Good ole Brian Cox. I miss his wistful stares from mountaintops as he regales the audience with soundbites of majestic physics.
The TV presenter/scientist/ex-keyboardist of D-REAM has recently come to Twitter blows with blowhard Chopra and his rather dubious use of real science to espouse his spiritualistic nonsense. There is a great article, here, at The New Statesman:
Quantum physics’s observer effect – whereby observing an event at the quantum level changes the outcome of the event – is taken by Chopra to be proof that he’s right about consciousness, and in turn that then lets him get away with describing lots of other banal phenomena as imbued with mystical meaning. He looks at a brain, sees molecules being moved and changed during thought, and interprets it as consciousness “turning into” thought; quite why he thinks that thought couldn’t just be what happens when molecules move around inside the brain is never interrogated. By his definition, food breaking down in the stomach and intestines is also consciousness manifesting as mind – though of an altogether different sort.
Which brings us to Brian Cox, who couldn’t stand by and say nothing as Chopra tweeted about #CosmicConsciousness last week:
Eternal inflation is one of many theories that seek to explain the Big Bang, its cause and its aftermath. Cox is well aware that Chopra is cobbling together a nonsense belief system from half-understood fragments of actual science, and that there is science out there that explains what Chopra considers to be a mystery.
…which Chopra studiously ignores, instead switching tactic and going for Cox’s ego, passive-aggressively retweeting a funny video and asking him to come speak at his upcoming conference:
Eventually, Cox and Chopra left it – or so it seemed, because today Chopra couldn’t help but get one final subtweet in:
…and neither could Cox:
Chopra will probably be able to get out of paying Cox any money because, technically, what the physicist did was show that the premise of the question was incorrect, not provide a solution – but it would be cute to see him try.
