The Infinite Monkey Cage - When Quantum Goes Woo

Episode Date: February 9, 2015

When Quantum Goes WooBrian Cox and Robin Ince are joined on stage by Bad Science author, Ben Goldacre, Professor of Particle Physics at Manchester University, Jeff Forshaw, and comedian Sara Pascoe. They'll be looking at why quantum physics, in particular, seems to attract some of the more fringe elements of pseudoscience and alternative medicine, and whether there is anything about the frankly weird quantum behaviour of particles, like the ability to seemingly be in two places at once, that really can be applied to the human condition. When spiritual healers and gurus talk about our own quantum energy and the power of quantum healing, is it simply a metaphor, or is there more to this esoteric branch of science that we could all learn from?

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio. Enjoy it. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And today we're going to be talking about quantum theory.

Quantum theory is one of the foundations of modern physics, a collection of theoretical ideas and techniques dating back over a century that provides the most accurate description we have of the natural world, with the exception of gravitational interactions, obviously. It is also, however, arguably the most misunderstood area of modern science, a gateway to pseudoscience, and to quote one of our panellists today, a theory which has had reams of drivel penned in its name. In today's programme, we will be asking why this is the case.

What is it about quantum mechanics that makes it such a useful vehicle for woo merchants, snakehole sales, men and women, and new age healers? Now, today's show is going to be very difficult for me and the panel because due to the time Monkey Cage is broadcast, we're unable to respond in language strong enough to represent our true feelings about the misunderstanding and misuse of quantum theory. So we've decided to introduce some code words which we can use to indicate our anger or indignation without causing offence.

The code words are... Daisy flattener., nose tingler, Merlin's bucket. Now in order to demonstrate their use I'll read a quote from a non-mainstream practitioner of quantum theory and Robin will respond according to the guidelines. Our bodies ultimately are fields of information, intelligence and energy. Quantum healing involves a shift in the fields of energy information. Got to say, that sounds to me like a bit of a daisy flap there. Now, interestingly, our producer said, can you say it sounds to you like,

because I don't want to get in any legal problems. So the idea that we might be taken to court for, and they accused me of my work being daisy flattening, is a court case I was looking forward to. Here's another real one. If a quantum field holds us all together in its invisible web, we have to rethink our definitions of ourselves and how we interact with every facet of our lives. I would have thought that's a nose tingler. A field full of nose tinglers. And one last one.

Although relativistic quantum field theories are built with causality in mind, the way causality plays out at the level of the particle dynamics is not so clear. That is the biggest Merlin's bucket of them all. It is, except it's taken from the abstract of a paper that I wrote with one of our panellists. But you've got to admit, would you believe

that? So, to help us through this fog of superpositions, we have three panellists, and they are... My name's Ben Goldacre, I'm an NHS doctor and an academic, and I write books about science, like Bad Science and the recent facetiously titled I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More

Complicated Than That. And my favourite form of bamboozlement is people who pretend for elaborate magical reasons that their fabulous intervention cannot for some special reason be tested in a randomised controlled trial. I'm Geoff Farshaw. I'm a professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester and I've written a book called The Quantum Universe with Brian.

I hate bamboozling people at parties. It means I've explained something in a particularly rubbish way. My favourite fancy idea, though, is the idea that we can trace the evolution of the universe starting from a time when all of the matter in the visible universe was compressed to something about the size of a beach ball, and we can use our understanding of the universe at that time to predict the way the galaxies are scattered across the sky. You still haven't got that first 10 to the minus 37 of a second on yet,

have you, lazy? That's where the woo merchants live. What, the woo lives in the first 10 to the minus 37? That's where the Merlin's bucket lies. Hello, my name's Sarah Pascoe. I'm a comedian, but I got a double b at science gcse and yeah so i'm meant to be here and um i'm currently writing my first book which is about um a woman's body and i've been accused of quackery myself because i'm talking a lot on

stage at the moment about sperm um and how basically men have got two kinds of sperm kamikaze and egg getters and kamikaze is is like 99% and it's blockers and fighters. And so I'm really fun at parties at the moment. And this is our panel. Ben, as the member of the panel who's probably been involved most

in kind of investigating different medical and scientific claims, what would you define woo as? Because someone I was arguing with said, oh, so anything that's unproved science is woo. Now, I wouldn't say that that was woo, necessarily. What for you is woo? I think it's about the reasons why people are doing it. So it's either deliberate deliberate or at best incompetent

use of science-y sounding language or the appearance of science wearing a white coat using professional titles like professor or doctor or or qualifications in order to give an appearance of being science-y in order to sell a product or a potion or a special healing system. And what do you think it is about the ideas of quantum theory that are so alluring sometimes in that world of selling what may well be charlatanism and bamboozlement? So I think a lot of it is about the fact that it's... If you want your quack idea to survive, it has to have various characteristics.

