This was to be the event. At the start of the year, Guerlain teams are refining their communications plan. The French cosmetics giant is to launch a new cream, Imperial Orchid Gold Nobile. 50 milliliters, 650 euros. The firm would have succeeded in putting “quantum technology” into a bottle, based on “quantum light”. With this, “skin rejuvenation” guaranteed. At that price, it’s almost free.
As soon as it was launched on January 4, the advertising campaign caused a stir. Fans approve, but many scientists are skeptical. In scholarly circles, we sometimes punctuate aberrant remarks with a very serious: “It’s quantum.” The idea: to mock laypeople who try to season their salads with scientific terms. “It’s quantum,” they say about the cream on social networks. The formula goes viral. Guerlain withdraws the term.
To justify itself, the firm issued a press release explaining that it had relied on real “advances” in “quantum biology”, in collaboration with a Polish university. This confirms: she works well with Guerlain. Alas, no quantum cream. And for good reason: “Quantum phenomena are only seen in the infinitely small,” complains physicist (and columnist for L’Express) Etienne Klein. He also made his annoyed comment on X (ex-Twitter).
The matter is not trivial: Guerlain has a certain aura, and scientists see it as a trivialization of pseudoscientific discourse, increasingly visible on social networks and in surveys. “For a large company to take up the fallacious arguments around quantum, willingly or unwillingly, it means that popularization has failed. It has made the word known but not what it designates,” laments Etienne Klein.
120 years of mysteries and paradoxes
Built by Schrödinger, Bohr and Born at the start of the 20th century, quantum physics describes the behavior of the smallest particles of matter, such as electrons or photons. “At this scale, bodies can also, and at the same time, behave like waves, a paradox for our senses which only perceive one or the other,” explains Julien Bobroff, physicist and popular author. This gives them astonishing, sometimes contradictory, properties.
These notions, such as “state superposition” or “entanglement” shook the scientists of the time and continue to intrigue the most brilliant minds of our time. But until the 1980s, physicists mainly focused on the calculations resulting from these observations. They are surprisingly easy and precise – computing, medical imaging and even nuclear power rely on them. Without really worrying about “why”. Result: dozens of interpretations of quantum paradoxes coexist. None are satisfactory.
This vagueness fascinates: “Quantum axioms are particularly complex and create important conceptual problems. These are all gaps into which fantasies and pseudosciences rush,” summarizes Jérémy Attard, physicist and philosophy researcher. The fault of the scientists themselves: Schrödinger, to whom we owe the “wave function”, one of the main equations, also said that the universe had consciousness. His famous half-living, half-dead cat, so easy to remember, also gives the impression that the living is quantum.
These mysteries have infused better than the theory itself. Especially since “mystical-quantum” content did not wait for luxury marketing to flourish. Like this “quantum mediation” video, ideal for “reprogramming the unconscious”. Where these capsules with tens of thousands of views on TikTok where users describe their “quantum leaps”, a kind of epiphany. So many misguided concepts, but much more attractive and inspiring than the endless “energy packet calculations” or the very difficult to digest “Bell inequalities”.
False remedies, real abuses
To listen to its apostles, “quantum” would have what it takes to cure all illnesses. A New Age belief that germinated in the 1960s, the fruit of meetings between hippies and physics students, while quantum physics began to become more popular. It will then be enriched by a bestseller, The Quantum Body (1989). Taking up part of the theses of a physicist, Fritz-Albert Popp, the Indian-American endocrinologist Deepak Chopra affirms that we are quantum beings. An absurdity. The person concerned will recognize that he only saw it as a “metaphor”.
No matter, these ideas persist. They are finding a new lease of life with the renewed interest in alternative therapies. A few years ago, Joël, a retired salesman based in the south of France, heard about a therapist capable of increasing “his vibrational frequencies” to the point of passing through matter. He tells her about his liver problems, settles under her hands, and heals, he says. Upset, the septuagenarian begins to practice in his turn. He reads Deepak Chopra, Richard Gordon, Nadine Schuster. At the height of his activity, he received around ten clients per month.
