If you’ve run across Microsoft’s new ads, which aim to counter the witty “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” series by Apple, you might have noticed this tweedy academic-looking guy near the end:
Years back, I had the idea that Apple should include more famous-for-academia types in its Think Different ads. Ed Witten, Jacques Derrida, Amartya Sen, people like that. But I didn’t actually call up any ad agencies to make the pitch. So I figured that Microsoft had the same idea, and was including some professor-type among its self-declared PC’s in order to lend some gravitas to the proceedings.
Yeah, not so much. The somber mug above belongs to none other than Deepak Chopra, celebrated purveyor of quantum nonsense. He did, of course, win the 1998 IgNobel Prize in Physics for “for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness.” So there is that. (In certain religious circles, there is an increasingly popular teaching known as the Prosperity Gospel. I wonder if I could make money writing a book about “The Prosperity Hamiltonian”?)
The construction of jokes comparing Deepak Chopra’s understanding of quantum mechanics to Microsoft’s understanding of software is left as an exercise for the reader.
I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen the Mac/PC ads, but the slash is pretty good.
Virtual particles exist — well virtually 🙂 Real particles are called on-shell, their amplitudes carry their actual mass-energy. In Feynman diagrams these are depicted as lines which have an endpoint. Lines which connect at vertices are termed virtual particles, and are off shell. The heuristic is that they have a mass-energy which is variable or different from what they would have as an on-shell particle. Because of this their momenta often contribute to amplitudes as integration variables. Between two fermions with some “charge,” such as electric charge, these particles can have off-shell mass energy that exchanges momentum between them. How this happens involves something called gauge theory, where momentum is gauge covariant P = p + ieA, and the vector potential term A, or amplitudes thereof, gives virtual photons.
Do these suckers exist? HelliffIno, and in fact I would say that maybe we might best see these as mathematical devices, which in a perturbative scheme we interpret as “virtual particles.” Don’t worry about whether they exist, just do the calculation!
Lawrence B. Crowell
Eric, I do think I know what you’re trying to pinpoint here. In fact I have been thinking in similar ways:
Well well, these smart physicists. Now they have got really scared by the completely unexplainable initial conditions and that hugely gross number identifying all possible states that our universe could have been born with. And they can’t let the Christian Right Fundamentalist win the fight on T.K.O. So what do they do? Easy – just invent a hugely gross number of parallel universes and the problem is gone!
If you think that’s what really happened, then your “egg face” & “milk mustache” do makes sense.
But if you think again, you realize that many very intelligent and bright men have been questioning new science and classifying it as more or less crackpottery, for example Albert Einstein and quantum mechanics.
So what then? What’s the difference between “egg face” & “milk mustache”, and “Multiverse” & “Quantum Healing”?
I say a lot. No serious scientist will ever refer to “mysterious phenomenon” or “holy things” (that simple humans never will understand completely) in their struggle to formulate new testable theories about how nature works. Because that would not be science, it would be religion and mysticism.
Charlatans like Deepak Chopra, on the other hand, have no problem what so ever referring to “mysterious phenomenon”. In fact it seems like it’s a great deal of the whole business. Who can mistrust a “holy law” from a supreme mysterious being? (that’s if you believe the guy)
If you still think I’m wrong, let’s put the last nail in the “Charlatan Coffin”. I strongly recommend you to spend 13 minutes watching this most entertaining and intelligent video chat between John Horgan and Sean Carroll. Maybe it will change your life. John takes your position and tries to demolish Sean’s arguments for new physics:
Cosmological multiverse theories: are they completely nuts? (13:33)
If you want to watch the whole Science Saturday: Cosmic Bull Session (66:32) at Bloggingheads.tv the link is:
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/9433
(It’s bright and fun)
Physicists debate these and other subjects in a very critical way. Has Deepak submitted any of his theories on quantum healing to peer reviewed journals?
After buying a laptop with Windows Vista installed, I was almost forced to buy a Mac. I finally did last April and I haven’t looked back since. Now I can’t imagine going back to a PC, although I’m forced to use one at work. Windows has always sucked, but Vista was a complete disaster. I had to format the hard drive twice after continuous crashes. A Mac is like a breath of fresh air. If you’re not using a Mac, please do yourself a favor and get yourself one.
David, I completely agree. If you just want to breathe fresh air – go by a Big Mac. If you want to taste a real burger – pick the parts and build it yourself.
The free world is fantastic!
(I know this “fight” is silly, but fun 😉 )
Well, OS X is BSD with added shiny…
(“,)
No serious scientist will ever refer to “mysterious phenomenon” or “holy things” (that simple humans never will understand completely) in their struggle to formulate new testable theories about how nature works. Because that would not be science, it would be religion and mysticism.
Well, there’s the rub. There are plenty of arguments on how a whole lot of current particle physics research is nowhere near testable.
Arun, you are right on the “testable” issue, but I think you have forgotten the last word – today.
This fact doesn’t give Deepak Chopra carte blanche for his (never testable) “mysterious” business. The goal for Deepak Chopra is not to produce mathematical and testable theories, because this will not be doable. Just imagine a “Chopra-equation”:
E=MC2
(Where the “Chopra-C” would stand for Consciousness, instead of the speed of light in a vacuum)
Can this kind of crackpottery be regarded as ever testable?
Real scientists have a quest to understand the world, not to produce “mysterious theories” built on “holy powers”. Sean expresses this very neat on Bloggingheads.tv:
“What if I had a Black Box, and this Black Box had a feature that if you wrote a question about the behavior of the physical universe on a piece of paper, and you stuck it in to the Black Box, the Black Box would spit out the correct answer, every single time. Would that count as the final answer to all the laws of physics? Would that be all you wanted? And the answer is: Off course not! Because it doesn’t tell you anything, it doesn’t give you any understanding of what is happening, it’s just telling you the answers! The ultimate thing that science is after is an appreciation for what is the underlying mechanism for what is going on.”
(Shortened by me, here’s the original)
Cosmological multiverse theories: are they completely nuts? (13:33)
If Deepak Chopra had this Black Box in his hands, he would most certainly be satisfied with the situation. He would just call it “The Holy Quantum Black Box”, and make big business!
you’re all missing the really funny part here.
Which is that the “I’m a PC” ads were all built on Macs. The original files posted, I think, on the MS website, had that information in their metadata. I’m too lazy to google the link for you.
I work on a Vista Ultimate machine that functions fine because it was set up by a superb IT guy who installed all the right drivers and turned off the nagware; and also in a bash shell on our network, which is a high end *nix concoction. I use the same bash shell at home, in terminal on my personal Mac which as noted above is really “BSD+best desktop UI yet developed.”
Each is appropriate and works great in its own domain. Ideology and propaganda are always stupid, including here. That being said, the Mac ads are generally funny, while the new PC ones succeed in a Sarah Palin debate type way, simply by not being as terrible as the last thing you saw.