Billion Dollar Scam: Quantum Mysticism's Fake Physics

If you've spent much time consuming content related to self-help, personal growth, or psychology, you've probably seen the word quantum pop up at some point. Quantum shift, >> quantum leap, >> quantum mechanics, >> quantum entanglement, >> quantum reality, >> quantum computing, quantum quantum quantum, >> quantum quantum, quantum field, quantum physics. You might be asking yourself, why did so many spiritual self-help guru types become interested in physics? I asked myself that question and I ended up learning a little bit about what a quantum actually is and a lot more about the self-help industry, including the secret, the law of attraction, and how pseudocience works. To get what's going on here, it's helpful to have a basic grasp of what a quantum is. Because when you understand something, it's a lot easier to see how people are misusing it. And for the record, I'm not a physicist. If you are, please straighten out any details I get wrong in the comments. I'm just trying my best here. Before we started studying atoms and other very very small things, there were scientists like Sir Isaac Newton who described the world based on what they could directly observe. That framework which is now known as classical mechanics is very good at describing the behavior of everyday objects. But when objects get either very small or very fast, classical mechanics starts to fall apart a bit. And that's where quantum mechanics comes in. The word quantum comes from the Latin for amount. And in physics, a quantum refers to the smallest chunk you can break something into. For example, a photon is the quantum of light. We can't break light into a chunk that's any smaller than a photon. And while classical mechanics describes the macroscopic world, quantum mechanics tries to describe how matter and light behave at microscopic scales. In quantum theory, very very small objects like electrons and photons are described by a wave function that can produce what are called wavelike effects such as interference. But when we measure these things that behave like waves and therefore they should be diffuse and spread out, they show up at a single place and a single time. In other words, they look an awful lot like a particle. This tension is known as wave particle duality. And on a macroscopic level, we can't see this because everyday objects have very very very tiny wavelengths. And more importantly, because observing wave particle duality usually requires very controlled conditions. And when we start interacting with the environment, it tends to mess things up. We'll talk about this a little bit more later. And this means that the rules that seem to govern our macroscopic day-to-day life are different from the rules that seem to work at the microscopic level. And this means that the conclusions and theories that come from these differences can sound downright freaky. A very famous example of this is Schrodinger's cat, which is a thought experiment that illustrates something called quantum superposition. Then there are more speculative ideas like string theory, which models particles as these tiny one-dimensional uh strings and aims, among other things, to reconcile quantum mechanics with gravity. Once you've gone that far, it's really easy to fall down a YouTube rabbit hole. You start learning about many worlds theory. You fly straight off the deep end and suddenly realize that it's 3:00 a.m. and you still need to finish some work. Not that I speak from any personal experience here. Okay. So, what does any of this have to do with self-help? In the mid 1970s, there was this group of young physicists and other researchers who began meeting informally at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Goars to argue about what quantum mechanics meant and to discuss a bunch of ideas that mainstream physics mostly ignored at the time. They called themselves, I kid you not, they actually named this group this, the fundamental physics group. That's with an F and a Y. And some members of the group were fascinated by parasychology. They hoped that quantum mechanics might eventually explain sigh phenomena like telepathy or uh psychokinesis. And one member of the group wrote the dao of physics which attempted to draw parallels between these elements of quantum physics and eastern spirituality. It became a cult classic and it really helped to popularize the style of thinking that we're experiencing the consequences of today. If reality is really weird when we get down to the bottom of it, who knows? Maybe it's quantum can start to sound like an appealing explanation for people when they really don't understand what's going on. Because quantum physics is both technically difficult to understand, I really found that out while preparing for this video, and it's often very counterintuitive. And because of that, it is a absolutely wonderful dance partner for pseudocience. Most people really understandably do not know the details of quantum physics. and its actual findings already sound pretty out there. So, it's really easy to attach even wilder claims to those things without them seeming out of place. It's also a field where we're just still learning a lot and there are a lot of unanswered questions. And the phrase we're not sure yet, is often taken by artists as permission to just make things up. All you need to add is an authoritative voice, some misused technical terms, uh a lot of theory that doesn't have any testable claims attached