Thankfully the slick science magazine Nautilus (at https://nautil.us/) is now a subscription affair in which an average person can only read 2 articles per time period. This means that fewer people will be misled by its often misleading articles that so often state things that are false. An example is a recent article by physicist Jim Al-Khalili in which he included psychic phenomena in a list of thing he claims have "no basis in reality."
No one should be surprised by Al-Khalili's ignorance on this topic, because judging from the list of his writings on his Google Scholar profile, he shows zero signs of ever having studied paranormal phenomena or psychic phenomena. A decent study of the evidence for psychic phenomena and paranormal phenomena requires a very careful reading of hundreds of long volumes (50 of which are listed here), and the average physicist who denies the possibility of such realities has read none of those volumes. We should remember that when "won't study the evidence" physicists lecture us about psychic phenomena, it means as little as some cab driver lecturing us dogmatically about quantum chromodynamics or some plumber dogmatically stating his opinion about the physics of neutron stars.
The time Al-Khalili spent writing a book on the fantasy subjects of space-time wormholes, parallel universes and time machines (which no one has ever claimed to have observed) would have been much better spent studying the abundant empirical evidence for psychic phenomena and paranormal phenomena (which a host of distinguished observers have observed, often under controlled laboratory conditions). Something seems to have gone very wrong when modern theoretical physicists focus their attention on so many speculative things that have never been observed (space-time wormholes, parallel universes, time machines, dark energy, dark matter, superpartner particles, primordial cosmic inflation, a multiverse, and the 10 extra dimensions required by string theory), and deny the reality of very important things that have been abundantly observed (such as psychic phenomena).
Psychic phenomena such as ESP (very well established by many decades of experiments) and near-death experiences (very well established by a host of accounts) are very well-observed realities and what we may call pivotal realities. Rather than being some incidental things of no great relevance, psychic phenomena are pivotal to questions of who we are and how we got here. Rather than studying so pivotal a line of evidence, Al-Khalili has devoted enormous effort to attempting to market the cheesy catchphrase of "quantum biology." Since the requirements for biological living things are huge and scattered all over the place, it is probably true that some dependencies of living things can be found in quantum mechanics (among countless other places). For example, life does seem to depend on the Pauli Exclusion Principle, postulated by one of the founders of quantum mechanics (Wolfgang Pauli), just as it depends on many other laws of nature, such as the law of gravitation and the laws of electromagnetism. But so far "quantum biology" does not seem to have amounted to very much.
The unsolved mysteries of biology are gigantic, and quantum mechanics has done little or nothing to reduce such mysteries. Quantum mechanics does nothing to explain why matter would tend to become so fantastically organized. Biology has a very strong dependency on physics, but most of that dependency is to be found in physics factors that are outside of quantum factors. Those factors are mainly the fine-tuned fundamental constants of the universe, which have to be just right for life to be possible.
Physically, biology isn't actually quantum at all (except perhaps when someone dies). The term "quantum" refers mainly to certain types of physics phenomena that involve discontinuous instant transitions. An example is the energy state of an atom. Rather than a continuous transition from one energy state to another, in which every single intermediate state is passed through, atoms (according to the statements of quantum mechanics experts) undergo discontinuous instantaneous transitions from one energy state to another. Such a transition is sometimes called a "quantum jump." Wikipedia.org defines a quantum jump as "the abrupt transition of a quantum system (atom, molecule, atomic nucleus) from one quantum state to another, from one energy level to another." But in biology, no such instant discontinuous transitions occur on a physical level, except perhaps when an organism dies.
When the laws of quantum mechanics were discovered, nothing like any type of organization principle was found that might explain how matter is able to reach states of such enormously high organization. In fact, the more that was learned about quantum mechanics, the more surprising the habitability of the universe appeared. The quantum mechanics physicists told us that rather than being truly empty, the vacuum of space should be teeming with "virtual particles" that we should expect would make all of space very dense indeed, far denser than steel. The quantum mechanics physicists had to engage in various wild speculations to sweep this difficulty under the rug, sometimes evoking "miraculous cancellations" in which one type of energy with a very high density very precisely cancels out some other type of energy with a very high density.
Although a few physicists such as Jim Al-Khalili keep chanting a mantra of "quantum biology," and keep claiming that quantum biology has "come of age," very little has come from their efforts to get "quantum biology" rolling as an important discipline. Attempts to show quantum effects are a crucial part of photosynthesis have been disputed, as the article here notes, noting that talk of "quantum coherence" in photosynthesis has "largely evaporated." Attempts to claim that quantum effects in microtubules can explain consciousness are fallacious for reasons discussed here. None of the key questions of biology has been either solved or substantially clarified by studying quantum mechanics effects in biology. It is not even clear what is meant by "quantum biology," which still seems like a half-baked sort of thing, more of a catchphrase or slogan than a substantial empirical reality.
I was surprised to find that a recent Psychology Today article by Steve Taylor PhD has an insightful takedown of the psi-denying misstatements of people such as the figure I mentioned earlier. Taylor starts by discussing how strong the evidence for psi is, stating this:
"You might be surprised to learn that the evidence for phenomena such as telepathy and precognition is strong. As I point out in my book, Spiritual Science, this evidence has remained significant and robust over a massive range of studies over decades. In 2018, American Psychologist published an article by Professor Etzel Cardeña which carefully and systemically reviewed the evidence for psi phenomena, examining over 750 discrete studies. Cardeña concluded that there was a very strong case for the existence of psi, writing that the evidence was 'comparable to that for established phenomena in psychology and other disciplines.' For example, from 1974 to 2018, 117 experiments were reported using the 'Ganzfeld' procedure, in which one participant attempts to 'send' information about images to another distant person. An overall analysis of the results showed a 'hit rate' many millions of times higher than chance."
