Pseudoscience has been rapidly growing in the past few decades. Dietary supplements and homeopathic preparations advertised by various media charlatans constitute a multibillion-dollar industry. And the internet is awash with self-proclaimed experts who have gathered armies of uninformed citizens, ready by the hundreds of thousands to sign petitions to force their antiscientific demands on the food and agriculture industries.
Major universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, house centers of integrative health, which offer courses in acupuncture, Reiki, qigong, and Vedic medicine and are funded by the National Institutes of Health. Elsevier, a reputable scientific publisher, now offers Explore, a journal devoted to the pseudoscience of alternative and integrative medicine. In 2014 it published “Manifesto for a post-materialist science,” which elevates parapsychology and near-death experience to the rank of quantum theory (QT).1 And the influential Huffington Post glorified the authors of that manifesto as mavericks on a par with Nicholaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Albert Einstein.2
Among the factors contributing to the rapid growth of pseudoscience are various misrepresentations of modern physics and especially of QT. Some prominent physicists of the past century have presented philosophical outlooks that, as mystical and antiscientific as they may be, have become wrongfully associated with modern physics. And the public’s scant knowledge about the underlying principles of science, combined with the compelling power of science exhibited in smartphones, GPS, and confirmation of the Higgs boson and gravitational waves, turns those philosophical misrepresentations into a forceful engine for promoting such nonsense as quantum healing, quantum touch therapy, and other “quantum” commodities sold in the crowded information marketplace.
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