to it, and ideally an expensive paid course. Huh. >> Now, over time, we've learned more about how physics works at the quantum level. But that hasn't stopped personal growth types from making all kinds of ridiculous claims. >> If we realize that everything material is an illusion, then who is creating the illusion? Are we participants in the creation of the universe? Literally, >> this brand of quackery is known as quantum mysticism or quantum woo. It's when people use scientific sounding language and terms borrowed from physics as a kind of Trojan horse for metaphysical nonsense. A great example of this is Deepo Chopra and his concept of quantum healing. Uh this is his to be clear totally theory that people can use their mind to age in reverse. Another is the secret which leans on these vague references to quantum mechanics as a justification for the law of attraction which we'll be talking about in a little bit. Since then the word has cropped up just all over the place. In the next 12 minutes I'm going to explain exactly what quantum manifestation is and how to use it to shape your reality. Every part of my life has changed once I understood how quantum physics works and how to apply it to my life. >> I've witnessed clients double, triple, quadruple their income using these quantum tools. >> So that's when I came up with the idea for quantum field healing. >> For most people, they're unaware of the quantum field. And if you're unaware of it, it doesn't exist for you. >> To say something that's probably obvious to you if you clicked on this video, there's no evidence for any of this. It's just technobabble and it's used to make nonsense sound scientific and it drives people who study physics up the wall. There are all of these videos of physicists trying to explain physics to Dr. Chopra. They are some of my absolute favorite videos. And the dude is just absolutely convinced that he knows more about physics than they do. >> What's your question? And to whom >> would be to Deepo to say, um, would you like to have a short course in quantum mechanics sometime so that we can straighten out your slightly misuse of quantum notation? >> Physicist Murray Galman coined the phrase quantum flap doodle to refer to the misuse and misapplication of quantum physics to other topics. And this flap doodle seems to be everywhere. Now, there are probably some instances of the word quantum being used defensively in a personal development context. For example, people will use a quantum leap as a kind of useful metaphor, even if it's fudging the exact meaning of that term a little bit. >> A quantum leap is basically where you move from one state to another. And so, as it relates to your life, a quantum leap is kind of like a quick level up in your life. But the overwhelming majority of the time it's used incorrectly or even worse as an excuse for why an idea has no evidence to support it. You know, we don't know, maybe it's quantum. The most common and popular example of this is the law of attraction and particularly The Secret. If you are somehow not familiar, The Secret is a 2006 documentary based on the self-help book by the same name. The film is basically a series of interviews with so-called secret teachers whose backgrounds include some mix of psychology, philosophy, theology, and self-help. It became hugely popular, particularly after receiving high-profile endorsements from a bunch of people that you probably know the names of, including Oprah. >> I am a powerful manifesttor. The book and the film are based on the law of attraction which claims that positive or negative thoughts bring positive or negative experiences into a person's life and it includes three claims. First, people and their thoughts are made from pure energy. Second, like energy attracts like energy and third, thoughts become things. This means if you repeatedly visualize an outcome and you think and feel as if it's already true and you eliminate some of your limiting beliefs along the way, the universe will deliver. Much like Dr. Chopra, it uses some vague claims related to quantum mechanics. Here's the uh the core of it. It has long been known that matter or physical objects are also just packets of energy at the submicroscopic quantum level. And so as your thought radiates out, it attracts the energy and frequencies of like thoughts, like objects, and even like people, and draws those things back to you. It follows then that your thoughts become things. Does it does it follow then that that happens? I'm Anyways, uh these claims are a complete misunderstanding or a deliberate misrepresentation. I really can't tell of physics and there is no empirical evidence that supports the secret. The law of attraction is considered a pseudo science. But if you're inclined to give these people the benefit of the doubt, a fair question is where did this idea come from? Why do so many people think their thoughts and their energy can directly alter reality? The simple answer is that this is a misunderstanding of what's called the quantum observer effect. I've already mentioned one of the better known examples of this, which is Schrodinger's cat. If you don't want to get too far into the weeds here, you can skip this section and jump to the next one. But I am a huge nerd and I found this stuff totally fascinating. Also, this was really pushing my limits and uh my understanding of the science here. So, I hope that I communicate all of this in a way that makes sense. Okay, Schrodinger's cat. This is a thought experiment