How to Teach Physics to Your Dog (28 page)

One of the two main areas worked by scam artists abusing quantum theory is the field of “free energy.” Free energy scammers always claim to have developed a scheme that will produce huge amounts of energy for a trivial amount of work. This takes lots of different forms, but the basic appeal is always the same: you put a small amount of work in, and get a large amount of electricity out. All it will take is a small investment of cash to get the prototype system working, and soon you’ll be out from under the thumb of the power company forever . . .

This is nothing more than a claim to have invented a perpetual motion machine, and scientists have known for hundreds of years that perpetual motion machines are impossible. Quantum mechanics does not change that conclusion.

The most common phony explanation for a “quantum” perpetual motion machine is that it is tapping the zero-point energy
of some system or another. This zero-point energy is the energy that quantum physics tells us is present even in a system in its lowest possible energy state. When you’ve extracted all the energy that you can from a quantum system—reduced the kinetic energy to its lowest possible value and removed outside interactions that would raise the potential energy—there is still some residual energy left in the system.

Hucksters like to point to this zero-point energy as a resource to be tapped. “There’s still energy there,” they say, “and our device taps that energy to keep the perpetual motion machine moving.”

We saw in
chapter 2
(page 52), though, that zero-point energy exists because matter is fundamentally wavelike, and quantum particles must always have some wavelength. For the energy of a system to truly be zero, it would have to be perfectly still at a specific position, and that is impossible for any system described by a wave. Zero-point energy, like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, is a consequence of the fundamental wave nature of matter. Just as there is no way to evade the limits imposed by uncertainty, there is no way to extract the zero-point energy to do useful work. Trying to use the zero-point energy is like asking for half a photon—it’s a request that makes no sense.

Probably the most successful proponent of free energy via bogus quantum theory to date is a company called Black Light Power. Bob Park of the University of Maryland and the American Physical Society has spent nearly twenty years debunking the claims of the company’s founder, Randell Mills, which is well covered in Park’s book
Voodoo Science: The Path from Foolishness to Fraud
(Oxford, 2000). Despite Park’s efforts, though, Black Light Power is still around, peddling a remarkable energy-generating process in which (according to their website) “energy is released as the electrons of hydrogen atoms are induced by a catalyst to transition to lower-energy levels (i.e., drop to lower base orbits around each atom’s nucleus) corresponding
to fractional quantum numbers.” These mysterious lower-energy hydrogen atoms, called “hydrinos,” are claimed to have all sorts of magical properties, supposedly enabling new high-voltage batteries and miraculous light sources (none of which are available yet, but they’re promised any day now).

This sounds impressively science-y, but even a dog can tell that it’s nonsense. Hydrogen is the simplest atom in the universe, consisting of a single proton orbited by a single electron. The first quantum model of hydrogen was put forward by Niels Bohr in 1913, and a full quantum treatment was developed using the Schrödinger equation in the 1920s. Quantum electrodynamics was first applied to hydrogen in 1947, and modern QED models of hydrogen agree with experimental results to the same phenomenal precision as the measurements of the electron g-factor. The hydrogen atom is one of the best understood and most precisely tested systems in the universe.

Modern physics leaves no room for states “below the ground state” in hydrogen. For such states to exist, our understanding of fundamental physics would need to be so far wrong that it would be impossible to achieve the fourteen-decimal-place agreement between experiment and theory that we see with QED.

Another commonly cited source of “quantum” free energy is the “vacuum energy.” This is just a variant of the zero-point energy scheme that purports to tap the zero-point energy of empty space—the constantly appearing and disappearing sea of virtual particles that QED shows must exist.

“Vacuum energy” schemes are no more possible than “hydrino” power. Empty space does contain energy in the form of virtual particles, but those particles appear at random, and disappear again in a tiny fraction of a second. We have no way of making electrons appear on demand, nor do we have any way of making them stick around to do useful work. Vacuum energy exerts a small but real influence on electrons and other particles, but it is not an energy resource that can be tapped.

Any claim of perpetual motion or “free energy” is essentially a claim that you can get something for nothing. Any dog knows, deep down, that that’s not possible—you don’t get treats without doing some sort of a trick. Throwing the word “quantum” around doesn’t change that basic fact: you can’t get something from nothing. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something.

“I thought you said virtual particles did become real, as in Hawking radiation?”

“Sort of. The idea is that an electron and a positron can appear right at the edge of a black hole, in such a way that one of them falls into the black hole, while the other escapes.”

“Right, so electrons are created out of nothing!”

“Wrong. When a virtual electron becomes real through the Hawking process, the black hole actually
loses
a bit of mass, to make up for it. The energy to make the real electron doesn’t come from the vacuum energy, it comes from the black hole, which gets whittled away to nothing, one virtual particle at a time.”

“So, I guess it’s not much use as a power source, then?”

“No, not really. Even assuming you could contain and control a black hole, it would be consumed through the power generation process, just like anything else. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

“Yes there is. You never charge me for lunch. Or breakfast, or dinner, or snacks . . .”

“You earn your food by being cute.”

“Oh, yeah. And protecting the house from evil squirrels!”

“That, too. Speaking of which . . .”

The other main source of misused quantum mechanics is “alternative” medicine. Bookstores and the Internet abound with people
pitching quantum mechanics as the key to health, wealth, and long life.

The most common form of these claims involves quantum measurement. Hucksters note that in quantum theory states aren’t determined until they are measured. They then claim that the key to health is simply to measure yourself as healthy. You can live forever, in this line of thinking, by running a quantum Zeno effect experiment on yourself—if you’re always measuring yourself to be in fine health, quantum measurement will see to it that you never get sick.

