Leptons vs. Left Nuts: An Apologist's Guide to Scientific Illiteracy

[Everybody Wang Chung]

I hope Physics Guy can chime in and give his opinion about this 30-second video, which asserts that quantum field theory provides an explanation for "baptism for the dead."

Quantum Field Theory is fairly robust and reliably predictive—our understanding of it is what makes much of modern tech possible. Therefore, the argument that a 19th-century religious ritual is "tapping into quantum physics" is a clear sign that the person has zero grasp of the concept. It's a truly mind-boggling level of scientific illiteracy, attempting to co-opt one of history’s most successful theories to legitimize a fringe cultish belief. It's not just wrong, it's laughably ignorant. This belief demonstrates a profound disconnect from the principles of science/reality.

Try to watch this 30 second clip without rolling your eyes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWAwAUQwjbI

[Physics Guy]

Yeah, this is the scientific analog of illiteracy at the level of not knowing what a letter is. It's not just that the guy doesn't know what quantum physics means: he doesn't know that it even means anything at all in particular. He thinks it kind of has something somehow to do with time looping around so that the present can affect the distant past, or something.

People who don't know much physics sometimes use the terms "linear" and "nonlinear" to mean whether time has to go straight forward or can go in loops like that. Those are terrible words to use for this concept, because linearity and nonlinearity are important concepts in physics that have nothing to do with whether time can have loops. So lay people hear about how important nonlinearity is and think it has something to do with the time thing, when it doesn't.

Anyway, there actually are a couple of spots in quantum field theory where it can kind of look, in a way, as though the future or present determines the past. This isn't actually nearly as big a deal as it sounds, though. It's not any deal at all, because there is no fundamental "arrow of time". Determinism means that past, present, and future are locked in a one-to-one causal relationship. Which one is the cause, and which the effect, is really only a matter of human interpretation. It's not part of natural law. Natural law just says the different times are connected. Which one is the cause and which the effect is a convention of language. We usually say it one way, but we can say it the other way, too, if we want, and sometimes people do.

The ambiguity of cause and effect seems weird to humans, and understanding why human perception of time has this huge difference between past and future is a major open problem in physics. This issue isn't specifically an issue in quantum physics, though. It was already there in Newton's day, and it hasn't changed. So when quantum field theory gets expressed in ways that seem to have the future affecting the past, this is not at all a big new principle in physics, but just an option in how we can describe things.

Thinking that "nonlinear time" is a big thing in quantum physics is like thinking that serifs are a big deal in language. Naw, dude, serifs just show up on some letters, in some fonts. Not all letters have them, and there are lots of fonts in which no letters have them. Serifs aren't language. They're just a possible style of writing some letters.

So this guy talking about quantum physics and nonlinear time is indeed in way over his head, to the point where there is just no way to attach any meaning at all to what he says. It's just gibberish. I wouldn't say, though, that this makes this one Mormon guy an especially stunning example of scientific illiteracy. This kind of mumbo-jumbo gee-whiz take on quantum physics is depressingly common. All too many people seize on some cool-sounding phrase that they've heard in kind of the same way that Eeyore admires the letter A in The House at Pooh Corner, without showing any notion of even the general kind of thing that it might mean.

Eeyore had three sticks on the ground, and was looking at them. Two of the sticks were touching at one end, but not at the other, and the third stick was laid across them. Piglet thought that perhaps it was a Trap of some kind. ...

“Is that little Piglet?’ said Eeyore, still looking hard at his sticks.
“Yes, Eeyore, and I—”
“Do you know what this is?”
“No,” said Piglet.
“It’s an A.”
“Oh,” said Piglet.

“Not O, A,” said Eeyore severely. “Can’t you hear, or do you think you have more education than Christopher Robin?”
“Yes,” said Piglet. “No,” said Piglet very quickly. And he came closer still.
“Christopher Robin said it was an A, and an A it is—until somebody treads on me,’ Eeyore added sternly. Piglet jumped backwards hurriedly, and smelt at his violets.

“Do you know what A means, little Piglet?”
“No, Eeyore, I don’t.”’
“It means Learning, it means Education, it means all the things that you and Pooh haven't got. That’s what A means.”
“Oh,” said Piglet again. “I mean, does it?” he explained quickly.

“I’m telling you. People come and go in this Forest, and they say, ‘It’s only Eeyore, so it doesn’t count.’ They walk to and fro saying ‘Ha ha!’ But do they know anything about A? They don’t. It’s just three sticks to them. But to the Educated—mark this, little Piglet—to the Educated, not meaning Poohs and Piglets, it’s a great and glorious A. Not,” he added, “just something that anybody can come and breathe on.”