that comes from a 1935 conversation between physicist Irwin Schrodinger and some guy named Albert Einstein. To be clear, this was not an actual experiment. It was just a thought experiment that was trying to show how weird quantum stuff looks when you scale it up to the size of an everyday object. In this thought experiment, a cat is put into a sealed box with a tiny radioactive source and a geer counter. That's a uh that's a device that can detect radioactive decay and a vial of poison linked to a hammer. The odds of decay which releases radioactivity are 50/50. And if the geer counter detects any radioactivity, it triggers the hammer which smashes the vial and kills the cat. If it doesn't, Boots survives another day. Now, here's where things get weird. In Schrodinger's experiment, there's a 50% chance the cat is alive and a 50% chance the cat is dead, but it's in a box, and you don't know if it's alive or if it's dead. So, you, a normal human, are probably thinking something like, "Well, great. The cat is either alive or dead. Who cares?" And then I say, "I care. Boots matters to me." But then a quantum physicist comes in and they say actually the cat is both alive and dead. Wait, what? Okay. In ordinary life, uncertainty usually means something is already true, but we just don't know it yet. If you think about flipping a coin and then hiding it in your hand, you don't know whether it's heads or tails, but one of those things is definitively true. Not knowing what the coin is doesn't change what the coin is. And opening my hand doesn't affect the coin enough to change it. But in the theory of quantum mechanics, there is a wave equation that determines the state of a quantum system. When we don't know the exact state of that system because to be clear, we haven't measured it yet. There are many different possible states that it could be in. This is called quantum superposition. It's a mathematical combination of all of the different possibilities that describes the system. And up until the moment that you measure it mathematically, the system is thought of as being in all of those states at the same time. But why do they do it that way? And not just say, well, either could be true. The cat is either dead or alive. And you know, we we just don't know it yet. This is where it gets really wild because in those microscopic quantum situations, super positions, all of those possible positions the thing could be in actually interfere with each other in a way that it's either this or it's that just doesn't explain. It really does seem like both things are true at the same time. And this is completely brainmelting to think about. The most famous example of this is the double slit experiment, and I'm not going to get into that one because the video is already too long. Okay, so what does all of this have to do with the law of attraction and self-help and all that good stuff. Remember that final claim, thoughts can become things. One of the big problems in quantum physics is called the measurement problem. Superpositions exist in theory, but measurements can only have a single definitive result. So, if the cat is both alive and dead, when does it transform into being just alive or just dead? A common shorthand answer is when it's observed, which takes us to another big question. What's the observer doing exactly? And the observer effect is the idea that we can't measure something without physically interacting with it. The word observer is actually a bit confusing here uh because it's really more like the measurer. It doesn't need to be a living observer. For example, in Schroinger's experiment, the geer counter is observing the system by measuring whether decay is happening. Everyday examples of this can be a little helpful for understanding how observing a system messes with it. Uh, for example, if you check the the pressure of a tire on your car, you're probably going to let a little bit of air out. But this is taken to the max in quantum systems. Quantum measurement is incredibly specific and extreme. We're talking about these tiny tiny tiny scales and at these scales the interaction that's required to get information can fundamentally change what state the system is in. Going all the way back to the coin uh flip example that I gave. It would be like if the coin were volatile enough that opening your hand was enough to change whether it was heads or tails. And this is where we get all the way back to the law of attraction. The law of attraction takes a real idea from quantum mechanics that measurement affects a system and it starts playing very fast and loose with it. If our observation is a part of the process, then it could suggest to somebody particularly to somebody who has a bit of an agenda to push that the mind or the consciousness of the person doing the observing is affecting things. And that idea was really appealing to people who already had a metaphysical bend. So they just took it and ran with it without really caring much about whether or not it was demonstrabably true. And as near as we can tell, it just isn't. There's nothing special about it being a person that's the observer. A geer counter doesn't need a mind or a consciousness or, you know, the magical power of thoughts to take a measurement. It's not thinking about the cat or praying that the cat is alive that alters the system. It's when a person physically interacts with it. You see this kind of bait and switch tactic all over the quantum self-help stuff. They'll start with a truth