One of our favourite parts of a Friday afternoon (at least for European readers) is the arrival of the Forbes Wolfe Nanotech Insider. Fast becoming a cult in the nanoscience community, it is a promo piece for their monthly nanotech stock tips newsletter and illustrates perfectly the the problems faced when writers with no understanding of the science behind nanotechnology attempt to explain it to readers who also have no idea. To their credit, the Forbes people probably know a thing or two about stock newsletters, but when it comes to science its the blind leading the blind.
Recent issues have stumbled over explanations of the second law of thermodynamics and the relationship between general relativity and quantum physics, but the real coup de grace comes this week when Josh Wolfe promises to refute the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, something that has been vexing the world’s brightest physicists and cosmologists for almost fifty years. Many Worlds is where physics meets metaphysics.
Of course refuting a theory takes many forms, but given that this particular interpretation of quantum mechanics has supporters such as Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman it had better be pretty good. Why this will be in published in Forbes and not in a letter to Nature we have no idea, as the readers if the former probably have little idea what a wave function is, and even less idea abut Dirac Notation.
What this has to do with nanotechnology investing were not quite sure, but we are certainly looking forward to finding out.