Ask A Genius 1348: Debunking Quantum Myths: Misused Science in Pop Culture

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/04/09

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I’ve got an idea—we will discuss quantum mechanics misinterpretations.

Rick Rosner: I’m down. I just cracked open the book again, and it was so dusty that it triggered a sneeze. 

Jacobsen: And I’m not talking about mistakes professionals make—I’m talking about the New Age-y, crystal-alignment, “quantum healing” stuff.

Rosner: Yeah. All right.

Jacobsen: So what do you make of phrases thrown around in spiritual or self-help spaces, like “Quantum mechanics means anything is possible”?

Rosner: Well, that one’s a classic misunderstanding. Quantum mechanics does not mean anything is possible. It means that, for specific systems, we can only predict probabilities of different outcomes—not definite results—until we make a measurement. But that doesn’t mean unicorns can teleport through your closet because of quantum fluctuations.

People often conflate “uncertainty” with “limitless potential.” However, uncertainty in quantum mechanics is well-defined. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, for example, tells us that there’s a limit to how precisely we can know both the position and momentum of a particle simultaneously. It’s not because our tools are clumsy—it’s baked into the structure of reality.

Also, “wavefunction collapse” is often misunderstood. People think it’s about consciousness shaping reality, but it’s not. It just refers to how a quantum system, when measured, appears to jump from a superposition of possibilities to one definite outcome. That’s not magic—it’s a mathematical update of information based on observation. Interpretations vary, but none say your thoughts alter objective reality in a wish-fulfillment way.

So yeah, quantum mechanics is strange, but it’s not your genie. It doesn’t say everything is possible—it says very specific, mathematically defined things are possible under particular conditions. You think it can happen. Well, I mean, okay. So, people can misuse the terminology of quantum mechanics—a lot. Entanglement is enormous right now. I got invited to pitch a podcast, and I asked JD to team up—and maybe you, too, if it’s something you’d be interested in.

Jacobsen: Sure.

Rosner: And JD came up with a pretty good title: Quantum Hollywood. The idea is that Hollywood is basically like high school—but for beautiful people. It’s pretty small; everybody knows everybody, and—using JD’s phrasing—everyone is “entangled.”

And I didn’t get annoyed at that. It’s fine. I’m okay with some appropriations of quantum terms. Honestly, that one’s not a terrible misuse of “entanglement.” In quantum mechanics, entanglement means two particles share a common quantum state due to prior interaction, and their properties remain correlated no matter how far apart they are—as long as they haven’t interacted with anything else in a way that breaks that entanglement.

You can work with entangled systems but can’t destroy the entanglement and expect it to function how you want. And yeah, that’s the kind of quantum physics I haven’t learned thoroughly yet—but I probably should. What does annoy me is when people say, “Well, if you can’t explain something, it must be a quantum phenomenon.” That kind of lazy thinking. The most prominent example that comes to mind—and we’ve talked about this—is when people say, “Consciousness probably comes from quantum processes within neurons.”

Jacobsen: Like quantum entanglement inside the brain or something?

Rosner: Yeah—like some quantum entanglement or quantum coherence within neurons. That it’s the “magic juice” of consciousness. 

Jacobsen: What do you make of the mindset that says, “Observing something magically changes reality”? That whole thing.

Rosner: Yeah—that’s a big one. The idea is that the observer effect in quantum mechanics means you, as a person—your consciousness—change reality just by looking at it. That’s not how it works.

In quantum mechanics, the observer effect refers to the fact that any measurement disturbs the system. It’s not about human awareness; it’s about interaction. If you want to measure an electron’s position, you must hit it with a photon, which changes its momentum. So your measurement changes the state—not because you’re conscious, but because of the physical interaction involved in the measurement.

People twist that into metaphysical nonsense. They imagine the “observer” as a person in the everyday sense—like a cameraman or someone watching events—and assume their awareness shapes reality, which veers hard into magical thinking.

Oprah mainstreamed that with The Secret, right? That whole thing about visualizing something into existence? Ten, fifteen years ago, she was pushing that idea—that if you focus hard enough on what you want, the universe will rearrange itself to give it to you. People used quantum terms to legitimize that: “You attract what you focus on because quantum physics says reality is a function of observation.”

But that’s not physics. That’s magical thinking. You don’t need to invoke quantum terms to believe in wish fulfillment. Humans have been doing that forever. Quantum gives it a sciencey gloss. All an observer does is make something known—if only to the observer—that wasn’t known before. 

So, I don’t know. Yeah, you can probably set up scenarios where the observation feels special or magical if you engineer the setup in a certain way, but honestly, that’s mostly horseshit. It’s more about how people interpret it than what’s happening.

Oh—and the thing I was thinking about today, which isn’t even strictly a quantum thing, is that information requires context. What you see, or what happens in the world, isn’t information itself. It only becomes information when it exists within a context.

We don’t consciously think about context because we are the context. When we observe the world—or even reflect inwardly—we interpret and assign meaning. We’re the system into which that stuff slots in and gets recognized as information.