statement like measurement affects a quantum system or a useful idea like thinking you can do something makes it more likely you'll do it. And then they will just lead you through a series of logical leaps to kind of similar but really totally different ideas like my thoughts create my reality. In fact, you have a Wi-Fi signal and if the thought sends the signal out and the feeling draws the event back to us, you get the new car, you get the new relationship, you get the better health. And this is one of the big challenges of the secret. There are actually genuinely useful ideas from psychology that are buried under all of the metaphysical frosting. Believing that you can accomplish something does make it more likely that you're going to try in the first place or that you'll keep going if things get hard and that you'll bounce back if something doesn't go your way. A sense of individual power and agency is generally healthy for people. There's even research out there like Barbara Frederickson's work on positive upward spirals that suggests that positive emotions can uh kind of nudge people toward greater emotional well-being which then creates more positive emotions and so on and so on which could be thought of as a form of like attracting like if you're willing to interpret that pretty loosely. But you're not going to sell millions of copies of a book by saying believing you can do something is the first step to doing it. You turn on the money printer when you turn on the printer. And even if we ignore all of the metaphysical stuff, the reasonable common sense advice that's in the secret is outweighed by one of its big problems. It's essentially an elaborate form of victim blaming. If somebody's circumstances are based on the power of their thoughts and we call in the things that happen to us based on the energy those thoughts emit, then our suffering is by definition self-inflicted. This view is stated very clearly on Oprah's website. The energy you put into the world, both good and bad, is exactly what comes back to you. The implications of this get ugly pretty quickly. I don't think that children with cancer are calling that in, and things take a really grim turn once you start to consider various historical atrocities. The Secret is also a great example of survivorship bias. The people giving the keynote talk about manifesting are almost by definition people for whom there was some combination of talent and privilege and sheer luck mixed with hard work. How convenient to reframe that luck as virtue. I'm here because my thoughts were pure. Believing in yourself is probably a necessary condition for achievement, but it's not the only condition. or uh to share a proverb, pray to God, but row away from the rocks. The part of this to me that makes it really difficult to talk about is that these problems are also mostly what attracts people to the law of attraction in the first place. In a world that feels chaotic and unreliable, we want to believe that we're in control of our lives. If there is somebody out there who's wearing a suit and they have doctor in front of their name and you know, sure it's a doctor of chiropractic from Life University, but still, if that person tells you that there is a secret to reclaiming total control over your life, it's really easy to see why that's an attractive sales pitch. The law of attraction gives us a person to blame when things go wrong. Yeah, it's you, but that's actually comforting because at least somebody is in charge. And this reminds me a bit of a very welldocumented psychological pattern. When a child is neglected or abused by a caregiver, they face what I can only call a horrible choice. They have two options. They can believe that their caregiver is unreliable or unsafe and therefore the caregiver is the problem. Or they can think that the caregivers's behavior is a rational reaction to the child, therefore the child is the problem. The first interpretation is completely terrifying. They are trapped. They are powerless and they are going to suffer until they can escape. The second interpretation is more appealing because it preserves two things that a child desperately needs. First, a sense of predictability and second, a sense of agency. And it is poignant to realize that children are so reliant on their caregivers for their survival and so desperate for their support and their validation and their love that they would rather think that they are the problem in order to have even a false sense of control over their environment. And in much the same way, if the universe is random and indifferent, we're at its mercy. Luck really matters. But if our thoughts control our reality, we have power, even if the price is accepting responsibility for things that we don't actually control. There's a reasonable distinction to be made here between some of the truly deranged law of attraction stuff. These are people who think that they can literally manifest money. So guys, I want to give you three ways to manifest money within 24 hours. Now, I know some of you will think that sounds like crazy. >> Yeah. Then on the other hand, people who combine some metaphysical language with mostly reasonable advice. For example, visualization is often used as a coaching technique for athletes and for performers. I've done a lot of that myself as a dancer and there's evidence that it can improve performance. I've definitely found it helpful. It's also frequently advocated for by people who believe in the law of attraction. And in a