Hello Classmates,
Probably the subject Quantum Mechanics (QM) does not necessarily ring a bell.
It is however a very interesting topic because, the findings that let to QM, are on the edge pure science and religion. Therefore in today’s scientific world people have different explanations about what QM exactly implies.
You may wonder what QM has to do with Social Media, but I will explain that right now.
Because QM has such mystical and vague explanations, it is very vulnerable for wrong information circling around on websites like for example Wikipedia.
The Sokal Hoax is such an example were even a scientific paper was not able to uncover the nonsense of “true” information.
What I want to state with this example is that is becoming more and more difficult to identify true information, because of the nature the information itself. Information is not something that can stand alone. In the light of different perspectives and new insights information “changes”.
Therefore I think that we as a society are not becoming more shallower as Nicholas Carr’s states. We now have the opportunity to find information from various perspectives and stay update with every change that is being made, this, I think enriches our thinking instead of making it more shallower
Below the example of the Sokal Hoax:
Sokal hoax
In the scientific field there are reports that there is some difficulty to distinguish) true science from fiction when it comes to QM. A good example of this is the Sokal hoax. This refers to an article published by Alan Sokal a physics professor at the New York University In 1996 he submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The title of his article was “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”
The article was as Sokal explains; “a pastiche of Left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense, structured around the silliest quotations (by postmodernist academics) he could find about mathematics and physics”.
At that time the journal did not practice academic peer review and did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