It has to be relatively resistant to debunking. And so in my experience of having to write about these things, I mean, I did it every week for The Guardian for a decade, you end up having arguments with lawyers where they're going, well, how can we really be sure that this stuff that they're saying really is nonsense? And can you talk me through it? And when somebody's used a lot of science-y sounding language in a superficially plausible way, it's actually quite difficult to talk a lawyer around. And then also worse than that, they'll say, oh, well, you know, with Reynolds' defence, we have to give them right of reply. So you'd write your best effort to give a clear explanation of why what they're saying

is wrong and unpicking their misuse of scientific terminology. And then you're obliged by the libel laws to allow them to give you a paragraph of Daisy Flattner that you then have to put at the end and then you feel that you can't let that lie and then you're caught in this endless circle of, well, I'm going to have to explain why that's rubbish. So I think it's a survival strategy

for creating a kind of hassle barrier to make it difficult for you to tear their ideas apart so in a sense it's the perceived uh difficulty of the theory itself yeah allows a lot of wriggle room but but also i think there's something very attractive about about quantum terminology because it allows you to take i mean the recurring theme seems to be that people take quite banal observations like there was a video that you sent around and in this video that robin sent around she's sort of saying oh we're all we're all entangled we're all socially connected and we're all entangled together and that's a lot like quantum entanglement and it's almost as if i think obviously nobody's going to give you any money

just for making the completely fatuous and obvious observation that we're all socially connected and if you want to make that proprietary and owned and saleable and special and unique then you have to bolt on some nonsense and i think that's where the appeal of of quantum stuff comes from it's a way of making banal superficial observations somehow uh more than just themselves. Well, because that's why, I don't know if you saw it as well. Yeah. A lot of it says it's very nice.

It's a nice, you know, we need to work together, we're all in this together. I think the problem could be that science is using words, and words is how we make stories. That's the building block for fun narratives and mermaids and fairies and this great stuff. And so because science is using them, we can then put them together in other ways, however we want.

And maybe you guys should just use symbols all the time. So I was thinking quantum could be like a fish's tail, and mechanics could be a wrench, and just the pictures, and then we can't take that anymore and make better stories. Well, you see, yeah, if you'd kept it all just to

your equations, which we haven't got a clue about. Yeah, we can't do that. I mean, I read the easy guide to quantum mechanics, but the moment I actually get to now, oh no, I become... So if you'd kept it as your own little language of equations, everything would be fine. I should say, Geoff, I mean, so, can you define, just so we know what we're speaking about,

quantum mechanics in about a minute or so, what actually is it? Oh, I've forgotten. Well, what it is, it's a set of rules. So as far as we can tell, everything in the universe is made up of particles, and it's a set of rules that explain how those particles hop around. And it's a very simple set of rules. It usurped Newton's ideas on how the basic building blocks of the universe operated, largely in order

that it should explain how atoms work, which he did with wonderful success. And it's totally outrageous affront to common sense, which is why it attracts all of this stuff. Because it paints a picture of the world which is almost magical, which is why it's wonderful. These particles behave exactly as if a single particle can be in more than one place at the same time. And we have to keep track of all the possible things that a particle or a bunch of particles could possibly do. We have to keep track of them all,

and then keeping track of each possibility gives rise to a number. We add the numbers up in the end, and that gives us the probability of a certain outcome in an experiment so the output of quantum mechanics is probabilities of outcomes and experiments and the way we do it is by thinking about the world in these remarkable ways um i was just going to ask about the the sarah was saying one of the things that with with scientific language i as a non-scientist which i've made patently clear over 11 series of this now, I will hear a beautiful idea of science

and then not notice sometimes that it's connected to something that may well actually be nonsense. That once we hear, once we start to be bamboozled by language, there was another clip that I looked at over the weekend, people sent me a lot of stuff, and it was someone talking about homeopathy and she started off, she said, well, you think

if we take all the mass in the universe, it turns out once you take out all the empty spaces in it, all the mass just takes up the space of, I think it was a bowling ball, and Einstein, of course, came up with an equation, E equals mc squared, but as you realise, in fact, mass is so tiny, perhaps we can ignore mass, so really you could just say E equals c squared. That was when I first became suspicious. The mathematicians in the audience might notice the error there.

