A Critical Analysis of "Quantum Parapsychology" By Jacobs and Soderlund. Part 1

As the first post for a new blog examining misunderstanding of quantum physics, I can't think of a better place to start than in a comprehensive review of a book that was recently passed to me. Quantum Parapsychology: How Science is Proving the paranormal by David Jacobs and Sarah Soderlund contains many of the common errors and misunderstandings we've covered before in my numerous quantum woo posts on my Skeptic's Boot blog, in fact looking at the source material here gives me a unique opportunity to bring what we've done thus far together.

This book. It is my anti-particle.

In the first part of the review we'll look at the various introductions, the forewords by the authors themselves and by paranormal investigator Patrick Burns who you may know from *insert name of ghost hunting TV show here*. I normally wouldn't focus on forewords in such a way, but the introductions here give me the distinct impression that what follows will be based on the two major misapprehensions about quantum physics we run into time and time again.

1. That consciousness causes wave-function collapse in the double slit experiment.

2. Particles remain entangled despite interactions with other particles, fields and physical systems.

And as such will tell us much about what we should expect to encounter in the book. Also by tackling them initially, I'm hopefully going to shorten the future reviews.

"Quantum Parapsychology: How Science is proving the paranormal" is written by software engineer David Jacobs and Sarah Soderlund, the latter of whom can be found on Facebook offering psychic newsletters with free divination gifts under the moniker "Paranormal Sarah", she's a psychology student who has also written, "Haunted by the Abyss" which claims to contain her true life experiences with demons and evil spirits. Jacobs offers this as his bio:

One has to wonder if he was such a child prodigy why he ended up in software engineering, a fine career though that is, and not physics? You'll notice what is distinctly absent from Jacobs' bio is any kind of physics qualification. What makes a man like Jacobs believe he's qualified to write a book on quantum physics? An interest as a child? I was very interested in dinosaurs as a child, as was every other kid I met, does this qualify me to write a book on palaeontology?

Of course not.

The problem with reading about quantum physics is what your sources for this reading are. If you're reading the work of Bob Lanza, for example, you're going to be bogged down in the same metaphysical nonsense as Jacobs and Soderlund present here.

The foreword by is by paranormal investigator Patrick Burns, also not a physicist by training. It begins:

What utter rubbish. If there were repeatable, verifiable evidence of the paranormal in any scientist's notebook it would be established science. You can contend it as much as you like. I contend you're wrong.

If you think the consciousness plays a role in quantum mechanics, you very probably haven't "studied" it at all and you are taking the word "observation" way too literally. Just look at the above passage. The act of observation becomes "the mere act of looking upon an object." which you can show is nonsense in short order by considering how absurd it is to "look at" at an electron. You can't look at any quantum object. What you can do is make a measurement of it by firing a stream of photons at it, or by firing it at something else.

Consider why this must change the system or "object" as Burns incorrectly terms it, by comparing it to this macroscopic analogy:

Imagine I tell you I'm about to introduce a baseball to the room you're standing in and I want you to determine one of the ball's observables, position or momentum say. "No problem!" you respond. "Ok, here's your measuring equipment," I say as I hand you a blindfold and a baseball bat. Off you go into the room.

Let's imagine further: you get lucky, and after 100 failed swipes (analogous to 100 photons that fail to be absorbed by the electron in the quantum example) you hit the ball. When you come out of the room I express surprise that you failed to make a measurement with changing the state of the system.

What I hope this shows we should be more aghast if attempting to observe an electron by bombarding it with photons didn't change the system!

Again, correcting Burns definition of "observe" removes the mysticism from the double slit experiment. You could sit a LOOK at that experiment all day, watching the photons forming an interference pattern on the photoreceptive screen. The system's behaviour won't change. You can alternate between staring at the screen or the slit, or the light source or the ceiling. The system won't change, The interference pattern remains.

But when a device is placed at the far side of the slit partition in the above diagram to try and obtain "which way" information, the wave-function collapses and the inference pattern is gone, and the photons arrive as particles. "YOU" have not made a difference. It's the device placed at the slit that has caused the system to change. You can happily leave the experiment running and head to the pub and it will continue to give the same results.

It's not "logic" (always be wary of anyone who says logic but doesn't mention which logical system they are referring to) that states this behaviour shouldn't occur but our intuitive beliefs about how nature behaves. If the paranormal is "experiences that lie outside the range of normal experience...." then we can definitively say quantum physics isn't paranormal given just how often this experiment has been tested over the past hundred years! This is a fact of nature, physicists are over it despite not fully understanding it! Of course, you can't acknowledge that fact if you're selling a book based on quantum mysticism!

FURTHER READING: Confronting Quantum Woo: The Double Slit Experiment.

Predictably, after mangling the double-slit experiment Burns move on to entanglement, again making mistakes we've seen time and time again. In fact, there are so many errors in this one short passage, I've had to highlight them and number them.

(1) Particles do not stay entangled. Entanglement is very delicate when it comes to outward interactions, and an encounter with another particle or even a moderately strong magnetic field can destroy it. (2) When the state of one particle changes the state of the other changes too, meaning that the two particles are no longer described by a wave-function that can't be expressed as separate products. To a physicist that's what entanglement is. (3) This isn't "data" as such because it's non-programmable. That completely random element of entanglement is what prevents it from violating special relativity. (4) Yeah, but how? Also, if this phenomenon is macroscopic it's made up of a large number of particles. To preserve entanglement all these particles must be prevented from interacting with themselves and the environment around them. Bluntly, this isn't possible.

