If you’ve run across Microsoft’s new ads, which aim to counter the witty “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” series by Apple, you might have noticed this tweedy academic-looking guy near the end:
Years back, I had the idea that Apple should include more famous-for-academia types in its Think Different ads. Ed Witten, Jacques Derrida, Amartya Sen, people like that. But I didn’t actually call up any ad agencies to make the pitch. So I figured that Microsoft had the same idea, and was including some professor-type among its self-declared PC’s in order to lend some gravitas to the proceedings.
Yeah, not so much. The somber mug above belongs to none other than Deepak Chopra, celebrated purveyor of quantum nonsense. He did, of course, win the 1998 IgNobel Prize in Physics for “for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness.” So there is that. (In certain religious circles, there is an increasingly popular teaching known as the Prosperity Gospel. I wonder if I could make money writing a book about “The Prosperity Hamiltonian”?)
The construction of jokes comparing Deepak Chopra’s understanding of quantum mechanics to Microsoft’s understanding of software is left as an exercise for the reader.
September 29th, 2008 at 10:31 am
You beat me to this! His appearance in those ads has been driving me crazy.
September 29th, 2008 at 10:31 am
Have you been following Washington bothering Muslims, securing petroleum, administering healthcare, safeguarding retirements, warring on drugs, promoting airline travel, restoring New Orleans and Galvestan, regulating financial markets… Deepak Chopra and Moose Jewel in 2008! Let’s get it over with.
Enter some CP/M file handling commands into Microcrap Vista (on expendable files). ‘Nough said.
September 29th, 2008 at 10:46 am
There is guy who works with genes, and chick who designs jeans and the guy who wants to saves polar bears. Why didn’t you mention those people? And the Africans, don’t forget the Africans …
September 29th, 2008 at 10:53 am
It’s especially great that in the ad he says he’s, “… not a human thinking, not a human doing …”
Agreed.
September 29th, 2008 at 10:58 am
Despite two decades of PC evangelism (and even the fact that IBM put me through college), I must declare that as of this day, I am no longer PC.
September 29th, 2008 at 11:02 am
I was sent a couple of weeks ago a clip from Deepak Chopra’s website his statements about the Republican National Convention. As much as I find his rot about quantum consciousness or quantum healing to be irritating, he was razor sharp and spot on with that one.
Besides Deep-pockets Chopra can’t be dumb. It takes a certain smarts to lift cash from people’s wallets by selling balderdash.
Lawrence B. Crowell
September 29th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Been there, complained about that — but yes, the “not a human thinking” bit was, unintentionally, hilarious.
September 29th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Since when does Derrida count as a serious academician?
September 29th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
You folks need to relax. One way to look at the advertising is that it’s saying that Windows can help you do whatever it is that you do, even if it’s nonsense.
Also, regarding your statement about “the witty “I’m a PC, I’m a Mac” series by Apple”, does anybody here really think those ads are witty? As a professional nerd, I find them annoying. An Apple computer is a cool twentysomething dude who dresses in hip, stylish clothes and a Windows PC is a overweight guy in a suit and tie who also wears glasses? Yeah, that’s really witty.
September 29th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
“Jacques Derrida”? You mean one of the most decorated intellectual impostures of our times? Come onnn..
September 29th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Deepsix Chopra!
September 29th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Actually, Luke, yes, the Mac/PC ads are funny, and I’ve never used anything but Windows (XP, that is).
John Hodgeman was an inspired choice for the ads and the “cool Mac” vs “stuffy PC” is an image Apple has cultivated for years and plays perfectly what is pretty much the conventional wisdom these days whether or not it’s true. Even though I am quite happy with my “PC” (an IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad) and find no reason to pay through the nose for a Mac, I still find the ads clever and amusing.
Frankly, I think the biggest problem with Microsoft response is that they have waited far too long to do it. If they had responded this way within the first few months, they might have been effective. These days, it’s just a big yawn.
