Saturday 16 November 2013

Pseudo-science, maybe.

I'm not a Quantum Physicist (and neither is Lanza) and I'd never heard of biocentrism but based on this article in the Independent about Professor Robert Lanza I'd say it has much to do with science as the spaghetti monster. What is annoying is that it uses his reputation in another scientific field and throws scientific elements into the discussion to give weight to his pondering.
The quotes in the article, "Death is a mere figment of our consciousness" and "the inescapable-life-matrix"  sound far more like philosophy or hokey dialogue from a science-fiction film.  There's a time and place for that but not in an article claiming a connection between science and the afterlife.
If he wants to be scientific about this the Professor needs to pose a question/hypothesis and design an experiment in which the results can be interpreted into statistically significant and reproducible answers. All this article provides is an hypothesis with thought "experiments" - things which we can all conduct in the pub late on a Friday night.

I'd also like to point out that being a well respected scientist in one field means your thoughts on another should be automatically excepted. From what I can gather the book is written by a biologist and an astronomer.
If I teamed up with an architect I shouldn't be taken seriously when writing a book on the language of dinosaurs.

I'd be interested to see how Quantum Physicists feel about the use of aspects of their branch of science. Surely there must be limits to it? Especially with the branch that considers infinite space or universes (I think the key is it's not universally accepted). An infinite universe/s is/are license to spout any crackpot theory because infinite is infinite. There are mes out there who will think I'm in the heaven and hell and limbo of all established faith systems. I'm also Batman somewhere out there and writing this very article upside down in the body of a chicken-fish, drinking wood whilst eating happiness and sitting on the back of a giant helium atom.

In fairness, I'm sure Lanza is fully aware of this and his book is not supposed to be a scientific document but treatise on an idea and maybe in the foreword of the book he explains he isn't presenting experimentally proven ideas.

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