E equals MC squared. M is very small, so we can ignore it and say E equals C squared. You see, that's what I wonder about, because mathematicians and scientists who come up with things like constants, are they always trying to come up with a big one, like Planck? Was he really embarrassed when he went, oh, my constant's really small?

It's just 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 quantum theory and you use this term like it's almost magical it's counterintuitive it's strange there are strange concepts we actually one of the letters we got from a listener it says here provocatively i'm suggesting that by constantly proclaiming that anything that can happen will happen which is the subcital of a well-known book on quantum physics that we wrote it allows quacks to use this as a catch-all justification for improbable science. The senses... And I've received some of this criticism when we talk about quantum theory. Because the ideas are odd, it's thought that we are, by trying to explain the theory in language rather than symbols, enabling quackery.

Well, that's nonsense. I mean, it is like everything that can happen does happen. It's that wonderful. We can't be responsible for people then just making stuff up, which is what... I suppose then that a plausible response from the... What's a word that isn't libelous that you could use instead of quack? I don't know.

Anyway, these people, they may wish to misrepresent that and say, well, OK, therefore, my consciousness is somehow connected to the consciousness of someone because we're all made of particles, aren't we, and they're quantum things, and they all seem to be interconnected, and so, therefore, we're all interconnected. Do we have a responsibility to try and prevent people from doing that, or is our responsibility to just talk about the science? Well, we've got a responsibility probably to explain carefully when we write a book like that

how it is that we understand words like that. How do we come to make conclusions that the world behaves in this very strange way? And perhaps also explain just how difficult it is to secure knowledge and how easy it is to be wrong. I tell my PhD students, before you show me anything, just assume that what you've written is total rubbish. Just start with that in mind and try and convince me otherwise, because I'm going to assume that what you've written is total rubbish. Just start with that in mind and try and convince me otherwise, because I'm going to assume that.

And that completely changes the way that you... That's very much how we work in the arts, isn't it, Sarah? It is. It's so difficult to get anything right. It's very, very easy to make things up, but so tremendously hard to... It's actually pretty similar to what Ben was saying about the framework within which ideas are difficult to challenge is almost a meaningless framework or an unhelpful framework, in a sense.

Yeah, I think one of the things that defines quackery is avoiding critical scrutiny of your ideas. And I think that's the spirit in which people are often deploying this kind of language. It's to create a barrier to understanding. It's to deliberately make themselves unintelligible and difficult to understand in order to make themselves seem like they're better and more powerful than you. And actually, that's kind of the exact opposite of what I, for example, would try to do as a doctor. When I'm seeing somebody and explaining their medication to them or their diagnosis,

I'm going out of my way to make it as understandable as possible and to try and undermine and take away any kind of inherent power imbalance that may be a product of class or fear or anxiety and I think what quacks do is is exactly the opposite of that they use language deliberately to confuse rather than to explicate is Is it really deliberate? Because I think, being very outside this, I'm actually much more dispassionate than all of you. Just about this, not in general in life.

I'm proper fun, but I mean, this isn't anywhere near my heart. I just think it's really interesting. So being where I am, it looks to me like lots of people believe what they're saying, and sometimes they've misunderstood something, or they've taken energy to mean whatever they want it to mean, and then they're regurgitating language.

But they all seem very good-hearted. It just seems like they're coming from a different angle. From my position, probably like most people, absolutely knowing nothing about science, you just have to pick a side, really. So I have never seen any dinosaur fossils but i think probably evolution is the best story and it's similar with this if a person has a choice between you guys and someone else with crystals they're just picking because they're not doing any of

the investigation isn't the thing about the picking the size though you can still then check say the bibliography you can still check still check how deep you can go into... I mean, I'm always interested. Again, this weekend, people sent me so many links to various bizarre things, which really ruined the entire 48 hours. And the number of... You know, where I would watch and I think,

is this constantly a victory of cognitive dissonance, where you will see someone, for instance, talking about quantum behaviour, and then they'll say, when they're challenged, they'll will see someone, for instance, talking about quantum behaviour, and then they'll say, when they're challenged, they'll go, well, of course, I mean that as a metaphor, and then they immediately slip back into saying, actually, I do mean that as real physics. Oh, no, no, that's a metaphor.