The best example of this line of quantum quackery is Deepak Chopra, who even has a book titled
Quantum Healing
(Bantam, 1990), the first of a string of bestselling alternative medicine books. What is “quantum healing,” you ask? Chopra offers a one-paragraph explanation in a 1995 interview:

Quantum healing is healing the bodymind from a quantum level. That means from a level which is not manifest at a sensory level. Our bodies ultimately are fields of information, intelligence and energy. Quantum healing involves a shift in the fields of energy information, so as to bring about a correction in an idea that has gone wrong. So quantum healing involves healing one mode of consciousness, mind, to bring about changes in another mode of consciousness, body.
*

He uses a lot of scientific-sounding terms, but this is just word salad. It has all the scientific validity of the technobabble on old episodes of
Star Trek
—all he’s missing is a call to “reverse the polarity” of something.

He expands on these ideas in
Ageless Body, Timeless Mind
(Harmony, 1994) whose subtitle promises a “Quantum Alternative
to Getting Old.” His explanation of the physical basis of his ideas shows an impressive ignorance of history, boldly declaring that “Einstein taught us that the physical body, like all material objects, is an illusion, and trying to manipulate it can be like grasping the shadow and missing the substance” (p. 10). This is almost exactly the opposite of Einstein’s view, as we saw in
chapter 7
. Einstein was profoundly disturbed by the idea of quantum indeterminacy, which Chopra takes to an entirely new level, arguing that nothing actually exists:

Because there are no absolute quantities in the material world, it is false to say that there even is an independent world “out there.” The world is a reflection of the sensory apparatus that registers it . . . All that is really “out there” is raw, unformed data waiting to be interpreted by you, the perceiver. You take “a radically ambiguous flowing quantum soup” as physicists call it,
*
and use your senses to congeal the soup into the solid three-dimensional world. [p. 11]

While he acknowledges that this descent into solipsism may sound “disturbing,” perhaps because congealed soup sounds unappealing, he sees this as a feature, not a bug, writing that “there is incredible liberation in realizing that you can change your world—including your body—
simply by changing your perception
.” (pp. 11–12) In other words, since nothing really exists, you might as well be healthy, wealthy, and youthful. It’s all just a matter of “perception,” which is to say, measurement.

The idea of “quantum healing,” using the active nature of quantum measurement to ensure good health, suffers from two
major problems. The first problem is that Chopra and other authors are applying quantum ideas to systems that are far too large to show quantum effects. As we’ve seen again and again throughout this book, quantum effects are extremely difficult to tease out, and the larger the system being studied, the harder it is to see quantum effects. The largest object ever seen in a quantum superposition state is a collection of about a billion electrons (see
chapter 4
, page 101), while the quantum Zeno effect (
chapter 5
) has only been demonstrated with single particles.

The bigger problem, though, is that quantum measurements are fundamentally random. The state of a quantum system is indeterminate until a measurement is made, and the specific outcome of an individual measurement cannot be predicted. It doesn’t matter whether you subscribe to a Copenhagen-like interpretation in which the wavefunction collapses to a single value, or a many-worlds-like interpretation in which you simply perceive a single branch of an ever-expanding wavefunction, or even Chopra’s congealed soup interpretation: there is no way to know in advance how a given quantum measurement will turn out.

There may very well be a branch of the wavefunction of the universe in which every dog enjoys perfect health and an infinite supply of fat, slow bunnies, but there is no way to influence measurement outcomes to reach that universe. Meditation doesn’t help, positive thinking won’t get the job done, drugs don’t do any good—there is no known way to influence the quantum structure of the universe to generate a particular outcome of a quantum measurement, and no scientific study has ever detected a hint of one. If it were possible to achieve great things simply by wanting them badly enough, physicists would have a much easier time demonstrating quantum effects,
*
and dogs would never lack for steak, cheese, and bunnies.

Meditation may lower your stress level, and thinking positive thoughts may improve your mood, and either of those things may make you feel better about your lot in life and thus help you find the energy to catch that bunny. There’s nothing quantum about that, though, and you’re not tapping into the deep structure of the universe in any meaningful way.

“You’re right about the meditation thing. Meditating really helps me lower my stress level.”

“Since when do you meditate?”

“Since always. I have Buddha nature. I like to meditate in the sun in the backyard.”

“That’s not meditating, that’s sleeping. Your eyes are closed, and you snore.”

“That’s not snoring, that’s . . . a mantra.”

“You’re ridiculous. What stress do you have, anyway?”

“Oh, my life is very hard. I have to worry about whether to sleep in the living room, or the dining room, or the office. I worry about why you’re not petting me, why you’re not giving me treats . . .”

“Okay, stop it. You’re giving me a headache.”

“You should try meditating!”

Another common form of quantum quackery is claiming quantum nonlocality as a basis for “alternative” or “traditional” medicine. The claim is that the correlations seen in Bell’s theorem and the Aspect experiments show that there is some deeper, “transcendent,” level of reality. This supposedly produces a connection between all living things, and practitioners can use this connection to diagnose problems or even heal people without actually touching them. It’s also the alleged basis for all sorts of ESP phenomena.

The most extreme variant of this idea is found in books like
Distant Healing,
by Jack Angelo (Sounds True, 2008), which proclaims:

Quantum mechanics scientists believe that the unified field theory connects everything in the universe including gravity, nuclear reactions, electromagnetic fields, and human consciousness. Modern physics, then, supports the finding of Distant Healing that thought forms, such as ideas and information, are able to travel from one part of the human family to another via a network of consciousness. [pp. 180–81]

Again, this is
Star Trek
–level stuff. There is no “unified field theory” in physics—indeed, the
lack
of a unified field theory is one of the great challenges of modern physics. Even if there were a unified field theory, “human consciousness” is not one of the elements it would include.