Abusing Albert Einstein

I'm glad that there are writers like Tom Chivers of the UK's Telegraph. There need to be someone who points out the stupidity in things like what he's highlighting in this article. In it, he's pointing to the recent book on the supposed "scientific case" for ESP where the authors used Einstein's quotes and possibly his physics to justify ESP.

But when a genuine hero of science has his consoling words to a bereaved woman twisted to make it sound like he believes what in a family newspaper I can only describe as “claptrap”, I think we should object. Make up your own nonsense, Ms Hennacy Powell, and stop dancing on the grave of a great man.

As with Deepak Chopra, it is amazing how people who do not understand physics can somehow bastardize parts of it to justify a pseudoscience. For some odd reason, they can't generate their own validity, because the lack proper empirical evidence. So instead, they latch onto established physics as "justification" that what they believe is valid because physics says it's possible. This of course, is completely bogus. The Standard Model says that the Higgs should be there. Now even when the Standard Model has been successful so many times, we still just simply don't take its word for it, and we still want to be able to detect these Higgs bosons. That's why we have the LHC. We simply don't accept it via "induction". There must be convincing empirical evidence that the Higgs is there.

Now why these people who piggy-back onto various aspects of physics cannot see this, I have no idea. I suppose if you only cherry-pick various superficial ideas in physics, you miss all the important details. And they hope that the rest of the public will miss them as well. More often than not, the public does!

Zz.