And it's that bit of, I think you've talked about this, Ben, the hassle factor, this thing of where you watch someone, and you think, oh, my God, they've changed the terminology so many times. I am now lost. But if you find the science confusing, that is what all of it is. So I think that's a really important and interesting question, oh, my God, they've changed the terminology so many times. I am now lost. But if you find the science confusing, that is what all of it is. So I think that's a really important and interesting question, actually, is when they are speaking, using terminology inconsistently and coming out with what just sounds like verbal,

do they really think that that's what we do for a living when we write scientific papers? Like, do they really, really think that we're just kind of going, oh, confounding variables, crime factors, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now can I have a PhD, please? Well, I always think that's when designing aircraft. They don't really think the aircraft designer's going, the wings and... Make them cubic. And I suspect they they don't really think the aircraft designer's going and i suspect they probably don't i think they probably know that there is a kind of subjective

qualia of making sense to yourself right there is a there is something that it is like to know that you're to know what you're talking about and i think they must know that that's not their lived, subjective, conscious experience. It's really difficult to get yourself into the head of somebody who appears to be using language in a completely inconsistent and burbly way. But that's the power of, I think, self-belief, believing you're right, and the instincts, is that what sounds to you like a circular argument or a massive jump, or funny,

like a lot of the stuff that we've been reading for this, it's hilarious if you know what they're getting wrong. I think they believe it. Everything I read seemed like someone who was entirely convinced. I think what stops me being particularly generous is having had to deal with libel threats from people like this, where they get quite cross and not very generous but also they are notably unwilling to engage in a kind of serious discussion of the evidence for the claims that they've made so they'll leap immediately to personal smears they'll leap immediately to using the law to try and shut

you up to very to basically different forms of shut up and actually i think that this quantum terminology is being used effectively it's just another way of saying shut up don't challenge me i know you don't leave me alone yeah yeah i i think this is a similar i think i think that a large number of these people are very sincere i think that um it's a kind of seduction that that people trap that people fall into. I mean, I fall into it. I like my ideas to be right, and I don't like being wrong. But I'm wrong nearly all the time. So when it's a case of really interrogating

and trying to be honest with yourself, fight that massive bias that you think you know something. So you think you know something, you've got a theory about the world. That's a tremendously seductive position, especially when it gives meaning to your life. So I think a lot of these people are swept away by that. I think it's all human beings. The mind, it creates a model very early in life about how things work.

It's like when people are brought up very religious. And then what happens is anyone who's trying to absolutely sweep away that belief, you see as an enemy, which I think is why you're experiencing so much aggression and what i've enjoyed reading about recently is all these experiments they've done really cruelly with things like kittens they put kittens in their cage where they only showed them horizontal bars until they were six so the grown-up cats and then they put in horizontal ones and they all walked into the bars because they couldn't see them because it doesn't make sense to their world and i think really similarly if you believe in energy working in a certain way and you've used the language that you've learned anyone who disagrees with you you

think is part of some conspiracy because they don't they see you as the man like trying to stop them getting to the real truth the real spiritual happiness that we could all just have and what's so great about scientists is you have had to train yourself all the time with your minds not to ever let yourself go, I just feel this is right, I just know it's this. Whereas everyone else, we function like that, I think. So I think it's worth interrogating why we

find these people so spectacularly irritating. And I think part of that is obviously that they are adopting our clothes and our terminology and trying to borrow authority that we kind of feel that we don't even particularly want to have, because science is actually quite anti-authority. But I wonder if it's also because their projection of what they seem to think we are like feels so offensive. their projection of what they seem to think we are like feels so offensive. Because what they seem to think we're like is people who deliberately obfuscate, people who deliberately attempt to appear authoritative or threatening or hierarchical, wear white coats, constantly refer to ourselves as professors, as Brian Cox does.

But maybe what we really dislike is that they're giving us an incredibly ugly reflection of ourselves which we are adamant that we are not but is it also the the case that Carl Sagan often made this case very strongly and particularly in the demon haunted world is it's science is a candle in the dark the idea that because we live in a society that's that's based on science and particularly in your field of medicine respecting evidence and and society supporting evidence-based treatment supporting vaccination programs etc etc these things are very important and so it's more than just it hurts scientists feelings to have these people out there.