September 29th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
hi Sean,
I would like to mention that I have a display problem connected to the header image:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/files/uploads/header3b.jpg
The problem is that if I make my browser window wider than the inner page width the header image shifts awkwardly.
firefox 3.0.1 linux
September 29th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
The ad campaign wasn’t that bad an idea (although improving Windows would be even better). However, including Deepak Chopra ruins it. As the kids would say back when I was in college (whenever “upchucking” was insufficiently graphic): Deepak makes me want to blow chunks.
September 29th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Damn you Sean, the phrase “is left as an exercise for the reader.” is the pinnacle of textbook evil! (Yes, it actually beats confusing notation.)
September 29th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Just by thinking (and thereby altering quantum fluctuations), Deepak Chopra has created a spiritual wavefunction and a bhagavan wormhole connecting to a specific parallel universe, where things are different. Very different. The name of the parallel universe is Kabbalah-blabla.
In Kabbalah-blabla the other guys won WW2 and they have no problems using software. Intelligent design prohibits software bugs (=eliminate the developer immediately) and all other crap. They also have no problems choosing – there is only one company in the universe. Business, mysticism and dictatorship are the same thing in Kabbalah-blabla universe (pretty much as in our).
COB Tupac Chopper (Deepak’s quantum brother) runs business together with CEO Adolf Ballmer. Please, enjoy this enlightening video that Deepak Chopra managed to get through the bhagavan wormhole:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3XdOl5YtLg
(Confession: Yes, I love my PC and Vista is honestly making my life easier, and Ballmer is not bullying me to say this!
September 29th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
I’m solidly Mac, but I’m getting concerned that the continued weakness of the competition does not help Mac in motivating it to continue to improve its products. Macs could still use a lot of improvement in battery lifetime, and in being more solidly built (more able to withstand cold and a little bit more bumps and bangs without covers coming off etc.) What’s going to motivate them to improve when the “competition” is just putting out garbage like this?
September 29th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
As a Linux user all I can think of to describe the problem is to ask the question - Many Worlds or Many Nerds?
September 30th, 2008 at 4:56 am
I wish you guys could see yourselves and your reaction to Deepak as I see you.
You remind me of my days in school surrounded by too hip by half kids, kids who all too quickly learned everything required to get an “A” in a class, but never learned the reasons behind equations. Most scientists, and especially physicists, think of the universe mechanistically and find the idea of multiverses more satisfying than that our universe has some intrinsic meaning behind it.
Maybe you find Deepak’s philosophy shallow, but I marvel at your derision. If there’s one thing I’ve found its that aggressive derision against someone who has done no harm to them is usually a sign of insecurity. As an aside, any physicist who has speculated about alternative universes, and treated it as a “scientific” endeavor is in my opinion far more “new agey” that Deepak. Its a sad excuse for the fear that the universe might have some meaning to it that is separate from pure probability. What a sad thing to require other universes to escape meaning within out own.
September 30th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Eric Habegger, sorry if I offended you in any way. My experience though, is that people that can’t take a joke may not be the most confident among us.
(Sean will probably grumble that we are going off-topic here, but what the heck.)
Doctor Deepak Chopra is for sure smarter than I am, and knows a whole lot more, but he is using his knowledge in a dangerous and wrong way. I my eyes he is nothing more than a charlatan.
Why? Well, if you write books titled “Quantum Healing”, examining the mysterious phenomenon of spontaneous healing of cancer, any hillbilly-amateur-physicist like me can be absolutely sure that this is NOT science. My mother had colorectal cancer and if she had turned to Doctor Deepak Chopra for some “Quantum Healing” she wouldn’t be alive today. Now, she is perfectly cured by real doctors with the help off latest technology and real science.
It’s NOT up to real science to decide if there is meaning to our lives and the universe, or not. It’s NOT up to real science to decide if there is a God, or not. No real scientist will ever write an equation proving this. It’s helpless and utterly out of topics of real science.
So, charlatans turning glitters into gold, just have to accept that hip kids make fun of them in the name of real science.
September 30th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Speedy,
I’m not even a fan of Deepak and have read no books by him. But my antenna goes up when I spot hypocracy. There has been so much quackery in physics for the last 50 years that its ridiculous. People will willfully use illogic, such as many worlds , or in a more literal way - multiverses, to explain things that can’t be easily explained in our universe. It even goes to the idea of something as simple as a virtual particle. What the hell is a “virtual” particle except an excuse to invent a new definition for something you don’t understand. There has been this huge overuse of labeling in physics to give one the feeling that one now understands it. “Oh, its a virtual particle. That explains it!”
