Three days ago, PBS Spacetime explained the event horizon. I have only watched parts of the video but I do believe that it does correctly explain what's special and what's not special about the black hole event horizon – and how the Penrose diagrams work.
Sadly, PBS Spacetime keeps on producing wildly deceptive videos about quantum mechanics. In late October, they promoted the many worlds "interpretation" which I discussed two weeks ago. The November 30th video embedded above promotes Bohmian mechanics – the pilot wave theory.
The 12-minute-long video (plus four minutes not related to the main topic) correctly sketches the meaning of this theory and some of the history. However, almost all the claims "evaluating" the theory or "comparing" it to proper quantum mechanics are highly problematic or downright deceptive. Let me discuss some of them in detail.
In the first sentence, Bohmian mechanics is promoted as "one interpretation that manages to skip... all the mysterious ideas". This is, of course, rubbish. The thing that Bohmian mechanics skips is that the world is quantum mechanical, not classical. And this "skipping" is a fundamental and lethal flaw, not a virtue, of Bohmian mechanics because it's the quantum mechanical nature of our theories that is absolutely needed to get an agreement between the reality and the experiment. It's been needed for more than 90 years. It's a long enough period of time for people to notice.
Moreover, while Bohmian mechanics is a classical theory, it in no way "skips" bizarre features. In particular, Bohmian mechanics has to introduce straight non-local influences – which are really voodoo and have been known to be prohibited by the 1905 theory of relativity. Also, it contains new classical waves that spread and their number and dilution is constantly getting out of control. A "janitor" that would clean all this mess – the spreading omnipresent wave functions that are no longer needed for any predictions and won't be observed – would be badly needed.
But no one has provided Bohmian mechanics with a well-defined janitor of this kind. So while these critics of quantum mechanics (=Copenhagen interpretation) identify the measurement as their pet "problem", Bohmian mechanics doesn't say and really cannot say anything coherent about the measurement at all. Instead, Bohmian mechanics only proposes a different story for the phase of the unitary evolution in between two measurements – something that is considered OK in quantum mechanics, even by the critics of quantum mechanics. During the measurement, the pilot wave should "shrink" to emulate the collapse in proper quantum mechanics. Proper (=Copenhagen) quantum mechanics defines very clear rules what happens during the measurement (these insights are really the bulk of quantum mechanics as a new framework of physics, not some optional makeup); while Bohmian mechanics simply doesn't have and cannot have any replacement for these rules.
No Bohmist has ever written down any rules that would govern how the pilot wave shrinks. Also, and it's related, none of them has ever explained how the initial state of the particle after the measurement – which has to be randomly placed within the realm of the pilot wave, to agree with the probabilistic distribution extracted from the pilot wave – is determined.
Bohmian mechanics claims to remove the need for the intrinsic randomness of Nature. However, in reality, it only rewrites the random result of the final measurement as a function of the random initial conditions – position of the Bohmian particle. To agree with the observations, the initial position has to be random, anyway, and no one knows how this random number is prepared. It means that Bohmian mechanics doesn't actually say anything new, original, or coherent about the ultimate origin of the random numbers that we measure at the end.
Bohmian mechanics violates locality – as required by relativity. It has no explanation for the linearity of the equation that governs the evolution of the wave function (rebranded as the pilot wave). Any completion of it that also takes care of the measurements etc. will unavoidably disagree with the low heat capacity of the atoms. Also, Bohmian mechanics implies a frantic – and experimentally unjustified – very fast motion of particles around places with \(\psi=0\) which are needed to repel the particle from the interference minima. Bohmian mechanics isn't consistent with the spin, particle production, and other intrinsically relativistic quantum phenomena. And it has many other serious flaws that have been discussed in numerous previous blog posts on Bohmian mechanics.
And yes, the very claim that quantum mechanics (like understood in Copenhagen etc.) is "near mystical" or "wildly extravagant" is just a widespread laymen's delusion. Laymen may have trouble to understand modern physics but that doesn't make modern physics extravagant or similar to mystical cults.
And despite its alluringly intuitive nature, for some reason, it remains a fringe theory.
This meme is repeated about 10 times in the video. It's clearly being hoped that a lie repeated many times becomes the truth. Bohmian mechanics is mainly "alluringly intuitive" for the laymen – and de facto laymen – who just aren't capable of learning a framework of physics that goes beyond classical physics. My point is that the term "alluringly intuitive" is absolutely subjective and the people who assign this adjective to Bohmian mechanics suck as physicists.