The more that it becomes acceptable to say, well, there are alternative ways of looking at reality. So whilst you as a doctor may say this is the best treatment, my guru over here says this. That actually can be dangerous and can indeed undermine public health programmes. I think that's right, but I think not so much locally. So I think i'm not particularly

upset or worried that individual people might be harmed because they go and get their cancer treated by some quantum energy guru um i mean i you know harm might be done but i'm almost willing to see that as a kind of consent issue um or uh that we need exactly yes sort of sadistic. Yeah, a voluntary self-administered tax on scientific ignorance with the price of death. That's some game show, isn't it? But I think what's actually more worrying is that when the value of science and evidence, and evidence-based practice,

whether it's in medicine or social policy, is undermined by people saying, well, actually, it doesn't really matter if you do evidence-based practice properly or not, you can just make up these flowery-sounding words. I think that's really corrosive, because that undermines all of our efforts to try and get more evidence-based practice in medicine,

in social policy, in education, in crime, everywhere. And that's, I think, what the real danger is. Not that some idiots go to talk to some other idiots and exchange cash. Well, that's what I want to ask. Because sometimes when you say woo merchants, we may have very specific ideas of these kind of gurus. But some things that I've heard as well, in terms of in general practice, etc.,

for a lot of the 20th century, a lot of the things that we would have received from people that we would consider to be the experts, from doctors, even within mainstream medicine, were there areas and are there still areas of woo there? Oh, definitely. Firstly, we weren't actually very good at evidence-based practice in medicine until fairly recently. actually very good at evidence-based practice in medicine until fairly recently so we didn't need to be very good at trials in the era of medicine when what we had either worked or didn't work sort of very dramatic life-saving things and we didn't have to be very good at evidence-based practice in the days when nobody really had anything much that worked so in the time when

homeopathy became very popular for example a lot of what mainstream doctors did was actively quite harmful like bloodletting. And actually, there are some, there's like, I think there's a cholera outbreak where people treated in the homeopathic hospital do better than people treated by the medics, for the simple fact that at least they were only handing out sugar pills. And so I think, historically, we've been quite bad at evidence-based practice, even now, Even now, I write all the time about the shortcomings in evidence-based medicine, how we fail to implement the noble principles of evidence-based practice. But the difference is at least we have these noble principles that we are attempting to manifest in our daily practice,

whereas quacks don't. Jeff, I think one of the problems, to get back to quantum theory, is that it's a theory that has... It has interpretations, for example. So it's an unusual theory in that what it means... It makes predictions that agree with experiment, but the meaning of the theory... There's the Copenhagen interpretation, the many-worlds interpretation.

So the impression is that there's space there for for debate and it's space into which the quacks can move and that's it that's right that's true um and it but it is true that we that there is a we don't know we certainly don't know what really is going on in the quantum world. We can't say that it's definitely the case that this particle is both here and there. Is it

here in one universe, there in another and there are all these extra universes or is this just a bookkeeping device for some phenomenon that we can't conceive, that we don't really understand? You know, we're trying to shoehorn a picture of the universe into something which is just not... doesn't fit in our heads. And the theory itself, in large part,

doesn't require... doesn't demand that we do that. It says, look, you just do what these rules say and you will get the answers to your experiments. But there is something called the measurement problem which sits at the heart of quantum mechanics and which is unsolved. And that is more or less interesting, depending on your position, but I think most people would accept that it's a problem, right,

and so that we don't have a complete theory of quantum physics. That idea has been invoked by really reputable physicists, people like Roger Penrose, really reputable physicists, people like Roger Penrose, in order to talk about quantum phenomena and the emergence of consciousness. So it's not very easy to dismiss that as a statement, that this is quackery. There's a bit of quantum mechanics that we don't understand.

And it may be an interesting area of research that could lead to insight into... It's speculative research, extremely speculative research. In the spirit of your one-minute introductions, can you give a one-minute summary of the measurement problem? Well, I'll try. How many people know what unitary evolution is? That would speed things up a little bit.