Magnetism, Chinese medicine, homeopathy… Everything can be explained, thanks to quantum. People like Philippe Bobola are convinced of this. Biologist, physicist, anthropologist and psychoanalyst (sic), it promotes nothing less than a “great quantum awakening”. Others build machines to restore “the frequencies.” The classified ads abound. Seen on the website of BFMTV (!): “bioresonance” and “biofeedback” device. 25,000 euros. In two clicks, Claude-Jean Lapostat, its inventor, “resynchronizes” the organs.
What’s the point of burdening yourself with such paraphernalia? Swiss company 90.10 offers much better: remotely converting any bed into an energy teleporter for just $2,500. A service dubbed by the leaders of the QAnon networks, these pro-Trump groups which see conspiracies everywhere. Here they divert the very serious concept of “quantum teleportation”: two particles can see their state evolve jointly without an apparent physical link, one of the famous quantum paradoxes.
The seductive trap of mystical-quantum
More and more French people believe in these pseudo-quantum treatments. So much so that the Order of Physicians had to recall, in a report on the abuses of unconventional care published in June 2023, that these “therapies” are “unrecognized and not scientifically validated”. What’s more, issuing a diagnosis or offering treatments is illegal for non-doctors, the organization points out. The risk ? Keep patients away from proven solutions.
Certain esoteric profiles are particularly worrying: this is the case of Yannick Vérité, 94,000 subscribers on YouTube and around fifteen reports to Miviludes, the interministerial mission to combat sectarian aberrations. Yannick Vérité founded the French School of Quantum Bioenergy. An esoteric training center at 10,000 euros per course, at the end of which its disciples are led to summon “their quantum double”, to access their “innate intelligence” and release their “true potential”.
For the most radical, quantum physics, by breaking down certain theoretical dogmas, would force us to question everything. The world would only be a vast illusion, a masquerade. A dangerous rhetoric: it helps to undo free will. If you can no longer be sure of anything, how can you live your life? Holy bread for manipulators and gurus. The fact remains that if we don’t know how to make the rules of the infinitely small coexist with ours, your issue of L’Express has not yet turned into a wave.
What should we think, all the same, of this disturbing “reduction” of matter, at the moment we observe it? Can we change reality through thought, as the documentary claims What the Bleep Do We Know (“What do we really know about reality”, 2004), popular but fertile in untruths? “In reality, the particles are as they are, but we do not access all their states at the same time”, corrects Richard Monvoisin, didactician and author of Quantox: Ideological misuses of quantum mechanics. At issue: interferences, called “decoherences”, known to the French Alain Aspect and Serge Haroche.
Naive magazines and intellectuals who slip up
A doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Namur, in Belgium, Alice Van Helden tracks down abusive allusions. This specialist in the analysis of quantum interpretations finds them everywhere: in the media, where the tone is often too mystical, and the words are poorly used. In the exhibitions, too: “Once, I read that water would keep information in memory, because of the wave/particle duality. A quantum update of the theses of Jacques Benveniste, which have been refuted many times since 1988. And even in the most reputable scientific journals.
To give credence to their results or attract attention, researchers themselves sometimes indulge in describing what they describe as “quantum”, even though it is unrelated. Thus, we can read in American Psychologist (2018), the most influential psychology journal, that the paranormal could be explained by quantum. A recurring theory in the field, which results, again, from a poor understanding of these phenomena. In 2014, a study published in PNAS was already making headlines, promising to reveal the “quantum nature of human judgments”.
Each time she comes across these mentions, Alice Van Helden sends a note to those responsible. “It’s not because it’s paradoxical, or because there are unknowns, that it’s quantum. We want to see similarities where there aren’t any,” she corrects. , between two conferences on these erroneous presuppositions. Be careful, a minefield: “Making allegories of this type gives, often wrongly, the impression that we are talking about something important, that we have gone to meet the substantive marrow of reality”, abounds the sociologist of beliefs Romy Sauvayre.
On Facebook, a group compiles the slip-ups. Its name takes up the gimmick “It’s quantum”. Pinned: Guerlain, Novak Djokovic, Luc Montagnier Nobel Prize covid-sceptic, Pierre Rabhi and his all-vibration. Michel Onfray too. “Global warming presupposes an organization of the cosmos the details of which we do not know […] Quantum physics tells us ‘let’s be more modest, we don’t know everything’ […] It’s not just that we flush the toilet too much, it’s also interactions (..) in an unthinkable configuration with other universes”, the philosopher got confused in 2020. It’s not a physicist who wanna.
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