(When Eeyore later proudly checks whether Rabbit can recognize his wonderful A made of sticks, Rabbit casually observes that it's an A, though not a very good one, and goes on talking. Upon discovering that the wonderful A is actually only "a thing Rabbit knows", Eeyore disgustedly smashes his A of sticks into tiny bits.)

What might be more specifically Mormon is the relish the guy seems to take in feeling that he knows some great secret that most people don't know, even though what he thinks is his secret knowledge is actually nonsense. Mormon priesthood power may not be anything like quantum physics, but the way some Mormons think about priesthood power does seem to be all too similar to the way some people think about quantum physics.

[I Have Questions]

This is the guys YouTube channel description “Elite brotherhood of consecrated men. Faith | Discipline | Leadership”.

The Church is full of men who think like this about themselves.

[malkie]

Yeah, this is the scientific analog of illiteracy at the level of not knowing what a letter is. It's not just that the guy doesn't know what quantum physics means: he doesn't know that it even means anything at all in particular. He thinks it kind of has something somehow to do with time looping around so that the present can affect the distant past, or something.

People who don't know much physics sometimes use the terms "linear" and "nonlinear" to mean whether time has to go straight forward or can go in loops like that. Those are terrible words to use for this concept, because linearity and nonlinearity are important concepts in physics that have nothing to do with whether time can have loops. So lay people hear about how important nonlinearity is and think it has something to do with the time thing, when it doesn't.

Anyway, there actually are a couple of spots in quantum field theory where it can kind of look, in a way, as though the future or present determines the past. This isn't actually nearly as big a deal as it sounds, though. It's not any deal at all, because there is no fundamental "arrow of time". Determinism means that past, present, and future are locked in a one-to-one causal relationship. Which one is the cause, and which the effect, is really only a matter of human interpretation. It's not part of natural law. Natural law just says the different times are connected. Which one is the cause and which the effect is a convention of language. We usually say it one way, but we can say it the other way, too, if we want, and sometimes people do.

The ambiguity of cause and effect seems weird to humans, and understanding why human perception of time has this huge difference between past and future is a major open problem in physics. This issue isn't specifically an issue in quantum physics, though. It was already there in Newton's day, and it hasn't changed. So when quantum field theory gets expressed in ways that seem to have the future affecting the past, this is not at all a big new principle in physics, but just an option in how we can describe things.

Thinking that "nonlinear time" is a big thing in quantum physics is like thinking that serifs are a big deal in language. Naw, dude, serifs just show up on some letters, in some fonts. Not all letters have them, and there are lots of fonts in which no letters have them. Serifs aren't language. They're just a possible style of writing some letters.

So this guy talking about quantum physics and nonlinear time is indeed in way over his head, to the point where there is just no way to attach any meaning at all to what he says. It's just gibberish. I wouldn't say, though, that this makes this one Mormon guy an especially stunning example of scientific illiteracy. This kind of mumbo-jumbo gee-whiz take on quantum physics is depressingly common. All too many people seize on some cool-sounding phrase that they've heard in kind of the same way that Eeyore admires the letter A in The House at Pooh Corner, without showing any notion of even the general kind of thing that it might mean.

Eeyore had three sticks on the ground, and was looking at them. Two of the sticks were touching at one end, but not at the other, and the third stick was laid across them. Piglet thought that perhaps it was a Trap of some kind. ...

“Is that little Piglet?’ said Eeyore, still looking hard at his sticks.
“Yes, Eeyore, and I—”
“Do you know what this is?”
“No,” said Piglet.
“It’s an A.”
“Oh,” said Piglet.

“Not O, A,” said Eeyore severely. “Can’t you hear, or do you think you have more education than Christopher Robin?”
“Yes,” said Piglet. “No,” said Piglet very quickly. And he came closer still.
“Christopher Robin said it was an A, and an A it is—until somebody treads on me,’ Eeyore added sternly. Piglet jumped backwards hurriedly, and smelt at his violets.

“Do you know what A means, little Piglet?”
“No, Eeyore, I don’t.”’
“It means Learning, it means Education, it means all the things that you and Pooh haven't got. That’s what A means.”
“Oh,” said Piglet again. “I mean, does it?” he explained quickly.

“I’m telling you. People come and go in this Forest, and they say, ‘It’s only Eeyore, so it doesn’t count.’ They walk to and fro saying ‘Ha ha!’ But do they know anything about A? They don’t. It’s just three sticks to them. But to the Educated—mark this, little Piglet—to the Educated, not meaning Poohs and Piglets, it’s a great and glorious A. Not,” he added, “just something that anybody can come and breathe on.”

(When Eeyore later proudly checks whether Rabbit can recognize his wonderful A made of sticks, Rabbit casually observes that it's an A, though not a very good one, and goes on talking. Upon discovering that the wonderful A is actually only "a thing Rabbit knows", Eeyore disgustedly smashes his A of sticks into tiny bits.)