So what is going on with scientists such as Jim Al-Khalili claiming that psychic phenomena are illusory? According to Taylor's analysis in Psychology Today, what is going on is mainly ideology. He describes many scientists as being captives of an ideology that "consists of a number of basic ideas, which are often stated as facts, even though they are just assumptions—e.g., that the world is purely physical in nature, that human consciousness is a product of brain activity, that human beings are biological machines whose behaviour is determined by genes, that anomalous phenomena such as near-death experiences and psi are unreal, and so on." He says that such an ideology has become a "quasi-religion," and that the ideology is peddled by those who "often behave like religious zealots, demonising unwelcome ideas and disregarding any evidence that doesn’t fit with their worldview."
Taylor states that he finds claims that psi violates laws of physics to be "one of the most puzzling claims made by skeptics." He discusses some of the reasons why it is ludicrous to be evoking modern physics as some reason for rejecting the paranormal. I'll mention a few of those reasons. For one thing, modern physics itself postulates bizarre realities as strange as some of the main things mentioned in parapsychology handbooks: things such as instantaneous quantum jumps, the superposition of particles in multiple places at the same time, particles having a dual existence as waves and particles, particles being "smeared" over different spatial positions, various types of spooky action at a distance such as quantum entanglement, and so forth. For another thing, modern physics claims the existence of various kinds of mysterious invisible realities such as dark matter and dark energy, which are as strange and intangible as some human soul or some source of telepathic abilities. After describing a refusal to examine evidence for the paranormal as "the opposite of true science," Taylor ends by stating this: "Skeptics who refuse to engage with the evidence for telepathy or precognition are acting in the same way as the contemporaries of Galileo who refused to look through his telescope, unwilling to face the possibility that their beliefs may need to be revised."
(For a similar recent article in Psychology Today, read the article here. Maybe in order to get published in Psychology Today, the article uses the term "The Quantum Mind," but it seems to make little or no appeal to quantum mechanics. The article does, however, repeatedly affirm the reality of psychic phenomena.)
People who keep muttering the catchphrase of "quantum biology" like to evoke the authority of Erwin Schrodinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. They point out that Schrodinger wrote a short book called "What Is Life?" which tried to suggest that quantum mechanics was important to biology. As Jim Al-Khalili stated, "Quantum biology's origins are often traced back to 1944 and the publication of Erwin Schrödinger's famous book, What is Life?" But people citing that book (to try to make quantum biology sound substantial) fail to mention that Schrodinger told a huge lie in that book. It came when he stated this:
"Let me use the word 'pattern' of an organism in the sense in be which the biologist calls it 'the four-dimensional pattern', meaning not only the structure and functioning of that organism in the adult, or in any other particular stage, but the whole of its ontogenetic development from the fertilized egg the cell to the stage of maturity, when the organism begins to reproduce itself. Now, this whole four-dimensional pattern is known to be determined by the structure of that one cell, the fertilized egg. Moreover, we know that it is essentially determined by the structure of only a small part of that cell, its large nucleus....It is these chromosomes, or probably only an axial skeleton fibre of what we actually see under the microscope as the chromosome, that contain in some kind of code-script the entire pattern of the individual's future development and of its functioning in the mature state."
No such knowledge existed when Schrodinger wrote these lying words. By now the cell, the cell nucleus and DNA have all been exhaustively studied, and no one has found in such things anything like a pattern specifying the structure of an adult organism or "the whole of its ontogenetic development from the fertilized egg the cell to the stage of maturity, when the organism begins to reproduce itself." All that is contained in DNA and the cell nucleus and genes is low-level chemical information such as which amino acids are in a particular protein molecule, and not even a specification of the structure of any cell. At the end of the post here, you can read statements by more than 20 science authorities telling us there is no truth to the claim that DNA is a blueprint, program or recipe for building an organism. The idea that organisms arise from a reading of a blueprint in a cell nucleus is both false and nonsensical, partially because blueprints never build things (instead, things get built when intelligent agents read blueprints and use them to get ideas about how to construct things). The arising of the enormously organized structure of a human body (with so many layers of hierarchical organization) from a speck-sized fertilized ovum (which does not specify such organization) is a miracle of origination that is not at all solved by studying either quantum mechanics or DNA.
Schrodinger kept telling his "organism blueprint in the cell nucleus" lie repeatedly in his book, such as here and here, but never clarified how quantum mechanics could explain any of the key mysteries of biology. The founding document of "quantum biology" (Schrodinger's What Is Life?) was a book centered around a gigantic lie, the claim that in a cell nucleus was "in some kind of code-script the entire pattern of the individual's future development and of its functioning in the mature state." No one has found any such thing, but merely a molecule (DNA) giving low-level chemical information. It is therefore very ironic that the salesmen of quantum biology keep evoking Schrodinger's book What Is Life? rather than confessing how misleading that book was.
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