The adjective is in no way an objective appraisal of any features of Bohmian mechanics. It is a subjective feeling, and one as perceived by the intellectually inadequate people.
Also, Bohmian mechanics doesn't remain a fringe theory just for "some" reason; the vagueness about the hypothetical "some" reason makes the viewers think about some evil conspiracy. Bohmian mechanics remains a fringe theory for a very important, totally well-known, and completely standard reason: It just doesn't agree with the empirically discovered properties of Nature. The laws of relativity that imply locality are a principle that has been experimentally verified and very accurately verified. A theory that prohibits locality is in existential trouble, to put it euphemistically. A theory that doesn't predict the spin has a problem. And so on. If I use a slightly non-technical language that is free of equations, Bohmian theory remains a fringe theory simply because it's a pile of šit. To claim otherwise – e.g. to claim that Bohmian mechanics is being suppressed by the brute force of some evil, white, male, pro-capitalist or bigoted physicists – means to deceive the audiences.
You may see that Mr Matt is literally trying to brainwash the listeners and make them suspicious about the physicists, starting from Heisenberg and Bohr, who must surely have "some" (dirty) reasons for their conclusions. This is not how popularization of science works. You're not really trying to make science popular, Mr Matt. You're trying to make science unpopular, disliked, and make it (and its heroes) look suspicious by repeating your pseudoscientific populist clichés.
Proper popularization of science tries to communicate the insights made by science and by scientists to broader audiences. What (not only) PBS Spacetime is doing in these videos about (or against) quantum mechanics is exactly the opposite thing. It wants to intimidate the scientists and push them in a direction that would be favored by the laymen. This behavior is immensely counterproductive. Science proceeds by careful calculations, argumentations, and especially comparisons of the empirical data with proposed hypotheses. It doesn't work by imposing prejudices of large bodies of people on everyone else. If you don't get this point, you are misunderstanding something much more fundamental about all of science than just a technicality about a particular physics experiment.
Misinterpretations of the ideas of quantum mechanics has spawned some of the worst quackery pseudoscience hoo-ha and unfounded mystical storytelling of any scientific theory.
Right. But what Mr Matt forgot to say is that Bohmian mechanics is pretty much exactly the same kind of bad quackery pseudoscience hoo-ha as other stories that try to deny or misinterpret the very basic principles discovered during the quantum revolution. I think that Mr Matt is an atheist fundamentalist of a sort so he thinks that a quackery attempting to confine physics in the era of classical physics is better than more idealist types of quackeries. But it's not better.
Mr Matt says a few sentences trying to make proper quantum mechanics look "weird". But again, it's not weird and if it looks weird to you even after years of thinking about them, it's because you're stupid, not because there's something "weird" about quantum mechanics.
But there is one interpretation that remains comfortably, almost stodgily, physical. Bohmian mechanics.
Again, this is basically a repetition of the lie I've discussed above. You may focus on the key word in the sentence. It's the word "physical". Why does he say that Bohmian mechanics is more "physical" than proper quantum mechanics? It's simple. It's because he thinks that the word "physical" means what physicists actually call "classical". It's very clear that the actual thing he wanted to say is the sentence with the word "classical". Mr Matt makes this fact obvious when he says that Bohmian mechanics postulates "a real wave and a real particle". What he calls "physical" – and also what he calls "real" – is that the theory assumes that everything is about some observer-independent, objective values of some classical degrees of freedom.
But "classical" and "physical" are entirely different, inequivalent adjectives. After all, almost all of new physics has been quantum mechanical – i.e. non-classical – for over 90 years. The word "physics" comes from the ancient Greek "physis" or "φύσις" which is Nature, not classical physics. Nature follows the laws of quantum mechanics. The identification of the words "real" and "classical" is also problematic. The word "real" is undefined but it's clearly being used because the property is assumed to be "good". But being "classical" is no good in physics. So the words can't be equivalent. You're bound to reach wrong conclusions if you treat them as equivalent.
I think that sentences like that – and especially words like "physical" – are rarely being fought against but they should be confronted vigorously because these "microagressions" may be the main reason that keeps most laymen, even laymen who are interested in modern physics, clueless and deluded. People are being constantly told that theories of Nature should be classical by talking heads who pretty much deliberately conflate the adjective "physical" (and other, positively sounding adjectives such as "real") with the totally different adjective "classical". In this way, instead of being explained in what sense they need to update their reasoning if they want to understand modern physics, the laymen's incorrect prejudices that the world must be fundamentally classical are being reinforced.
