Which is that the “I’m a PC” ads were all built on Macs. The original files posted, I think, on the MS website, had that information in their metadata. I’m too lazy to google the link for you.

I work on a Vista Ultimate machine that functions fine because it was set up by a superb IT guy who installed all the right drivers and turned off the nagware; and also in a bash shell on our network, which is a high end *nix concoction. I use the same bash shell at home, in terminal on my personal Mac which as noted above is really “BSD+best desktop UI yet developed.”

Each is appropriate and works great in its own domain. Ideology and propaganda are always stupid, including here. That being said, the Mac ads are generally funny, while the new PC ones succeed in a Sarah Palin debate type way, simply by not being as terrible as the last thing you saw.

This fact doesn’t give Deepak Chopra carte blanche for his (never testable) “mysterious” business. The goal for Deepak Chopra is not to produce mathematical and testable theories, because this will not be doable. Just imagine a “Chopra-equation”:

E=MC2

(Where the “Chopra-C” would stand for Consciousness, instead of the speed of light in a vacuum)

Can this kind of crackpottery be regarded as ever testable?

Real scientists have a quest to understand the world, not to produce “mysterious theories” built on “holy powers”. Sean expresses this very neat on Bloggingheads.tv:

“What if I had a Black Box, and this Black Box had a feature that if you wrote a question about the behavior of the physical universe on a piece of paper, and you stuck it in to the Black Box, the Black Box would spit out the correct answer, every single time. Would that count as the final answer to all the laws of physics? Would that be all you wanted? And the answer is: Off course not! Because it doesn’t tell you anything, it doesn’t give you any understanding of what is happening, it’s just telling you the answers! The ultimate thing that science is after is an appreciation for what is the underlying mechanism for what is going on.”

(Shortened by me, here’s the original)
Cosmological multiverse theories: are they completely nuts? (13:33)

If Deepak Chopra had this Black Box in his hands, he would most certainly be satisfied with the situation. He would just call it “The Holy Quantum Black Box”, and make big business!

Well, there’s the rub. There are plenty of arguments on how a whole lot of current particle physics research is nowhere near testable.

The free world is fantastic!

(I know this “fight” is silly, but fun )

But inventing an entire alternate reality in the form of multiverses that can’t be proven and has no contact with experiment, as the direction modern physics has moved in, is surely no better than what Deepak is doing.

Physicists debate these and other subjects in a very critical way. Has Deepak submitted any of his theories on quantum healing to peer reviewed journals?

Well well, these smart physicists. Now they have got really scared by the completely unexplainable initial conditions and that hugely gross number identifying all possible states that our universe could have been born with. And they can’t let the Christian Right Fundamentalist win the fight on T.K.O. So what do they do? Easy – just invent a hugely gross number of parallel universes and the problem is gone!

If you think that’s what really happened, then your “egg face” & “milk mustache” do makes sense.

But if you think again, you realize that many very intelligent and bright men have been questioning new science and classifying it as more or less crackpottery, for example Albert Einstein and quantum mechanics.

So what then? What’s the difference between “egg face” & “milk mustache”, and “Multiverse” & “Quantum Healing”?

I say a lot. No serious scientist will ever refer to “mysterious phenomenon” or “holy things” (that simple humans never will understand completely) in their struggle to formulate new testable theories about how nature works. Because that would not be science, it would be religion and mysticism.

Charlatans like Deepak Chopra, on the other hand, have no problem what so ever referring to “mysterious phenomenon”. In fact it seems like it’s a great deal of the whole business. Who can mistrust a “holy law” from a supreme mysterious being? (that’s if you believe the guy)

If you still think I’m wrong, let’s put the last nail in the “Charlatan Coffin”. I strongly recommend you to spend 13 minutes watching this most entertaining and intelligent video chat between John Horgan and Sean Carroll. Maybe it will change your life. John takes your position and tries to demolish Sean’s arguments for new physics:

Cosmological multiverse theories: are they completely nuts? (13:33)

If you want to watch the whole Science Saturday: Cosmic Bull Session (66:32) at Bloggingheads.tv the link is:

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/9433

(It’s bright and fun)

Do these suckers exist? HelliffIno, and in fact I would say that maybe we might best see these as mathematical devices, which in a perturbative scheme we interpret as “virtual particles.” Don’t worry about whether they exist, just do the calculation!

Lawrence B. Crowell