Jacobsen: So we’re the filtering and decoding mechanism?

Rosner: Yeah. We take the raw input and make it legible. It happens so constantly that we forget it’s even a thing. We’re trained to see things and automatically label them as “information” without questioning how or why they became information.

But information floating around without being contextualized—without being processed by a mind or a system—might not even be information in any meaningful way. And that’s a deep point. We have information theory—it’s only about 76 years old. Shannon founded it in 1948. Sure, people thought about signal and meaning before then, but it wasn’t formalized.

Jacobsen: So we’ve got this understanding of data transmission, compression, redundancy, error correction—

Rosner: Right. We can do all that, but we still have almost no idea how information functions within the universe at large. We don’t understand how the universe contextualizes information—if it does at all. What counts as information from the universe’s perspective? We can define information in terms of bits, entropy, etc. But how is that contextualized in larger structures—galactic, cosmological, or temporal scales?

We can handle micro-information—what we observe and process in human experience. But macro-information? The kind that emerges through the large-scale workings of the universe? That’s a huge—well, to be fancy, I’ll say a lacuna. It’s an undeveloped area of thought. We don’t have a good handle on it.

Jacobsen: So, shifting gears slightly, what do you make of the phrase “Quantum mechanics proves telepathy, reincarnation, cosmic consciousness,” and so on?

Rosner: Total hijacking of scientific language. That kind of thing annoys me. It’s understandable—people want mystery and meaning—but it’s utterly unmoored from how quantum mechanics works. I’m sure I’d be annoyed if I saw someone saying that in a public forum.

It’s like linguistic smuggling. The words carry weight, so people use them to sell bullshit. At that time, Carole rode in an elevator with Tony Robbins—the motivational speaker.

Jacobsen: Yeah, you told me that. Or wait—was that a movie premise?

Rosner: I think it is a movie premise. Someone gets in an elevator with Tony Robbins, and he motivates the hell out of them. It changes the whole trajectory of their life.

Jacobsen: That sounds like a Judd Apatow setup.

Rosner: And Robbins is a super tall guy—6’8″ or 6’9″. That adds to his presence. He’s a giant guy with big teeth and a huge voice—he commands attention.

Jacobsen: And a head like a foot and a half wide.

Rosner: But I could see someone like him—maybe not Robbins himself—but someone in that motivational speaker space, hijacking quantum language. Saying things like, “Thanks to quantum entanglement, if you focus hard enough, you can manifest anything.”

That kind of Secret-style pseudo-wisdom bugs me. It’s the idea that it will happen if you think about something intensely enough and everything is quantumly connected. That’s magical thinking with a sciencey wrapper. And yeah, I’d be annoyed by horseshit like that.

I don’t think Tony Robbins does that. But I can imagine it. I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, the headquarters of many motivational stuff, including EST, Erhard Seminars Training, sensory deprivation tanks, etc. So yeah, I’m familiar with that scene. And yeah, people are going to hijack the nomenclature.

Jacobsen: First, the other idea that quantum entanglement means instant communication—sort of the spooky action-at-a-distance thing. Second, the idea is that particles can be simultaneously in two places.

Rosner: So, I mean—it’s pretty well known in the field, which I’m not in, so maybe I’m a little off—but you can’t transmit useful information via entanglement. You can’t use it to send a message. You start with two entangled particles. You let them fly apart—light-years apart if you want—and then you measure one of them.

That measurement instantly determines the outcome of one measurement on the other, no matter the distance, but that correlation can only be confirmed after classical communication. So, yes, the result is nonlocal—but there’s no way to control the outcome of the first measurement and, therefore, no way to encode and transmit a message with it.

The measurement collapses the state, but you can’t control which state you get, so there’s no signal. But I was thinking today—you could imagine a Schrödinger-type scenario, which, yes, people love to bring up too much, but whatever. Let’s say you measure the spin of one particle and its spin-up. The other one, two light-hours away, hits a detector. If it’s spin-down, the detector explodes.

So if something blows up or doesn’t blow up, you know what the spin was—even before the light from that event could’ve reached you. Seems like faster-than-light knowledge, right?

But that must not work because the setup only confirms something you already arranged. You can’t use it to send new information. You can set it up beforehand and determine the outcome, but you’re not receiving a message. You’re not getting anything new beyond what the system was designed to do.

So it’s more like revealing what already happened in a system you pre-configured, not sending a new signal across space. You’re just learning which of your possible outcomes occurred. And even if it seems instant, you still can’t communicate anything faster than light. You can’t break causality that way. It may be allowed by the math, but it still doesn’t allow messaging.

And yeah—this is the kind of stuff people get wrong constantly. We’ve had over a hundred years to get used to quantum mechanics, and people still misunderstand or misuse the concepts.

Jacobsen: People want magic.

Rosner: And they abuse the language—entanglement, wavefunction collapse, observer effect. It gets co-opted for pseudoscience and spiritual nonsense. They want it to mean telepathy, reincarnation, cosmic consciousness—when it’s just math and measurement.

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