What might be more specifically Mormon is the relish the guy seems to take in feeling that he knows some great secret that most people don't know, even though what he thinks is his secret knowledge is actually nonsense. Mormon priesthood power may not be anything like quantum physics, but the way some Mormons think about priesthood power does seem to be all too similar to the way some people think about quantum physics.

I have a relative who sometimes sends me stuff like this:

This frequency is the 5th harmonic (major-3rd interval) of the B-flat frequency I found interacting with Earth’s magnetic field.

It is also the vibration of the Sun – according to NASA, who performed a “sonification” of the Sun’s electro-magnetic energy into sound, which I have explored here. (However, as we recently discovered, NASA may have accidentally altered the note from an F-sharp).

But, if so, how strange and interesting that the Sun’s vibration is a harmonic above a frequency of the Earth’s magnetic rotation: We might think that the Sun would be a vibrational root from which the Earth vibrates – in the same way, we think of the Earth as physically subsidiary to the Sun in our Solar system.

https://harmonicsofnature.com/d-9-hz-the-dragon-sun/

I think I'm supposed to be impressed that NASA findings "support" this person's ideas.

[If I'm not mistaken, even the much simpler ideas he invokes - musical intervals and harmonics - he gets wrong. Perhaps someone with knowledge of music theory can confirm that a 5th harmonic is 5 octaves above the base frequency, which is not the same as the major 3rd interval, the latter being known as the 5th, or "perfect 5th", which would be G in the scale of C.]

[Physics Guy]

Maybe your relative should learn some actual quantum physics, because it really does involve lots of frequencies. They're not musical frequencies; most of them would be in the ultraviolet as light frequencies. It's rare for harmonics to be involved, in the sense of frequencies being rational multiples of each other, but sometimes that matters. It often matters a lot for two frequencies to match each other closely.

It might also be interesting, though perhaps just frustrating, to ask this relative just what exactly it is that is "vibrating" at these frequencies. Sound? Light? And what exactly is "the Earth's magnetic rotation"? The Earth's magnetic poles migrate a few miles each year, but that's a small fraction of the Earth's circumference, so it takes thousands of years for the Earth's magnetic field to do anything like a rotation, not the few milliseconds that are periods of musical notes.

The thing that is vibrating at the frequencies in quantum mechanics is, um, a probability amplitude. So I could probably talk about what that means for half an hour and it would still be indistinguishable to an intelligent layperson from crackpot babble. After maybe an hour or so—okay, maybe a day—one might start to notice the difference. It would help a lot if I could bring on an experimentalist colleague to show some actual spectral lines from a sample of hot pure hydrogen.

[malkie]

Maybe your relative should learn some actual quantum physics, because it really does involve lots of frequencies. They're not musical frequencies; most of them would be in the ultraviolet as light frequencies. It's rare for harmonics to be involved, in the sense of frequencies being rational multiples of each other, but sometimes that matters. It often matters a lot for two frequencies to match each other closely.

It might also be interesting, though perhaps just frustrating, to ask this relative just what exactly it is that is "vibrating" at these frequencies. Sound? Light? And what exactly is "the Earth's magnetic rotation"? The Earth's magnetic poles migrate a few miles each year, but that's a small fraction of the Earth's circumference, so it takes thousands of years for the Earth's magnetic field to do anything like a rotation, not the few milliseconds that are periods of musical notes.

The thing that is vibrating at the frequencies in quantum mechanics is, um, a probability amplitude. So I could probably talk about what that means for half an hour and it would still be indistinguishable to an intelligent layperson from crackpot babble. After maybe an hour or so—okay, maybe a day—one might start to notice the difference. It would help a lot if I could bring on an experimentalist colleague to show some actual spectral lines from a sample of hot pure hydrogen.

My relative hasn't the faintest idea what exactly it is that is "vibrating" at these frequencies, or what the possibilities are, nor, I suspect, could she learn some quantum physics - at least, not anything that involved any "math" beyond basic arithmetic, or any coherent physics concepts. But she's totally into the "wow/woo" thinking that the world of science, as represented here by NASA, is so completely in harmony (!) with the "harmonics" of the dragon sun, etc.

I remember my own "wow" moment when something I was reading tied energy levels of electrons to the concept of quantized jumps of level to spectral lines, black body radiation, etc. I think I was reading about the ultraviolet catastrophe at the time.

On the music side, though my own knowledge of music theory is clearly lacking, it strikes me as interesting that the author of the quoted paras doesn't say which B-flat or F-sharp he means - US Concert pitch, baroque pitch, or what. She and I both remember someone who played the concertina, and who carried with him a black instrument tuned to whatever British pianos normally used, and a brown one for playing with a regular church organ. So she knows enough to realize that for all of the harmonizations quoted, the reference pitch needs to be specified.