If you watched Ant-man and the Wasp in Quantumania (youtu.be/5WfTEZJnv_8) then you’ll be familiar with probably one of the purest examples of slapping the word quantum on anything as a shorthand explanation for how it works. How does Ant-man get small? Quantum stuff, of course! If you make yourself small enough then what will you find? The quantum realm, naturally! Pretty much every quantum physics concept that is mentioned in Chris Ferrie’s new book Quantum Bullsh*t makes an appearance, and is misused, in Quantumania. 

Chris Ferrie is an author known in particular for writing children’s books about science topics. In his new book “Quantum Bullsh*t: How to Ruin Your Life with Advice from Quantum Physics” (https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Bullsh-Ruin-Advice-Physics/dp/172826605X) he sets out to educate adults. Thankfully, as a professor of quantum physics he has some serious credentials to back things up too (https://www.csferrie.com/about). 

Much of the book is spent in a roughly chronological explication of quantum physics and which ideas in quantum physics are most commonly misused. The writing style is very conversational and informal, with prolific use of bad words. For me, I enjoyed the book, despite finding the schtick to be tiresome at times. It was largely fun and capable of keeping me engaged.

The first two chapters focus on energy (“Quantum fucking energy”) and matter waves (“Fucking matter waves”). Here Ferrie’s beef revolves around the fact that energy is discreet and the fact that the wave-like properties of macroscopic objects are essentially impossible to resonate with. Facts like that never seem to come up in new age discussions about healing energies and crystals. As an aside, the author doesn’t mention it, but you can read serious examinations of such things if you search the word “quantum” on Science Based Medicine’s blog (https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/?s=quantum&category_name=&submit=Search).

In chapter 3, “We have no fucking clue what is going on”, the focus is Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle. Interestingly, he spends time distinguishing between different kinds of knowledge to clarify what exactly we do know. In my opinion, Ferrie’s demystification of the underlying reasons for the uncertainty principle are some of the most cogent and clear I’ve come across. In order to illustrate the silliness of misusing the uncertainty principle, Ferrie makes a few jokes about a physicist who is pulled over by the police for speeding. While Ferrie’s prose isn’t exactly beautiful and poetic, at least it’s funny. For a fictional and very depressing take on the nature of reality you could read Cormac McCarthy’s recent The Passenger/Stella Maris, which I also enjoyed and relates to Quantum Bullsh*t in surprising ways, almost turning McCarthy’s work into a cautionary tale (https://www.amazon.com/Passenger-Box-Set-Stella-Maris/dp/0593536045/ref=sr_1_4?qid=1677431211&refinements=p_27%3ACormac+McCarthy&s=books&sr=1-4).

“The fucking zombie cat”, chapter 4, explores misuses of the Schrödinger’s cat metaphor which, according to him, usually come down to the imprecision of our language. He even quotes the tv show Numb3rs. Interestingly, it’s in this chapter that he begins to delve into his own worldview in a section titled “if you hate something, set it free”. He writes, “I'm not even that mad about Goop. What really annoys me is how and how much people react to it. The worst culprits come from the 'skeptics' community.” He makes a reference to Gwyneth Paltrow’s company Goop because they make a lot of vague, scientific-sounding claims that sometimes represent the exact kind of misuses that he’s describing in this book. Here, I believe he’s saying that it’s not always worth debunking or analyzing misuses of scientific terms. This despite the fact that in the very same chapter he does a review of popular new age books that have the word quantum in their titles and finds that most of them don’t even contain the word superposition, let alone treat it with any kind of accuracy.

Chapter 5, “Faster than fucking light”, is referring to quantum entanglement. This chapter is particularly interesting, because Ferrie is able to make a good case that although Einstein referred to entanglement as “spooky” actions, this is taking a single statement in a personal letter out of context from Einstein’s deep and extensive work on quantum physics. He also describes an interesting example of quantum bullshit on Dragon’s Den (a Canadian TV show similar to Shark Tank) where a chiropractor duped the judges into believing he had an “entangled” paperclip (youtu.be/P-Kl0XkZuCw).

Finally we get to the meat of things: quantum physics interpretations in Chapter 6, “Infinitely many goddamn worlds”, a subject that has long been of great debate in physics (see for example Physics Twitter: https://twitter.com/skdh/status/1637864446667153429?s=20 or https://twitter.com/WKCosmo/status/1628778424163610632?s=20 . There are a number of different legitimate scientific interpretations of quantum physics. His main argument against the more convoluted interpretations is straight-forward: “shut up and calculate” because “it works, bitches!” There are a number of subtly different interpretations of quantum physics that fall under that simple quote and each of which Ferrie, to his credit, does a good job of briefly explaining. 

The main things Ferrie rejects fall under the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI). He does a good job of explaining why some people believe it, but I felt his explanation of why he rejects it needed more. After reading the Wikipedia article on MWI, particularly Stephan Hawking’s opinion on it, I understood better why Ferrie rejects it.

The author brings up quantum suicide and quantum immortality, which are two legitimate thought experiments brought up by people seriously contemplating MWI, but Ferrie brings it up as a way to highlight the rare but sometimes deadly consequences of taking these types of interpretations too far. I think he does a good job of explaining how ideas like these are inchoate at best, and likely fundamentally flawed. Thus, he compares those who think the multiverse is real to flat earthers.

Making a fascinating historical connection with mechanical clocks, Ferrie points out that after their invention, the mechanical clock became a metaphor for the human body, the human mind, and the whole universe. In chapter 7, “Quantum fucking technomagic”, Ferrie shows that we’re doing the same thing today by using quantum computers as a metaphor for the very same things… with just as little evidence. In this chapter he covers a bunch of modern technology that relies on the extreme precision and accuracy of quantum physics, as well as briefly discusses baloney like laser eyes, 5G conspiracies, fraudulent tech startups, and teleportation. Quantum computers, however, get about three pages all to themselves.

Unexpectedly, something in the news recently underlined Ferrie’s point in this chapter: ChatGPT. It’s a special purpose Artificial Intelligence that uses machine learning to answer questions. Stephen Wolfram wrote a lengthy article about how ChatGPT works and in that article he writes, "And indeed it’s seemed somewhat remarkable that human brains—with their network of a ‘mere’ 100 billion or so neurons (and maybe 100 trillion connections) could be responsible for [human language]. Perhaps, one might have imagined, there’s something more to brains than their networks of neurons—like some new layer of undiscovered physics. But now with ChatGPT we’ve got an important new piece of information: we know that a pure, artificial neural network with about as many connections as brains have neurons is capable of doing a surprisingly good job of generating human language.” (https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/). Thus, while we don’t have definitive evidence one way or the other, we continue to find classical (i.e., non-quantum) explanations for at least some aspects of how the human brain works.

In chapter 8, “Where the hell do I go from here?”, Ferrie brings it all back around. He defines bullshit as: “[…] deceptive nontruth. It's not necessarily a lie, because a lie implies the liar knows the truth." Importantly, he also distinguishes bullshit from horseshit. Because quantum physics itself says so little about the nature of reality, bullshitters can use it to justify just about anything without care to whether it’s true or not. They can point to genuine disagreements among philosophers and physicists. These disagreements aren't directly related to how the bullshitter is using the jargon, but they can make it seem that way without actually saying so: a classic form of manipulation. In the end though, Ferrie’s opinion is as straight-forward as his interpretation of quantum physics: just ignore the bullshitters.

Note: an edited/shortened version of this review was published with my permission here: https://aiptcomics.com/2023/02/27/quantum-bullsht-physics-scams-ferrie/