Ted Talk: "How would your consciousness handle your body being delocalized in space?"

[OC68]

Saw this on The Daily Grail. Very cool vid.

[I]n an experiment remarkable both for it’s conceptual simplicity and technical difficulty, O’Connell was the first person to measure quantum effects in an object large enough to see with the naked eye. Named Breakthrough of the year by Science Magazine, the experiment shattered the previous record for the largest quantum object, showing decisively that there is no hard line between the quantum and everyday worlds.

Quantum Weirdness in the Everyday World | TDG - Science, Magick, Myth and History

[OC68]

Seems to be quite a bit of hostility to this particular Ted Talk. Wonder why?

QM is BS. Lets get back to basics and stop with all the weird theories.

full of shit!

there is nothing that makes me more angry then stupid people pretending to be smart people. sadly this guy is one of many people that call them selfless a quantum-physic ""scientist""! which could not be selling more crap to the common growing mind to lead him more of track! now im a guy who loves since and full heartedly follow it but this lecture he just gave is about as intelligent as a 11 year old lecturing to his friends on the play ground. so many presumption that he talks about as facts

Unfortunately, talks like this are just used as ammunition for the New Age fanatics and "gullibility exploiters". Witness the movie "What the Bleep do we Know?", which stretches quantum theory well past the breaking point, to make all sorts of silly pseudoscientific claims. I don't think Mr. O'Connell buys into that stuff - at least one would HOPE he doesn't - but he plays right into their hands.

Pretty kooky ideas can become law, yes, I'm all for that. What I'm not for is using real science in one domain to prop up kooky theories in an entirely different domain, when in fact any real scientist can tell you that the two bear absolutely no relation to each other. But doing just that has gotten to be quite an art form with New Age marketeers, most of whom have mastered at least one law propounded by that great scientist PT Barnum: "There's a sucker born every minute".

[OC68]

If you watch the vid at the Ted website, not on YouTube, I think the general tone of the comments is even more hostile.
Aaron O'Connell: Making sense of a visible quantum object | Video on TED.com

[vikki]

Thanks for starting a thread about this OC. As you know I put O'Connell's TED talk in the random thread. He's a good speaker (even if he does look like he just came from a Duran Duran concert)

I had a chat with my resident physicist who put the kibosh on the discussion pretty quickly . He claimed that the quantum effects observed on the micro scale were not observed on the macro (something to do with Plancks scale)

Planck scale - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I suggested that just because we can't observe these effects doesn't mean they're not happening, at which point he , then , then said something about the Nobel Prize and put his headphones on.

Anyway, I too noticed the negative comments on TED. It seems to me that scientists who overstep the boundaries of what's possible, and what's not get a lot of flak, no matter who they are (thinking of Penrose and Hameroff here too).

PS Equally amazing is the stabalization of anti-matter for 16 minutes.

[OC68]

Originally Posted by vikki

Anyway, I too noticed the negative comments on TED. It seems to me that scientists who overstep the boundaries of what's possible, and what's not get a lot of flak, no matter who they are (thinking of Penrose and Hameroff here too).

I think much of the hostility has to do with frustration that people who have little to no understanding of physics (like me ) are likely to use this video to promote "fringe" beliefs. And I'm pretty sure they're right about that.

[davidsmith73]

Originally Posted by OC68

I think much of the hostility has to do with frustration that people who have little to no understanding of physics (like me ) are likely to use this video to promote "fringe" beliefs. And I'm pretty sure they're right about that.

I agree. But I wonder why the frustration and outright certainty of these comments? It's slightly ironic that the people who lack this level of technical understanding are not in a position to know if these "fringe" beliefs are actually justified or not. This happens even in higher echelons of science. A good example is Steven Novella, the vocal sceptic and neurologist. Lots of times have I heard him denounce any relationship between quantum theory and consciousness as "woo". But he knows very little about quantum theory.