Life is about struggling with the unexplainable and incomprehensible. Everyone must find their own way of doing it. But inventing an entire alternate reality in the form of multiverses that can’t be proven and has no contact with experiment, as the direction modern physics has moved in, is surely no better than what Deepak is doing.
This is not about invoking a supreme deity, or an organized religion, or a new age philosophy. Its about having egg all over one’s face and laughing at the other guy with a milk mustache. It’s ignorant and its dishonest, and its smug. But most of all, its too easy.
September 30th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Eric, if you think physicists don’t know precisely what they mean by “virtual particle”, you’re completely wrong - the idea is in no way even speculative. That you’re ranting about it is a form of crackpottery and will fall under our no-crackpots clause in future.
September 30th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Mark,
It’s typical of modern physicists to pick out one thing to argue about so as to ignore the entire thesis of my argument. I’m not conceding about virtual particles and your accusation of crackpottery ignores everything else I was saying. What about the rest of what I was saying. Is that too threatening to you to argue about? Everyone here can see what you are ignoring and the philosophical hypocracy.
September 30th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Eric, I also think your comparison of people who discuss the multiverse in the context of a well-developed, well-motivated theory to the nonsense that comes out of Deepak Chopra’s mouth is complete crackpottery.
That you’re not conceding about virtual particles doesn’t help your case. Bye.
September 30th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
“I also think your comparison of people who discuss the multiverse in the context of a well-developed, well-motivated theory to the nonsense that comes out of Deepak Chopra’s mouth is complete crackpottery.”
I think that rather than labeling the “connection” between the multiverse and Deepak Chopra’s ideas as crackpottery it would be wiser to label the ideas themselves as crackpottery. If you did that then I would no longer feel inclined to defend Deepak based on unfairness. It’s the illusion of difference that I’m attacking. You and the rest of the science community better face up to it one of these days.
September 30th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen the Mac/PC ads, but the slash is pretty good.
September 30th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Virtual particles exist — well virtually
Real particles are called on-shell, their amplitudes carry their actual mass-energy. In Feynman diagrams these are depicted as lines which have an endpoint. Lines which connect at vertices are termed virtual particles, and are off shell. The heuristic is that they have a mass-energy which is variable or different from what they would have as an on-shell particle. Because of this their momenta often contribute to amplitudes as integration variables. Between two fermions with some “charge,” such as electric charge, these particles can have off-shell mass energy that exchanges momentum between them. How this happens involves something called gauge theory, where momentum is gauge covariant P = p + ieA, and the vector potential term A, or amplitudes thereof, gives virtual photons.
Do these suckers exist? HelliffIno, and in fact I would say that maybe we might best see these as mathematical devices, which in a perturbative scheme we interpret as “virtual particles.” Don’t worry about whether they exist, just do the calculation!
Lawrence B. Crowell
September 30th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Eric, I do think I know what you’re trying to pinpoint here. In fact I have been thinking in similar ways:
Well well, these smart physicists. Now they have got really scared by the completely unexplainable initial conditions and that hugely gross number identifying all possible states that our universe could have been born with. And they can’t let the Christian Right Fundamentalist win the fight on T.K.O. So what do they do? Easy - just invent a hugely gross number of parallel universes and the problem is gone!
If you think that’s what really happened, then your “egg face” & “milk mustache” do makes sense.
But if you think again, you realize that many very intelligent and bright men have been questioning new science and classifying it as more or less crackpottery, for example Albert Einstein and quantum mechanics.
So what then? What’s the difference between “egg face” & “milk mustache”, and “Multiverse” & “Quantum Healing”?
I say a lot. No serious scientist will ever refer to “mysterious phenomenon” or “holy things” (that simple humans never will understand completely) in their struggle to formulate new testable theories about how nature works. Because that would not be science, it would be religion and mysticism.
