Tag quantum physics

Deepak Chopra vs Prof Brian Cox. FIGHT!!!!

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:

Getting Around the Uncertainty Principle: Physicists Make First Direct Measurements of Polarization States of Light

Science Daily: Mar. 3, 2013 — Researchers at the University of Rochester and the University of Ottawa have applied a recently developed technique to directly measure for the first time the polarization states of light. Their work both overcomes some important challenges of Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle and also is applicable to qubits, the building blocks of quantum information theory.

Craig, Kalam and Quantum Indeterminacy

William Lane Craig, as we all know, is an apologist with a predilection for the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which goes like this:
1) Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause of its existence;

2) The universe has a beginning of its existence;

C) Therefore: The universe has a cause of its existence.

The point I want to make today is about quantum indeterminacy. This is the notion that, at the quantum, microscopic level, things could be indeterminate, or ‘uncaused’. This potentially invalidates the first premise.

My last talk is now a podcast: “Free Will?”

My last public talk which I gave, on free will, has now been made into a podcast which can be heard here. The talk, given to Portsmouth Skeptics in a Pub on 14th June 2012, was a nice informal gathering of about 50-odd people of varying skeptical persuasions. I have not listened to it yet, but the Q and A was an interesting and challenging time with some good questions which I think I dealt with pretty well.