- The entire universe – space & time – was created instantly in a single massive Big Bang that can still be ‘heard’ today as a musical note in background radiation.
- After the explosion, stars and planets spontaneously formed over billions of years from the expanding debris, the expansion initially slowing down but more recently speeding up.
- This speed up is caused by an undetectable and completely invisible substance called Dark Matter. Most of the universe is made of Dark Matter.
- Below the level of subatomic particles, matter is made up of vibrating ’strings’. They vibrate in 10 (or 26) dimensional space, in which the mathematics is ‘elegant’.
- A photon can act as a wave or a particle, responding to a measurement that has yet to take place.
- Two subatomic particles can be ‘entangled‘ and their properties communicated instantaneously across infinite distance.
- It is not possible to travel faster than light, as your mass would become infinite. As you travel near that speed, time for you would run at a different speed to a static observer.
- Every time a measurement takes place, multiple universes are formed in which all possible outcomes are preserved.
- There is no such thing as the human mind, which is simply a sequence of individual thought processes.
- When people die, their souls live on in the form of ghosts, attached to a place that was significant for them.
- By diluting a harmful substance it can be turned into an antidote, even if it is unlikely that any particles of the original substance exists – the water holds a ‘memory effect’ of the toxin.
- We are visited by other alien races, who are performing experiments on us while keeping hidden. The world governments know this but deny it to avoid panic.
- Some rare people are able to concentrate their will and cause physical objects to move.
- There is a hole at the north pole which leads to a surface inside the earth, lit by a sun at the core.
Some of the above is ’scientific’. Some is not.
When you are surprised by the pseudo-science that many people believe, take another look at the science that is also believed. Certainly we have evidence for Dark Matter and the Big Bang – we also have some evidence of the Yeti, UFOs and ghosts. My personal bias is to have more faith in string theory than homoeopathy. But you have to keep challenging your bias and ask if it really is more foolish to believe in memory effect than to believe that strings exist because the maths is ‘elegant’ (in 26 dimensions no less). If tachyons, why not poltergeists? Both seem rather elusive.
If string theory was a complete joke, I’d have no way of knowing. I can’t read the maths and I can’t do the experiments. All I have is faith, the same faith that a parishioner has in a pastor – that a man of the cloth (or white lab coat) would not tell them such lies. My faith in the Big Bang is still faith, and uncritical faith. I accept that experiments have found evidence of a big bang, but I think if I was told that the evidence suggested the ’steady state’ universe that Einstein once proposed, I’d probably follow that just as blindly.
It is true that most pseudo-science is based on very bad research (particularly in alternative therapies). Nevertheless, there is some good research in there, and some very dicey reasons for what is accepted as fact. The demarcation is not utterly clear.
Feynman said “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” The people that made What the Bleep do We Know started properly by conveying how little we understand, they screwed it by claiming to understand it as a spiritual matter. I don’t want to fall into that trap. I don’t understand ’spooky action at a distance’ under any model and if Einstein was similarly flummoxed I’m in good company. For me phrases such ‘a wave function collapses to form a particle’ have the same ring as ‘energy flows through your chi points’ – psychobabble.
Particularly galling is the ‘many worlds’ interpretation. Stephen Hawking might support it, but to me it sounds like Sir Conan Doyle and his fairy photographs. You can crap on about ‘quantum decoherence’ all you like – there is no bloody evidence of a multiverse, not the tiniest shred, and David Deutsch et al are selling the oil of snakes.
So what of this? For the science community to lament the stupidity of the common folk is to not understand how ridiculous much mainstream science can seem. Put your own house in order first. For me it means that when somebody critiques a system of thought as ‘unscientific’ I am not overawed. In studying Freud as a basis of my postgraduate work I’ve found it offends people as ‘unscientific’. Perhaps so, but the Id and Dark Matter have more in common than they might suppose.