Charlatans like Deepak Chopra, on the other hand, have no problem what so ever referring to “mysterious phenomenon”. In fact it seems like it’s a great deal of the whole business. Who can mistrust a “holy law” from a supreme mysterious being? (that’s if you believe the guy)
If you still think I’m wrong, let’s put the last nail in the “Charlatan Coffin”. I strongly recommend you to spend 13 minutes watching this most entertaining and intelligent video chat between John Horgan and Sean Carroll. Maybe it will change your life. John takes your position and tries to demolish Sean’s arguments for new physics:
Cosmological multiverse theories: are they completely nuts? (13:33)
If you want to watch the whole Science Saturday: Cosmic Bull Session (66:32) at Bloggingheads.tv the link is:
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/9433
(It’s bright and fun)
September 30th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Physicists debate these and other subjects in a very critical way. Has Deepak submitted any of his theories on quantum healing to peer reviewed journals?
September 30th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
After buying a laptop with Windows Vista installed, I was almost forced to buy a Mac. I finally did last April and I haven’t looked back since. Now I can’t imagine going back to a PC, although I’m forced to use one at work. Windows has always sucked, but Vista was a complete disaster. I had to format the hard drive twice after continuous crashes. A Mac is like a breath of fresh air. If you’re not using a Mac, please do yourself a favor and get yourself one.
October 1st, 2008 at 8:00 am
David, I completely agree. If you just want to breathe fresh air - go by a Big Mac. If you want to taste a real burger - pick the parts and build it yourself.
The free world is fantastic!
(I know this “fight” is silly, but fun
)
October 5th, 2008 at 9:06 am
Well, OS X is BSD with added shiny…
(”,)
October 5th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
No serious scientist will ever refer to “mysterious phenomenon” or “holy things” (that simple humans never will understand completely) in their struggle to formulate new testable theories about how nature works. Because that would not be science, it would be religion and mysticism.
Well, there’s the rub. There are plenty of arguments on how a whole lot of current particle physics research is nowhere near testable.
October 5th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Arun, you are right on the “testable” issue, but I think you have forgotten the last word - today.
This fact doesn’t give Deepak Chopra carte blanche for his (never testable) “mysterious” business. The goal for Deepak Chopra is not to produce mathematical and testable theories, because this will not be doable. Just imagine a “Chopra-equation”:
E=MC2
(Where the “Chopra-C” would stand for Consciousness, instead of the speed of light in a vacuum)
Can this kind of crackpottery be regarded as ever testable?
Real scientists have a quest to understand the world, not to produce “mysterious theories” built on “holy powers”. Sean expresses this very neat on Bloggingheads.tv:
“What if I had a Black Box, and this Black Box had a feature that if you wrote a question about the behavior of the physical universe on a piece of paper, and you stuck it in to the Black Box, the Black Box would spit out the correct answer, every single time. Would that count as the final answer to all the laws of physics? Would that be all you wanted? And the answer is: Off course not! Because it doesn’t tell you anything, it doesn’t give you any understanding of what is happening, it’s just telling you the answers! The ultimate thing that science is after is an appreciation for what is the underlying mechanism for what is going on.”
(Shortened by me, here’s the original)
Cosmological multiverse theories: are they completely nuts? (13:33)
If Deepak Chopra had this Black Box in his hands, he would most certainly be satisfied with the situation. He would just call it “The Holy Quantum Black Box”, and make big business!
October 6th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
you’re all missing the really funny part here.
Which is that the “I’m a PC” ads were all built on Macs. The original files posted, I think, on the MS website, had that information in their metadata. I’m too lazy to google the link for you.
I work on a Vista Ultimate machine that functions fine because it was set up by a superb IT guy who installed all the right drivers and turned off the nagware; and also in a bash shell on our network, which is a high end *nix concoction. I use the same bash shell at home, in terminal on my personal Mac which as noted above is really “BSD+best desktop UI yet developed.”
Each is appropriate and works great in its own domain. Ideology and propaganda are always stupid, including here. That being said, the Mac ads are generally funny, while the new PC ones succeed in a Sarah Palin debate type way, simply by not being as terrible as the last thing you saw.