Quantum Vodoo

Powerful faith tends to produce hallucinations that confirm it. Such hallucinations testify to exceptional states of mind. But they are misinterpreted by philistine interpreters of religion as evidence of the existence of supernatural entities.

“Extraordinary claims,” says Carl Sagan, “require extraordinary evidence.” If the personal accounts of disciples happen to coincide with one another, this can be explained far more plausibly by their shared faith, or by supposing some conference took place between them, than by supposing, in the face of all the evidence we have accumulated to the contrary, that the laws of nature vary with time and place.

It still irks me when quantum mechanics is invoked to smuggle superstition into the realm of fact. Quantum mechanics precisely predicts the probabilities of events, leaving no room for divine or other mysterious forms of intervention. When the outcome of experiments shows that the predicted probabilities are very precise, it becomes implausible to suppose that they are being mysteriously manipulated. Einstein once quipped, “God does not play dice with the universe.” Well, He does. But the quantum mechanical dice are not loaded dice. As our experiments show quite definitively, they are fair dice. Both mathematics and experiment show that quantum mechanics reduces precisely to Newtonian mechanics for things on the scale of human beings and the objects we see and manipulate with our unaided eyes and hands—even, in fact, for things on the scale of cells. The universe didn’t suddenly become less predictable when quantum mechanics was introduced. Thermodynamic effects, also probabilistic in nature, dwarf quantum mechanical effects in their magnitude, and these have been known and understood since the Nineteenth Century.