We have a theory which essentially says that a system that we're attempting to describe is described by something called a wave function. It's a mathematical function that describes a system. It could be anything. It could be a single particle. It could be a bunch of particles. And we have an equation called the Schrodinger equation, which essentially tells us how that wave function changes

as a function of time. And then, when we carry out an experiment we use that wave function to tell us the likelihood of getting a particular result but after we've got the result of the experiment the universe has changed completely it is now the state that was characterized by the measurement that we just made and then everything starts again and the the question is, what happened? What happened when you came in and did the measurement to change the world so that the subsequent evolution in your world is in accord? Because before that, anything could have happened. The outcome of your experiment could have been one of many possibilities,

but after you've performed the experiment, you've got one particular outcome, and it's that it's that issue which is not understood so you can see that uh well this is how this is how you you get people these sub-quantum gurus say things like well therefore because i can look at the world and change it i can look at my cancer and remove it so I can look at my cancer and remove it. So I can think my way into a different state of being. But is that the thing that happens? We're confused for electrons, which is that...

I don't know this, right, but when we see the behaviour... The double-slit experiment, probably one of the most famous experiments in terms of showing something behaving as a wave and a particle. And you'll know these incredible things where they go. And when unobserved, it appears that the particle goes through both slits, neither slits, individually... Now, if I'm left in a room with two doors and a screen at the back, if you're not observing me,

I presume that I don't then behave like a wave until observed, when you then see me splatted against the screen at the end. I don't know, though, that's what I'm saying, because a lot of what I see when I see some quantum is going, because electrons behave like that, all matter in the universe has got electrons in it, therefore there is electron behaviour in everything, and therefore the way we view the world is the same way that we might view an electron in a double-slit experiment.

Well, I mean, it's obviously nonsense, isn't it? You walk through one door or the other. I might not. I might be playing a trick. In any given universe, you walk through one door or the other. The possibility that in one universe you might walk through one and in another universe you might walk through the other is something which is conceivable. The many worlds

interpretation would have that as a possibility. The fact that it subsequently down the line might affect the results of an experiment, the fact that you did both, is just, even in the many worlds picture, statistically so highly improbable as to make no difference. But when one electron,

let's use the language of the many worlds, goes through one door, one slit, and the other one in two separate universes, then the actual probability of us making a measurement of where the electron's gone, and if we keep repeating it, it's as if the calculation was as if it went through both, and we had to remember both possibilities in order to compute the way that electrons hit that screen.

See, now, the way you said that, now, if I was making a film like What the Bleep Do We Know, I would go in, as Geoff's shown, therefore ghosts. You know, it's... But what's interesting, I think, is that they tend to leap between different explanatory levels. So you'll get quantum entanglement described, for example, and then there's a paper written by a homeopath

published in a homeopathic journal, which, amazingly, doesn't just have one letter in a very blank book, in which they try to say that what happens in the relationship between a homeopath and their patient is quantum entanglement because they have a relationship and they're kind of entangled in that relationship because they've talked to each other. And it's this very clumsy redeployment of language

from the level of particles up to the level of social interaction that I think feels to me as if it's not even trying very hard to manifest itself as quantum theory. Well, I was going to, Sarah, throw something at you, which is, as we were saying, we're both non-scientists, therefore this is from a book which deals amongst other things with with quantum healing okay and I'll ask you first of all your this this is about people who have had sometimes when an occasional spontaneous remission of cancer occurs yeah and the reason for this is such patients apparently

jump to a new level of consciousness that prohibits the existence of cancer. This is a quantum jump from one level of functioning to a higher level. Now, when you first hear that, I just wondered, what is your initial reaction? Well, first of all, I was cured of cancer. Thank you for that. And I think this is the thing, right, with not knowing certain things and how uncomfortable that feels. So for most people, if you get very sick or somebody that you know and you care about gets very sick, that is as senseless as anything.

Lots of things that happen in the world, we can't fit into making any sense. How is this fair? And then when something even more unexplainable, like that going away when your doctor, or many doctors told you that it wouldn't, I can understand. Again, I'm just trying to be empathetic,

if you're living in a grey area, it doesn't make you an idiot, it doesn't make you stupid, it makes you leave, you're feeling with emotions, and then you're finding explanations or picking anything that makes sense. That, to somebody, will make more sense than we don't understand why your cancer went away. One of the things that I find is most often misunderstood about science is that research scientists certainly operate on the edge of the known

