Leave Quantum Physics Alone

11 May, 2026

It did nothing to you.

Good morning, hoomans! Spring has sprung, birds are singing, my knee is healing, and this means one thing and one thing only:

"But Dr. Glowcat, you silly little floofball, what has the neighbour's dog ever done to you?" you might ask. Well, I'll let you know that, one, my neighbours are all decent people with cats, and two, even if there was a dog, I have no time for such lowly squabbles. No, what I want to discuss today is how the New Age and metaphysical community has appropriated and distorted some concepts from quantum physics. It's quite a big chonk to bite at, so let's get started! No, there will be no math in this pawst, I promise.

Now, it would be easy and neat to put the blame on some guru who meddled with things they didn't understand and thought they found the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything¹. We could just laugh at them, explain what quantum physics really is about, and move on. However, things are more complicated than that, a lot more. Perhaps the most surprising thing about how did quantum physics ended up entangled with mysticism, is that the responsibility for it lays, at least in part, with the founders of quantum physics itself.
Yikes.

Yes, as it turns out, The Secret does indeed link back to quantum physics... just not in the way the author thought. But let's start from the beginning.

The death of God and what happened afterwards

Illuminism and the scientific and industrial revolution brought Western countries not only a technological level unheard of before, but also a completely new worldview. Up to that point, the natural world had been infused with the essence of God and the knowledge that mankind could never fully decipher his plans. Now, the new science carried the promise that one day everything will be explained. Moreover, the new science didn't need the God hypothesis at all, as Laplace famously said. "God is dead", proclaimed Nietsche with his characteristic braggadocio, but he was speaking too soon. Maybe the Christian god was dead, or had been brought down a peg or two, but his absence created a void that the human soul seems pretty bad at tolerating. And hoomans wasted no time in filling that void again.
Spiritualism started trending around the 1840s, the unlikely child of Emanuel Swedemborg's philosophy and the Fox sisters' exploits. You may not have heard the term, but if you can picture a seance with floating tables, spirits knocking on the walls² and a medium vomiting ectoplasm, then you know what spiritualism is. Or at least what it looks like. Another influential philosopher of the time was Arthur Schopenhauer, whose own thought was heavily influenced by the Upanishad, some of the fundamental texts in Hinduism and also, fun fact, some of the oldest philosophical texts ever written. The concepts in these texts would become extremely influential in the West at the dawn of the 20th century, piggybacking on Schopenhauer's writings. In the same decades, when quantum physics was being birthed, World War I had just left behind an unprecedented trail of death and devastation, which meant a lot of people were desperate to believe in an afterlife, so that they could talk to their loved ones again. This meant a new high for the spiritualist movement, and the scientists themselves would not be left untouched.

The Copenhagen School

The foundation of quantum physics was developed by the Copenhagen School, an informal group of scientists who revolved around Danish physicist Niels Bohr (hence the Copenhagen part). The group included names such as Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli and Erwin Schrödinger (yeah, the one with the cat). Oh, Albert Einstein was hanging around too, though he didn't participate in the development because he was busy with his relativity theory. Also he really, really disliked quantum physics. And religion. And metaphysics. In fact he was one of the most vocal critics of the mingling of science and mysticism, if anything because people had already tried it with his relativity. So, bonus tip: all those metaphysical quotes that New Agers like to attribute to Einstein, are most definitely not his. Moving on.
It is well known that many of the scientists in the Copenhagen group were very interested in Schopenhauer's philosophy, and in Eastern theosophy as a result. It is even possible that they discussed it among themselves, perhaps indulging in rabbit holes and fantasy flights that they wouldn't dare explore in more formal settings. What is definitely not true, however, is that they themselves claimed that Hindu philosophy explained quantum physics and vice-versa. That is a later interpretation, and greatly exaggerated. If you actually go back to the physicists' own writings, they kept their ideas about physics and metaphysics well separated. "Science doesn't need religion and religion doesn't need science, but man needs both", said Fritjof Capra, and it would be a much more impressive quote if not for the fact that Capra is almost single-handedly responsible for spreading the notion that the founders of quantum physics believed in its mystical interpretation. But where did Capra get this idea?

The superposition of states and wave function collapse

I must admit at this point what is a tiny bit obvious: quantum physics doesn't help itself steer clear of woo, as many of its fundamental concepts really do defy conventional logic. Two such concepts are the superposition of states and the collapse of the wave function.
The former is what the famous mental experiment with the cat illustrates. If we seal a cat into a box, we can't know whether it is dead or alive until we open the box to check. In our understanding, the cat is either dead or alive regardless, we're just ignorant of its state, and by opening the box we simply resolve that ignorance. Not so in the world of quantum physics, however, where the cat is dead AND alive at the same time until somebody opens the box to check. Then it "decides" on which side of the Acheron it wants to be, or, to be specific, its wave function collapse in one of its possible states, "dead" or "alive". The hell is a wave function??? Well, subatomic particles are at the same time particles and waves (superposition of states!), and the wave function is the equation that describes the wave aspect. This is, importantly, a property of subatomic particles. You, as a macroscopic entity, don't have a wave function, despite being made of subatomic particles (when you dig deep enough). I mean, you could probably write one, but it wouldn't be meaningful: you, as a macroscopic entity of relatively small mass, obey the laws of classical mechanics, not those of quantum mechanics (or relativity, for that matter). But more on that later.
The point here is that, as you can imagine, these concepts lend themselves really well to metaphysical (mis)interpretations, and misinterpreted they were. The other part of the story comes from India.

When Heisenberg went to India

In the grand tradition of white people in middle-life crisis going to "find themselves" in India, Heisenberg traveled there too. There he met a scholar and poet by the name of Rabindranath Tagore, and the two hit it off, intellectually speaking. I'm sure Heisenberg came back enlightened and ready to annoy his friends, but this had no bearings in his view of physics. It is not true, as Capra later claimed, that Heisenberg suddenly "understood" quantum physics after speaking with Tagore, and it's definitely not true that the knowledge of Hindu doctrine influenced his later work on physics. It may very well have influenced his worldview, and perhaps even the way he philosophically interpreted the meaning of quantum physics, but that's fine. Of course our scientific understanding of the natural world influences our philosophical one, or even our mystical one. I've already said it, but the knowledge I have from science absolutely informs my witchcraft! What shouldn't happen is the opposite, religion or mysticism influencing science, but none of the inventors of quantum physics was doing that.
Fritjof Capra was doing that, with his bestseller³ The Tao of Physics, where he promulgated all these tales we have talked about. Deepak Chopra was doing that, Gary Zukav, Rhonda Byrne, and all those quacks who borrowed the credibility of a science they didn't understand and got rich by reselling it to a public who trusted them.
But that, my friends, is for the next installment; because yes, after this wall of text you just read, I am still far from done. Stay tuned for the next part, where I describe the New Age ideas borrowed from quantum physics and explain why none of them work as purported.

Small Bibliography

Here are a couple more articles about the subject:

The Wikipedia page on quantum mysticism.
Claiming Knowledge, Olav Hammer's foundational book on the debunking...
... and an open access article on the subject by him.
Sadri Hassani's excellent article that was my gateway into all this.

#meowgic #rant #science