Quantum quacks

Could I fund my retirement not by writing, but by hawking “zero point energy wands” sold by a real quantum mechanic? 

For  $119.97 (marked down from $169.99) you can buy a “scalar energy tool… infused with a full spectrum of over 18000+ beneficial vibrational frequencies.” Made of a  “ proprietary blend of semi-precious minerals, bioceramics, and crystals.” Ah, and a free wanding guide is included. 

Zero point energy is the inaccessible energy that a quantum mechanical system can have. For example, at absolute zero molecules are still moving, quivering in their places. This residual kinetic energy isn’t recoverable, by physics or by a wand of any sort. The wanding guide would be funny ("Drink a glass of wanded water before wanding yourself as it frequently speeds things up as your internal water molecules listen more effectively to the wand energy.") except that the list of maladies they purport to treat tells you that they are preying on the vulnerable. Cancer pain.

So definitely not how I'll be funding my retirement. 

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Walmart sells them for $19.99.

I'm not linking to the wanding guide or the wands themselves, because I don't want to give them more visibility.

“Quantum quacks” is the title of my next column in Nature Chemistry — about semantic drift and the woo that clings to “quantum” these days. It’s framed around zero point energy wands.

Tiny transporter

 

The family chat is sprinkled with photos of what we are cooking and baking. A way of being in each other’s kitchens when we are far apart. I can drool over Math Guy and his husband’s focaccia stuffed with mortadella. A loaf of Crash’s sourdough brings back memories of tending the starter during the pandemic. Math Man’s breakfast omelet. 

Today I am trying a recipe for an orange cranberry loaf. (The recipe suggests it freezes well and I am hoping I can slice and freeze for an occasional treat with my afternoon tea!) Photos of the process went into the family chat. Crash’s partner responded, “I wish you could send that overseas!!”

“We need the transporter, at least for loaves. Like how much power should it take for a little one, the size of a microwave?”

Math Guy bounced in to suggest that you just need a tiny fusion reactor. Which reminded me of the time he created a ball of plasma in the microwave, a little tiny sun hovering between two halves of a grape. 

Next kitchen renovation? Never mind a pot filler for the stove, I want a tiny fusion reactor and a toaster oven sized transporter to beam a slice of cake across town or across the Atlantic.

Last times

There is, they say, a last time for everything. It is certainly true for me this (last) academic year. There are many last times.  I have graded the last quantum midterm, and today made up the last problem set for the class. Last week in intro chemistry, I taught VSEPR theory for the last time. It takes practice to be able to visualize the 3D structures of the molecules from the sketches that chemists make, and so I give them all a simple molecular model kit they can carry around. It all fits neatly into a centrifuge tube.

I bring all the pieces to class and have students assemble their own kits. This time when I went to put the extra bits and bobs away, tossing the little signs — “Take 3” — into the bag I realized with a start that I would not need these things again. I could just toss the signs and give away the 50 extra octahedral centers. Except I couldn’t. It seemed too…real. Too final.

Somehow the last things are less real when there is not actual stuff attached to them. Literally weightier, they feel metaphorically heavier, too. I repacked the bag and put it back in the cupboard. 

Maybe it is the time of year, not just my imminent retirement. The days are shorter, the sun struggles to climb high in the sky, and the readings at Mass are circling around the end times.

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VSEPR stands for valence shell electron pair repulsion and basically says that bonds around an atom will arrange themselves to be as far apart as they can because the electrons that make up the bonds repel. So if an atom has two other atoms bonded to it, they will be in a line (CO₂ is an example), 180^o apart. There are a dozen or so patterns based on this theory.

Centrifuge tubes are great for storing small amounts of stuff and you don’t have to be a scientist to buy them. They don’t usually leak, either.

Back to the ordinary

"We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming…" I created the document in mid-June. Forty-seven reflections to write (forty-eight if you count the preface), forty-seven meditations to design. An empty space waiting for words, or perhaps waiting on the Word. Twenty weeks and seventeen thousand words later, it's off to the editor.

These last few weeks in particular I feel like I have been living in Lent: walking toward to Jerusalem, jostled by the crowds, facing the Passion. The lectionary selections for Lent are like a greatest hits list, so bits and pieces appear in the Ordinary way of things. And each time they do I am momentarily disoriented. The Pharisee and the tax collector are praying...Is it Tuesday in the first week of Lent? or the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time? Or both?

I keep envisioning it as a Fourier transform experiment, hitting all the frequencies at once, then capturing the free induction decay and transforming it into the other domain, where each peak pops up out of the noise. It's just not clear which domain I am in when writing. (Apologies to the non-spectroscopists out there.)

For today I am grateful to be anchored back in a single time. 

Break glass in case of emergency

“Resolving all tensions is a hallmark of ideology. Easy answers and clear-cut solutions are what authoritarianism offers. Part of the task upon us today is to resist these lures.We must build up tolerance for complexity. We must train our capacity to hold things in tension. We must exercise our communal ability for nuance and contestation. Everywhere, discernment will be needed. Only so can we do justice to reality and to one another.” From For Such a Time as This: An Emergency Devotional by Hanna Reichel

I fully admit that I bought the book because of its title. And because the current moment feels like an emergency, though I’m not quite sure where one pulls the alarm.

I’ve also been re-reading Tomáš Halík’s Touch the Wounds, a potent reflection on suffering and transformation. The strength of faith, he says, consists not of “‘unshakeable conviction’, but of the capacity to cope with doubts and ambiguities, to bear the burden of mystery, while maintaining…hope.” Faith now is an openness to the Incomprehensible, “radiant certainties” are for the life to come.

Obstinacy, stubbornness, the ability to hold onto to a position when it is challenged, would seem to be an asset when it comes to faith. But what if faith isn’t that at all, but a willingness to be open to mystery, open to reality, open to each other — open to the immense, incomprehensible, unfathomable divine. To be faithful is to let go of our certainties and be open to God.

So much of the rhetoric today is of certainties. Certain of what other people believe, certain of what God wants. To be certain that not one tittle of benefits goes to someone not entitled, we would strip benefits from many in genuine need. A miser’s measure for our sisters and brothers, not the full measure flowing over that we ourselves are promised.

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Photo is from Shermeee, used under a Creative Commons license.