and the unknown, on the dividing line between the two. That's the point. That's why you do research science. So being comfortable and delighted with not knowing is perhaps not a natural state. As Sarah said there, you want a narrative, you want explanations. That very same thought came when Sarah was speaking I really like to be it's a very important thing for me to be in a position where I don't know things so it being on that precipice and kind of it because it gives me an opportunity to learn something. And that sense of embracing ignorance and a lack of knowledge

and really liking it, really wanting to be there, I wonder where that came from, because I'm sure I wasn't like that when I was a six-year-old boy. I'm sure I thought I knew everything when I was a six-year-old, and probably certainly as a teenager. And I think it's come about having done lots of physics so having kind of been gone into physics and seeing how it works and then seeing that there is a type of knowledge which you can secure with hard work and and seeing how it delivers big ideas like quantum physics that have completely changed my world.

My perspective on the world has been transformed by it and I don't want, having secured that kind of certain knowledge to maybe this is perhaps an answer to what Ben was saying as well but it just terrifies me the concept of peddling or embracing ideas that are

wildly speculative and I'd rather just assume everything is wrong and enjoy the knowledge that I can secure. Certainty. There's a very famous passage in Brnofsky's Ascent of Man where he says that science is the most human of disciplines because it's the only discipline that acknowledges its own fallibility. In fact, it celebrates its own fallibility.

And perhaps that is the difference. What Sarah was saying about the fact that it's easy to characterize science as being rather sterile and rather inhuman, in a sense, whereas the other ways of looking at things are a bit more human. Well, in fact, I think Bronowski was absolutely right, that in fact, acknowledging your fallibility and saying that these are the things that we don't know, therefore we will say nothing about them but we will do research is actually the more human

response well and we actively welcoming criticism i mean the you know the q a after a work in progress seminar or a conference presentation is often a bloodbath but it's all consensual and in general people don't take it personally it's a kind of consenting intellectual s and m activity and we know we know that it's good for our soul and we welcome it and we want it because we know that that's how we will purify our ideas i think beyond your ideal picture of what scientific knowledge and discovery looks like there's also the kind of dirty reality and i i can't help thinking when i listen to you talking about quantum theory for example Jeff I glaze over a little bit I can catch some of it I don't fully get it but I trust that you're right and I think it's quite an unusual form of trust that I have for you so I know that there are social structures and systems in science that catch when people are wrong and call them out.

So for a start, I know that if you were ridiculously wrong or if the theories that you're describing were ridiculously wrong, then there would be an extensive literature demonstrating that they are wrong. I think also it's a bit like I can see that you operate in the same epistemological frameworks that I do, where ideas are shot down. But also, I'm aware that there are things which I trust

on the grounds that I once understood them, but can no longer remember them. So I'm not sure that this is holding together. So I use logistic regression, for example, in my work as an epidemiologist. And to do that, really, nowadays, I just type in the command in Stata, the stats package that runs some logistic regression on some data. There have been two occasions in my life when, for about 36 hours,

I feel like I've had a pretty good understanding of likelihood theory, which is the principles underlying logistic regression. I definitely couldn't explain it to you now. I have no recollection now of how likelihood theory works. But I remember what it was like to have a fairly kind of vertical, deep understanding of it. And I trust, therefore, that it's not complete rubbish, because I put a lot of effort in on two separate occasions, forgot it both times, two separate occasions to fully get it, and so I trust that. And in the same way that I trust myself in retrospect,

looking back at that effort and the subjective sense of the lightbulb going on that I had then, I kind of trust that you have that sense yourself, and so I'm willing to sort to project that trust over onto you. Have you ever been logistically regressed into a past life? But that's the thing, isn't it? That's exactly like what quantum entanglement people... What the quacks would do when they used quantum entanglement

to describe a relationship rather than... I think my trust in other scientists comes from... And I often ask this when I'm doing, like, PhD exams. So what did you do to demonstrate this is wrong? Like, how much have you tried to break what you've done? So I trust that professional scientists have spent a lot of time, and I expect the answer to that to be, oh, yeah, we tried everything, it just won't be wrong.

It's, you know, this be wrong it's stood up to and then they will list a long list of tests that they performed which verify that and if you have a similar conversation with somebody who pushes quantum woo or bamboozlement you'll often find that their answer

to the question what have you done to check if you're right or wrong their answer will be well, what have you done to check if you're right or wrong, their answer will be, well, I'm very, very open-minded. And that feels a little bit superficially like it's the same thing. But actually, in science, we start off by being open-minded to the possibility that we're wrong. But then we start doing some very specific stuff to try and show that we're wrong. We don't just keep our minds so open that our brains fall out. I've got a close relative who's ill.

