If I go to a party and say something about Einstein, quarks and quantum mechanics, it´s very likely someone will come up to me and start talking about budism. Physicists are the modern days knights in shine and armour. We shine because we´re blushing and we´re in armour because we can destroy the whole world in a few seconds. There´s nothing more sexy than someone blushing who has the power to blow you up.

And once one has said physics theory, it´s a small step to budhism, holism and a lot of talk about something called “souls”. So I ask:
- What material is this soul is made of? Where is the soul? Just above the left chamber of the heart, or more in the kidneys area?
And the answer is:
-Physisists are so unimaginative!
Well, even if that was true, why do these spiritual freaks then bother to try to justify their silly beliefs with stuff that those unimaginative physicists have come up with? Why justify your beliefs with theories of which you only accept half and understand none?

It´s like giving a teaparty and actually pouring out cups of hot water with herbs in it. And, then, when someone says: this isn´t tea! reply that that is because you don´t like tea. Then don´t give the teaparty! Or, more accurately and to the point, it´s saying you´re right about something because physics theory says so, but, when someone proofs physics theory says nothing of the kind, replying that physics theory is unimaginative.

So again, let´s talk about the various ways of looking at a sunset (see this link ).

First, there are people who just enjoy the look of it. I like them. Some people would call that stupid: “just enjoy something”, but I don´t agree. I wish someone would explain me how to do the trick. Simply enjoying things I find one of the hardest thing to do.

Then, there are the ones who are turning it into art. They are alright, as long as they´re not pretentious about it. Or start going on and on about social contexts and symbolic metaphors. The latter tendency I tend to label as “French”, because I have noticed that especially the French love to do this, although of course not only the French. Perhaps, we cannot rule out the slight chance that not all French do this either.

And then there are the scientists who wonder where the sun goes to. And whether the sun that comes up next day is the same sun as the one that went down yesterday. And whether the path it takes could be best described by a circle or a square. So they start observing it. And when they see that it´s actually us rotating around the sun and not the other way around, they find out all kinds of relationships between velocities, forces, distances, masses and accelerations. And then they apply these relationships to other observables in nature: pendulums for instance. And they find that these relationships repeat themselves, with slight variations, all through nature. And they find that to describe these relationships and their slight variations, there is a language that works particularly well to describe all that stuff, and that language is mathematics. And then they repeat these steps again and again: questions, measurements, mathematical description, new questions. It´s this procedure that has constructed the big cathedral that´s called physics theory. Oui, that is actually a metaphor.

If you think the previous paragraph is full of boring words, physics theory is not for you. Which is fine. Go make a painting or something. Do a chant under a tree. But leave physics theory out of it.

Because now, we have come to the people who believe in things which are not superficially noticeable, cannot be measured scientifically and are not presented as artforms either. These people often “just feel” that things are so, or “God told them so in a dream” or because they read it in a book that´s been written by some desert people lots of centuries ago. Or because – and these are the really annoying ones – they think modern physics theory says so.

These are the people who can´t be bothered to learn mathematics. Which is fair enough. They also don´t really dig all that square and boring stuff about velocities and masses and distances. They feel attracted to all that wild stuff about “relative time” and “everything is connected” which one can find in third rate articles that try to translate mathematical formulas in ordinary people´s words. It´s like looking at a huge tower and admiring the top floor but thinking that all the lower floors are really quite boring and unnecessary. The top floor wouldn´t be there without the other floors, of course, but never mind. They think that quantum mechanics talks about the same thing as Indian gurus (or wise Mayas, noble Incas, mystical Egyptians, …). These people are the religious.

I make a distinction between people who really believe and people like the pope and most priests, vicars, imans, gurus, sages, homeopathic doctors, and all these modern sages in suits who tell project managers that the road to success is to “just believe”. These latter people are rather similar to those who just enjoy the view of a sunset. Only, instead of enjoying a sunset, they enjoy power or sex or money or popularity. Attacking these charlatans I leave to the Johnny Rottens/Lydons of this world (”This Is Religion II” does this rather well). I personally cannot find anything wrong with wanting a lot of sex, money, or power, although I doubt it makes anyone happy in the long run. But then, who is happy anyway?

I prefer attacking the actual believers. And especially the ones who think (if “think” is the right word) that their believes can somehow be justified by the laws of modern physics theory. They seem mostly harmless but it´s their kind that so often leads to fascist or communist (what´s the difference?) regimes and a lot of annoying conversation at parties with or without a sunset to stress their points. They are like the political idealist, the ones that make up marches powered by sentiments.

A list of some of their most typical mistakes:

1. “Physicists think they know everything.” No, that´s the main point you see. They don´t. That´s the big smack´em in the eye difference between scientists and spiritualists. It´s the biggest give away. Scientist never think they know everything. That´s why they keep on doing new experiments! That´s why they keep on spending all that tax money! That´s why they keep on making hypotheses to question their theories. That how they make theories: by questioning them. It´s because of this one big difference that someone who wants to travel from Barcelona to India will take an airplane that works according to the laws of Bernouille. He´s not going to sit on a colourful carpet with eyes closed, mumbling “Om” and thinking very hard about India. Or maybe he does, but then his family and friends will never receive a postcard from Bombay saying “wish you were here”. One knows that the airplane is the result of a practice of continously testing, and hence, already for that reason more reliable than a delicately woven carpet.
2. “Einstein proved Newton was wrong.” No. Einstein proved Newton was right. Einstein added to Newton´s laws, he didn´t destroy them. A guru can oppose another guru but a physicist can never disprove a previous theory that has been shown to work. He can only state that something is missing from that theory. So Einstein said that something was missing in Newton´s laws? Yes, but so did Newton. Newton´s laws worked very well on earth, at relatively low speeds. But he couldn´t explain interference of light or how gravity propagated itself in space (as a matter of fact, this still is a bit of a puzzle).
3. “Einstein said everything is relative.” No, Einstein said the speed of light is absolute. He said that physics theory laws are absolute. From the equations to describe electromagnetics it followed that the speed of light always had to be the same. For every observer, whether moving with respect to the ray of light or not. This is in sharp contrast with laws of Newton which states that velocities can only be measured with respect to the velocity of the observer and do not have an absolute meaning. In short: Newton said all velocities are relative values, and Einstein stated that this wasn´t true for the speed of light. In a way, a better name would have been: “Einstein´s theory of (special/general) Absoluteness”. Now, imagine Einstein´s would have been called “The Theory of Absoluteness”. Would spiritual people have said: “Einstein said everything is absolute”? That´s a rhetorical question of course, we all know they wouldn´t have.
4. “Quantum mechanics says everything is connected”. No, it doesn´t. It says that the outcome of a measurement on one of a pair of two entangled particles in a closed system depends on the outcome of the measurement of the other particle of that pair. Actually, that´s what entanglement means. There is, however, a huge difference in between “two particles” and “everything”.

I leave Schrodinger´s cat for another day.