Third, a Dec. 27, 2005 New York Times article entitled "Quantum Trickery: Testing Einstein's Strangest Theory," just about floored me. Scientists have successfully acheived a "cat state" in half a dozen beryllium atom; that is, they managed to make individual berylliuim atoms spin both clockwise and counterclockwise simultaneously. And the truly miraculous aspect of it is that you only have to do this to one atom, and then the rest will instantaneously mimic the first one distance irrelevant. According to the theory that has been confirmed by this experiment, there seems to be a force at work that exceeds the speed of light.
The "cat" state in the experiment at NIST refers to the "cat" paradox published in 1935 by Ernest Schrödinger. This thought experiment is fundamental to the concept of the "creation of reality" by an act of "Consciousness" as is being proposed by New Agers and the movie "What the Bleep...". Here is why.
A cat (yes!, a live cat "animal") is put inside a box together with a mechanism that includes a radioactive atom and a poisonous vial that will kill the cat if broken. The vial will be broken depending if the radioactive atom will decay (disintegrate) spontaneously or not after a certain time.
According to Quantum Mechanics (QM), the atom has a "probability" of one-half to decay after one half-life (suppose 1 hour). Since QM is a complete theory, it describes nature accurately and completely (this is fundamental!). So, what it means is after one hour, the atom is in a "mixture of states", meaning it is both "decayed" AND "not-decayed" at the same time (this is one of the strange feature of QM and reality)!
If the system is left unaltered and "unobserved", the extension of the QM description of reality from the microscopic atom to the macroscopic cat means that the complete system (atom-vial-cat) is in a mixture of both states where the cat is both dead AND alive (atom decayed+vial broken = dead cat; atom not decayed+vial intact = cat alive). However, it is not clear where the QM description of reality breaks down between the single atom (microscopic) and the 10^26 atoms that constitute the cat (macroscopic world). The NIST experiment has now demonstrated the QM description extends to at least 6 atoms, 25 orders of magnitude short of explaining the cat's fate!
This is where New Agers abandon science altogether to adopt a philosophy based on pure speculations. New Agers will claim that, yes indeed, the cat is both "dead AND alive" (some will say in parallel universes). This is the "world of infinite possibilities" as Landmark claims for example and this is exactly what the movie "What the Bleep ..." is all about. The speculation continues and the "creation of reality" comes in when a "conscious observer" looks inside the box to see what happened to the cat. As soon as the observer "looks" inside the box, the dual "dead AND alive" cat state collapse to only one of the two "possibilities". This is described as the "collapse of the wave function" in QM. It is also what is meant by the "creation of reality" by an act of "consciousness". The movie "What the bleep.." talks about "a world where reality is created by every thought".
According to this new set of "beliefs" (remember this is not science), the collapse takes place inside the "brain" of the observer and thus, the observer "creates" and "chooses" the cat to be "dead OR alive".
This is the QM origins of "creation of reality" by an act of "consciousness". And this is what I mean when I say that this concept is an over exaggeration and extrapolation (by 25 order of magnitudes) of the fundamental concepts of QM. It's not science, only "beliefs". And this gives rise to all sorts of speculations, like the "creation of your own cancer" for instance. New Age gurus will instill the beliefs that "you create you're own reality" this way. Some will even claim that by "training" your consciousness (like with TM), you can gain "control" over matter and "choose" whetever reality is best for you. Gurus will claim that you can achieve "higher levels of consciousness" and thus be "rich" and "healthy" or be whaterver you "choose". For example, Deepak Chopra, a promoter of Quantum Healing claims in one of his best selling book that "by an act of consciousness, you can tell your body not to age". So, why is he growing old??? maybe he "chooses" to (LOL)!
If you look at the history of the Physics of Consciousness Research Group (PCRG) that was funded by Werner Erhard in 1975, this is exactly what you will find. Why is this of interests to New Age gurus like Werner Erhard? It's because if you "create your own reality", you are fully responsible (thus blamed) for everything good or bad that happens to your life (being sick, healthy, or swept away by a Tsunami !!!). This way, the guru is always right and you're always wrong (when convenient for the guru).
I am convinced that most Landmarkians don't even know about this ... since this is "what you don't know that you don't know". It's probably one of the secrets that are being kept because if they were to tell such nonsense openly, they would loose skeptical participants, and this is bad for the business.