The bundle of non-truths that's Deepak Chopra

You can always trust Deepak Chopra to put a positive spin on pseudoscience and casually pummel straw men and misrepresent facts while he is at it. His latest favorite concerns experiments done by Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier (the co-discoverer of the AIDS virus) who has ventured into highly questionable scientific territory by trying to demonstrate that DNA can imprint its "memory" on water even at great dilutions, which basically boils down to pushing homeopathy. Unless supported by massive evidence, there's no need to take Montagnier's results seriously for now. But as usual for Chopra, this is a resounding victory of what he considers to be the "inconvenient truths" of science. And as usual, Chopra's greatest achievement is the remarkable number of strawmen, non sequiturs, misguided conclusions and plain misrepresentations he manages to include in a single article.

Chopra starts by extolling what he sees as the "fraying of science at the edges" done by scientists themselves.

"What delights me about this controversy, which will be won by the skeptics, naturally, is that conventional science is fraying around the edges, and the fraying is being done by scientists themselves. A decade ago, for example, you couldn't find more than a small handful of physicists and biologists who were willing to consider that the study of consciousness was reputable. This year there will be conventions on the subject with hundreds of participants. This isn't because there's been an outbreak of rebelliousness in labs across the globe. Rather, there was nowhere else for the trail to go. You can't discuss memory, either in the human brain or in water, without explaining consciousness"

First of all, science has been "frayed" at the edges by scientists for hundreds of years; it's called scientific progress. One can argue that any new revolutionary result or theory pushes the envelope and tries to redefine the boundaries of conventional science. But this has nothing to do with Montagnier's experiments or the paranormal and only time will tell if these results will challenge "conventional" science. And of course in Chopra's definition, "unconventional" science is new-age mysticism whereas most scientists define it as new but still concrete and validated results that advance our understanding. Secondly, Chopra is just constructing a straw man with his quip about consciousness. He tries to make consciousness sound like some kind of non-material entity whose existence scientists are now being grudgingly forced to accept. That's just plain wrong. Consciousness has long since been thought to be a function of the basic biology and chemistry of the brain. No scientist worth his salt who is researching consciousness believes that it's supernatural or somehow outside the purview of science. If you doubt this, just read noted neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran's latest book to understand how scientists are boldly tackling consciousness; you will find them all using novel but standard scientific tools like MRI and CT scans. The only "rebelliousness" that Chopra talks about is in the fact that we can now actually tackle the problem of consciousness using modern scientific methods. Most scientists think consciousness is a remarkable phenomenon, but only Chopra thinks that it's remarkable because it's paranormal and outside the boundaries of traditional science.

Further on Chopra cannot help but tar the founders of quantum theory, a discipline whose real understanding he completely lacks and which he himself has done so much to dress up in mumbo jumbo and completely misrepresent.

Popular books like The Tao of Physics and God and the New Physics played an enormous role in the general culture. But their impact on professional physicists has been slight and gradual. That's because physics is based on materialism. Anything that isn't a thing, any phenomenon that cannot be measured, doesn't belong in physics. But the solid, material world vanished a hundred years ago, and almost all the quantum pioneers, such as Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrödinger, either became outright mystics or remained baffled by the radical discovery that the universe emerged from a void"

No. The solid, material world did not "vanish" with the advent of quantum mechanics. In fact if anything it became even more fortified because quantum mechanics helped us understand it better. The predictions of quantum theory were taken seriously only because they agreed with measurements in the material world to an outstanding degree of accuracy. And while some of the founders of quantum theory were great philosophers and interested in "mysticism", every single one of them always emphasized that quantum mechanics is only as good as its compatibility with hard experimental data on material objects. As Bohr himself said, "Physics only tells us what we can say about the world". In fact it is a triumph of traditional "materialist" science that some of the most bizarre predictions of quantum theory like entanglement are now being validated through meticulous experiments. By declaring that the founders of quantum theory became outright mystics, Chopra grossly misrepresents and insults their great contributions to science.

Further on Chopra again wants to convince us that the "wall between science and consciousness has broken down". Again, the wall is probably breaking down but only because of hard scientific experiments that are allowing us to actually study the phenomenon, not because of new-age thinking emerging from pseudoscience. I could go on, but what's the point? Deepak Chopra, in Derek Lowe's words, has been a "firehose of nonsense". He wants to portray every scientific development as some kind of maverick paradigm shift which is forcing scientists to re-evaluate material reality itself. Yes, there are paradigm shifts in science, but they come about because there's massive amounts of actual data, not because some isolated experiment whose results are inexplicable require scientists to believe in the paranormal. Chopra is about as misguided as they get.