Pseudoscience versus science

Although I completely agree with Sadri Hassani’s warning, I think the philosophical questions that motivate scientists are universal. As physicists, we should respect and celebrate the asking of questions, even as we point out how science and pseudoscience differ in arriving at the answers.

The notion of conscious photons, for example, has a long and fascinating history. One example of a rational question and an answer that we might mock today stands out for its utter charm. French encyclopedist Denis Diderot (1713–84) supported the Greek conception of invisible, indivisible, inert atoms. However, he reasonably pointed out, “To suppose that by placing next to a dead particle one, two, or three other dead particles, one can form the system of a living body amounts, it seems to me, to a flagrant absurdity, or I am grievously mistaken”(reference 1, page 148).

Modern scientists still struggle with the solution to his problem. Diderot took the bull by the horns and simply endowed the atoms themselves with a quality he called sensitivity, on which he based a complicated story of the emergence of life. He explained one consequence of his theory in a letter to his lover Sophie Volland:

Those who loved each other during their life and have themselves interred side by side are perhaps not as foolish as one might think. Perhaps their ashes come into contact, mingle and unite! Who am I to know? Perhaps they have not lost all feeling, all memory of their past state; perhaps they retain a remnant of warmth and life, which they enjoy in their own way at the bottom of the cold urn that holds them…. O dear Sophie, I thus cling to the hope that I may touch you, feel you, love you, seek you, unite with you, and meld into you when we no longer are … if the molecules of your erstwhile lover were destined to become inspired, aroused, and to seek yours scattered in nature! Allow me this reverie, so sweet to me; it would assure me eternity in you and with you (reference , page 151).

After this last quote, the late learned and humane quantum chemist Bernard Pullman added laconically: “After animate, sensitive, and intelligent atoms, here now are atoms in love. And why not, indeed?”