perfectly ordinary, non-magical sense, you can really see how it would be helpful. Now, did that visualization literally pull that outcome toward you through the power of your vibrations? Probably not. Uh, but that doesn't mean that it didn't help. And that's kind of the mess of this whole thing. The problem with The Secret and the Law of Attraction isn't just that it attributes causation to the wrong factors or plays very fast and loose, and I'm being charitable here with quantum science. It's how it makes those claims that's so problematic. It wraps ordinary psychology in mystical language and then turns that language into a self- validating system. If it worked for you, it's because the law of attraction is real. And if it didn't, it's because your vibrations were impure. The claim is immune to evidence because it has no interest in evidence. The more I've bumped into this stuff, the more convinced I am that these people just do not care about what's true. They care about how they feel. The secret is a gateway drug. Once you accept we don't have evidence, but maybe it's quantum as a legitimate explanation for things, you have opened the door to an an entire marketplace of awful ideas. And people carry this kind of non-evidentiary thinking to use some vocab here into everything into their choices about health and relationships and finance and politics and all of it. To be a little edgy here, I don't know what the correlation is between people who believe in the secret and people who think that vaccines cause autism, but I'd imagine that there's a lot of overlap in this kind of evidence agnostic approach then trains people to care about vibes and charisma more than reality. And this isn't an accident. People who think that way are exploitable. And I don't think it's a completely unrelated coincidence that Deepo recently showed up in the Epstein files talking about how God is a construct but cute girls are real and asking Epstein, "Did you find me a cute Israeli?" Moving people away from reality. From reasonable standards of evidence and toward magical thinking is a great way to set yourself up as an authority figure and then to convince those susceptible people to give you money. People who exploit others and abuse their position in one domain tend to do it in other domains. And it is deeply ironic to me that it's the people who are most concerned about brainwashing and thought control and the government is out to get you man who seem to be the most susceptible to this kind of thing. You don't need excessively scientific quantum language to justify doing the basics. taking action, building skills, asking for help, being a genuinely kind person while accepting that life contains randomness and injustice while we do what we can anyways. That's the real secret. It's just hard to sell a million books based on something that is so simple. I hope you enjoyed today's video. I learned a lot while putting this one together. If you liked it and you thought it was valuable and you thought somebody else could benefit from it, I would really appreciate it if you shared it around a little bit. You can also subscribe to the channel, hit the like button, all the things that people tell you to do on YouTube. I'm really interested in the comments on this one. I'm sure I'm going to get some comments that are not the biggest fan of this video, but that's frankly just the price of doing business. It is what it is. And I'm I'm really interested in anybody who feels like I got aspects of the science wrong or there was some kind of a detail in all of this that I messed up. I I would personally love to learn more about this. I found it really interesting. And uh yeah, I hope you have a great day. I hope you enjoyed the video and until next time, I'll talk to you soon. When you stop thinking, there's a wonderful thing that happens in the brain.

Why are so many self-help gurus obsessed with quantum physics? The answer involves a 1970s group of hippie physicists, Schrödinger's famous cat, the observer effect, The Secret, the Law of Attraction, my main man Deepak, plenty of pseudoscience, and a billion dollar cash grab. Along the way we'll cover some genuinely weird (and very interesting) findings from quantum mechanics, why it's a perfect dance partner for bullshit, and why "who knows, maybe it's quantum" might be the most dangerous phrase in self-help. Really enjoyed putting this one together, let me know what you think. Chapters: 0:00 Quantum Mysticism 0:58 Wait, What's A Quantum? 3:27 A Brief History of Bullshit 8:31 From Quantum to Quackery 11:05 Letting the Cat Out of the Bag (quantum science) 17:08 The Secret and its Discontents 22:10 The Price of Magical Thinking Subscribe to Being Well on: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/being-well-with-dr-rick-hanson/id1120885936 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5d87ZU1XY0fpdYNSEwXLVQ Who Am I: I'm Forrest, the co-author of Resilient (https://amzn.to/3iXLerD) and host of the Being Well Podcast (https://apple.co/38ufGG0). I'm making videos focused on simplifying psychology, mental health, and personal growth. Subscribe to Rick on YouTube: http://youtube.com/@RickHanson?sub_confirmation=1 Get Rick's Free Newsletters: https://rickhanson.com/writings/newsletters-from-dr-rick-hanson/ Follow Rick Here: 🌍 https://rickhanson.com/ 📸 https://www.instagram.com/rickhansonphd You can follow me here: 🎤 https://apple.co/38ufGG0 🌍 https://www.forresthanson.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/f.hanson