outperform placebos in properly run clinical trials. It’s all quantum, you see, and thus attempting to measure the performance in a manner consistent with scientific principles ruins everything. Milgrom concludes that standard medical testing protocols simply can’t be used to measure homeopathy because “they seem to destroy the very effects they were purportedly designed to investigate,” an impressive attempt to use quantum mechanics to avoid (possibly via tunneling or teleportation) meeting the exacting standards applied to conventional medical treatments.
The claim that entanglement explains homeopathy is patent nonsense. Patients and practitioners are much too large to exhibit quantum behavior, and even though there is the slight possibility of an entangling interaction between molecules in a solution, entanglement is just a correlation between the states of two systems—when an atom is in a particular state, a photon is vertically polarized, or when one dog is awake, another dog is also awake. This does not mean that one system has acquired characteristics of the other. A quantum interaction can set up a correlation between an atom and a photon, but it can’t turn an atom into a photon or water into healing elixir, any more than an interaction between two dogs can turn a Labrador retriever into a Boston terrier.
BEWARE OF EVIL SQUIRRELS: QUANTUM PHYSICS IS NOT MAGIC
Quantum mechanics is a weird and wonderful theory, and it makes some amazing things possible. Most modern technology depends on quantum mechanics in one way or another—modern electronic devices and computer chips rely on quantum effects in order to operate, and optical devices like the lasers and LEDs used in modern telecommunications are fundamentally quantum devices. Quantum theory may also provide for future technologies with amazing potential—quantum computers that can solve problems faster than any classical computer, or quantum cryptography systems that protect messages using unbreakable codes.
As astounding as its results are, though, quantum mechanics does not provide a basis for miracles. Its predictions defy everyday intuition, but the theory does not completely override common sense. If somebody promises results that sound too good to be true, chances are they’re lying, either to you or to themselves. Dropping a few quantum buzzwords into the explanation doesn’t make free energy or eternal youth any more plausible.
There are many fascinating aspects of quantum theory that we haven’t talked about here. There are also a lot of evil squirrels in the world, with or without goatees. Think carefully about claims made regarding quantum effects, and keep in mind that while it may be weird, quantum mechanics is not magic. If you do that, you’ll have no trouble finding the wonderful aspects of our quantum universe, and avoiding quacks and loonies.
“Yikes, that’s pretty depressing.”
“What? Quantum theory doesn’t need to be magic to be cool.”
“No, not that. I’m talking about the con artists. I knew squirrels were evil, but I didn’t know there were humans who were that bad.”
“Yes, it’s a little depressing to see a good theory abused in this way. But on some level, it’s a sign of progress.”
“How do you come to that conclusion?”
“Well, if you go back to the 1800s, you can find people making the same sorts of magical claims about electricity. All sorts of nonsensical devices were proposed that were supposed to do magical things because they used electricity.”
“Really?”
“And in the mid-1900s, it was atomic or nuclear power. People suggested using nuclear power for the most absurd things, and any number of scams claimed atomic power as a basis.”
“So? What’s your point?”
“Well, nobody really falls for either of those any more. We’ve got used to electricity and nuclear power, and people no longer believe ridiculous claims made about them.”
“So ‘quantum’ is the new ‘atomic’?”
“Pretty much. Con artists have had to move on to ‘quantum’ as an explanation, because the old explanations don’t work anymore. So, in a sense, the fact that people are peddling ‘quantum’ nonsense means that the general public has become a tiny bit less credulous over the years. ‘Quantum’ still works because most people don’t know what it means.”
“So you need to teach more people about quantum.”
“Exactly. Hence this book.”
“And I’m helping! I’m a public-service dog!”
“You’re a very good dog.”
“So, is that it for the book, then?”
“Pretty much. Why?”
“Well, if you’re finished with the book, can we go for a walk?”
“Okay.”
“And if we see any evil squirrels …”
“If we see evil squirrels, you can bite them.”
* The interview is online at www.healthy.net/scr/interview.asp?ID =167, and was retrieved in summer 2008.
* The plural “physicists” here is probably not justified—“radically ambiguous flowing quantum soup” is not a common phrase in physics. The only actual physicist who has ever used it appears to be Nick Herbert, a promoter of “Quantum Tantra,” which is about what you would expect.
* Not to mention securing funding for their experiments.
* “CAM” = “complementary and alternative medicine.” Acronyms make anything sound more scientific.
† Double-blind randomized control trials are medical tests in which patients are randomly selected to receive either the treatment being tested or a placebo, and neither the patient nor the doctor dispensing the treatment knows which is which. These are the gold standard for modern medical research.
* Lionel R. Milgrom, Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine 4, 7–16 (2006). Quotes from p. 14.