FURTHER READING: Understanding Entanglement

The authors then go on to mangle a quantum experiment we haven't touched upon in Confronting Quantum Woo as of yet, a form of the so-called "quantum eraser experiment". Without going too deep into the experiment, essentially it tells us that adding an extra layer of complexity to a quantum experiment can prevent a wave-function collapse. It's something that definitely deserves further exploration, but would require a lot more space than I can grant it here. Burns has the same interpretation of this experiment as many people do. That this experiment somehow violates causality.

Again, Burns is very tied to the idea of an observer as a human being here, he also ascribes personality to the decision to entangle the photons when what we actually have here is a measurement screen and two beam splitters which may or may not be activated and are set to be completely random. When considering the time difference between measurement and the element which causes the wavefunction to collapse or not, so for the photons to act like a wave or a particle at the screen, we also have to consider the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. Specifically in this form:

Which tells us the more certain we are about a system's energy, the less certain we can be about the time scales involved. As photons travel at the speed of light is not easy to determine with certainty which events occur first, in fact, if we add in relativistic effects we have to consider things from the reference frame of the travelling photons. Of course, if you ascribe to the wave mechanical description of quantum mechanics when the whole system has to be considered part of the wave-function there isn't really any violation of causality occurring here. Let me again explain this situation to you in classical terms:

Despite our earlier baseball bat experiment, you agree to come back to my lab for a second test. I blindfold you (again) and ask you to select a ball from a bag containing 2 red balls and 2 black balls. Your probability of selecting a red ball is 1/2. After you've selected the ball, I forbid you from looking at it nor do I. When I ask you to select another ball, your probability of selecting a red ball is still 1/2 because you have no prior knowledge of the ball's colour.

We rerun the experiment, you pull the first ball. This time I ask you to check the colour, and indeed it's red. You are then asked to select a second ball. Your chances of selecting a red have changed to 1/3. By doing nothing but obtaining "which colour" information, you have collapsed the wavefunction of the system and created a new one! Imagine if that wave-function was the only information you had about the system, you'd see what you'd done by peaking at the ball as profoundly altering the outcome to the second run.

I won't focus on Burns foreword anymore, other than to point out a fundamental misunderstanding he has about science. Burns states:

These conclusions were made about the order of the solar system and the shape of the Earth before the advent of science. To hold these beliefs as a failing of science is pure unbridled ignorance. The strength of science is it's never sure of itself, it is open to change constantly. This doesn't mean that it should be open to all ideas and theories, just those that are well evidenced.

Perhaps Burns should be less sure of himself.

Now let's look at Jacob's preface as this should lay out his motivation for writing the book and his basic knowledge of science. After elaborating on his child prodigy-like status with regards to physics, he goes on to say:

See the problem with what David has done here? He couldn't fit ghost theory into a framework of physical laws, so he decided those laws must be wrong or some how incomplete. He then set out to find a physical system that he could retro fit to include ghost theory. In 1820, Thomas Jefferson published his version of the Bible, known now as, predictably, the Jefferson Bible. The 84-page document was created when Jefferson took a straight razor to the Bible and removed the parts that did not correspond to scientific understanding. Jacobs has done the same to a physics textbook and has been left with little but a paper doll chain.

Jacobs then addresses the status of "experts" in the paranormal field:

Maybe there are no "paranormal experts" but that isn't the same as saying there are no experts working in the paranormal. Individuals take expertise from other fields and apply it to the paranormal field. You most certainly can be an expert in physics. In fact, later in this preface, Jacobs describes himself as a "quantum physics buff". Let's look at some words that are synonymous with "buff":

Now, you may think this is a little unfair, as the word "fan" is also synonymous with the word "buff". I would argue against this that by producing a book concerning quantum physics, Jacobs is positioning himself as an authority.

Moving to Sarah's preface. Soderlund discusses her experience in quantum physics and states that she does have some formal education in the subject. As a psychology student, she claims to have encountered quantum mechanics in the study of neurolinguistics.

Having not studied neurolinguistics I have no idea how much quantum mechanics is involved, nor can I quantify what "a bit" is. I would personally say that I've only studied "a bit" of quantum mechanics and as part of my physics degree I've spent at least a year and a half studying it! Perhaps, that's because it's only when you've fully engaged with a subject on an academic level do you realise how vast that subject actually is. I spent half a term studying chemistry, I'd never describe myself as having studied "a bit" of chemistry though, and I certainly won't be co-authoring a book on the subject at any time in the near future!

What does "having a mind" for quantum physics mean exactly. I find this statement worrying and insulting in equal measure. No one has a mind for quantum physics, even a superficial grasp of the subject requires a level of mathematical understanding far beyond the intuitive. If you think a person can have a mind for quantum physics you probably haven't studied it.

Soderlund talks at length in her foreword about her formal training in psychology, she talks about how important its applications could be to a paranormal investigation. I agree, but I can't help wondering why she is writing a book about quantum physics and not psychology. I also wonder what she'd think about a book about psychology by two authors with no formal education in the subject. And this is fundamentally the problem with quantum physics, public discourse on the subject is conducted by individuals who aren't qualified. It's then digested by members of the public who takes this misinformation at face value. It's a frustrating situation and it's why so many misapprehensions and misunderstandings about quantum physics continue to exist. For Soderlund to lament the misunderstanding of her field in her foreword, but then to participate in the propagation of misunderstanding of someone else's field is pretty appalling really.

In the next part of this review I'll focus on the actual content of the book, and Jacobs and Soderlund's proposal of a "quantum parapsychology" and go deeper into their understanding of the double-slit experiment.