And he's been undergoing healing for a long time. And to the point that now he has a guru. And he can travel out of his body. He goes into space. He sees things. He understands things. And that is a really real experience to him. So we could all argue against him for the rest of our lives and the rest of his life. And he would still think these people are unenlightened by what I've seen, by where I've been, because I was open-minded. Quite recently, I had dinner with him and his

family. And he said, and it's probably one of my favourite things anyone's ever said and he said that his guru works with David Icke and the thing is, if David Icke wasn't right why is everyone always trying to say that he's wrong? and that's beautiful why is everyone always trying to disprove him if he's not onto something? if they're not covering up? and this is the beautiful way that the human mind works um and this is why in a way we have to you have to

find fun in disagreeing with people rather than anger and i guess you guys have to take the moral high ground with that what i loved i read again like the cat study they did um cat scans actually on people's brains and they gave them a list of um and exactly the same positives and negatives about their favourite politician. This was in America. And then they scanned the brain and they found... So it was exactly an equal amount of criticisms and nice things about their favourite politician,

and asked them afterwards, was that a positive or negative list? And they all said positive, like virtually everyone, because we ignore what we don't want to see. And that's how non-scientists work all the time. That's how we create the world. Do you think, Sarah, that there is a problem here? Do you think we're here on monkey cage, that scientists lined up, and it's terrible,

these people who are misrepresenting our science. Do you think that there's a problem? You've outlined, in a sense, that there may be benefits if you've got a terminal illness, let's say, and it makes you feel better. Is there a problem, though? I think what's so important is allowing and it's difficult because you're scientists and this isn't what you need to allow so it's not me i mean as people that other people choose what works for them and that doesn't mean that you don't guys don't set out all of the facts as clearly as you can because that gives people the option all the time and that's the

fairest and best thing you can do do you need to argue with them do you guys need to go and stand outside with placards outside a homeopathic clinic no well actually i mean what i think is actually quite gracious about most of the quack busting activity in the uk at any rate is that for the most part it's about principles rather than people and actually i I'm not a consumer journalist. I don't want to stop people going to see quacks. I'm actually not bothered by that. I find it more interesting than I do dangerous. And I think it's really interesting because the fact that people buy into this stuff,

spend money on it, but also spend time and invest emotional energy in it, is really interesting because it tells us a lot about the role of science and medicine in culture and the challenges that we have to meet in explaining medicine better. But I don't think I actually want to stop people doing it because I kind of find it more interesting than dreadful. There's also a lot of books in it. If they stop doing it, that's the end of your book career, isn't it?

What are you going to write about then? I've got other fish to fry. So we asked the audience a question as well. Particles can be entangled with each other. We are made of particles. Therefore, we must be entangled with each other. So who would you like to have a three-legged race with and why? Please show working out.

So what have we got? Kylie Minogue, because she called me her mini-me. What? Someone said that? How small must someone be to be the mini-me of Kylie Minogue? There's only Kylie Minogue in here somewhere. Schrodinger's cat, we'd be at the beginning and the end at the same time, as long as no-one looked. Emily J.

The surfer, Laird Hamilton. He'd always be ahead when the waveform collapses. I felt that deserved more, but it's been a long recording. Angelina Jolie, why worry about winning the race? Saucy. Oh, yeah, Brian Cox, because his hair is so perfect, he could never become entangled, but it's so loose as well. He had his old hair stolen at

Christmas. Anyway, so... He's decided... He's now decided that I have a wig. I think it is! Because your face is very smooth. Because there was a quote that we saw which was all about... In, I think, one of the books about... What was it? There's a book which is all about using quantum to defy

ageing. And I thought, what a load of rubbish. And then I looked at you and I thought, he does look young, doesn't he? And it's where he works. That's his area, isn't it? So thank you very much to our guests, Sarah Pascoe, Geoff Foreshaw and Ben Goldacre. Next week, we are discussing what's the point of plants? I know, but I don't know where we came up with that subject. Let's get rid of the plants, says Radio 4.

Angry caps lock emails arrive. Thank you very much for listening and goodbye. APPLAUSE before angry caps lock emails arrive. Thank you very much for listening, nice again. you