Pilot wave theory is perhaps the most solidly physical, even mundane of the complete and self-consistent interpretations of quantum mechanics.
It's really amazing how many times these primary lies have been repeated in the video. So again: Pilot wave theory is not more "physical" than proper (Copenhagen) quantum mechanics. At most, it's more "classical". It may be "mundane" but the goal of physical theories isn't to be mundane. Their goal is for them to be correct – to agree with the empirical observations. "Mundane" and "correct" are completely different things. A person who tries to study and believe things that are maximally "mundane" is unlikely to become a good theoretical physicist.
As Mr Matt admits at other places, pilot wave theory is surely not "complete". Later in the video, he admits that it's incompatible with relativity and the corresponding phenomena in quantum field theory etc. But even independently of quantum field theory, Bohmian mechanics is obviously incomplete because it doesn't say how and why the pilot wave is "cleaned" after the measurement when the particle is absorbed, how the initial (random) position of the particle is determined, and so on.
The theory may be said to be "self-consistent" only to the extent to which it is incomplete. If you tried to make a Bohmian theory complete, it would unavoidably be internally inconsistent. There's simply no consistent yet complete way to describe the quantum mechanical phenomena classically – and Bohmian mechanics is nothing else than a subset of the attempts to describe quantum mechanical phenomena classically.
Bohmian mechanics is also considered the least orthodox one because orthodoxy is radicalism plus time.
Well, it's not a goal of a physical theory to be orthodox or non-orthodox, either. Nevertheless, Bohmian mechanics is clearly the least orthodox interpretation because it seems most incompatible with the founders of quantum mechanics who actually defined the orthodoxy – and with the propositions that these physicists have made. And among the available misinterpretations of quantum mechanics, Bohmian mechanics has also attracted some of the loudest criticisms by the actual founders of the orthodoxy such as Bohr and Heisenberg. Of course, the abandonment of the classical reasoning is a fundamental part of the quantum revolution – therefore a part of the orthodoxy – so if someone tries to deny this very basic point, that we need a new theory to connect the equations with observations, he's obviously a highly non-orthodox quantum mechanics guy. He's really not a quantum mechanics guy at all. If a person were this non-orthodox relatively to religions, he would be a full-fledged heretic and would be burned at stake.
So the "non-orthodox" adjective doesn't really matter for the evaluation of the theory but the reasons why this adjective is being used are sociological, historical, and very clear.
Bohr and Heisenberg were radicals.
Rubbish.
They considered themselves and they were conservative physicists and they were extending thinking in physics that has been so successful long before they started with their successful careers. Just to be sure, let me quote a sensible book about this very question (read the whole page!):
Contrary to common claims and some appearances, however, in Bohr's case (or that of Heisenberg or several others who may be invoked here, Pauli, for example), one encounters what might be called the extreme disciplinary conservatism or, extending the notion, the extreme conservatism in theoretical thinking. I mean by this an extreme reluctance to bring in a radical change, which is finally done only at points and in regions where there is really no choice, in the sense that their discipline (in either sense) in fact requires it. [...]
In particular, Heisenberg always thought that he learned about the need for the positivist thinking from Einstein. While finding special relativity, Einstein has warned that one must be careful to only talk about things that can be operationally defined i.e. measured, and e.g. "the absolute time" isn't one of those. Heisenberg only applied this insight to a broader set of observations. Only the results of observations by observers must be addressed by a theory; a theory may refuse the existence of some values of quantities before the observations – just like a relativistic theory rejects the very notion of absolute time! This positivism was already well-known in physics more than 100 years ago (it's too bad that some people still fail to get it even in 2016 but it's their fault, not because these insights would be "radical" or "new").
Otherwise, Heisenberg kept as much as he could. His Heisenberg equations of motion (for quantum mechanics) basically coincide with Newton's equations. The difference really is that \(xp-px\) is no longer zero but \(i\hbar\) instead (a tiny number, a tiny change, relatively to macroscopic values of quantities with the same units).
Sociologically and by self-description, the statement that Bohr and Heisenberg were "radicals" is just another lie. The qualitative modifications – e.g. the insight that one needs to pick an observer to apply the laws of physics – weren't chosen because Heisenberg, Bohr, Pauli, and pals were obsessed with producing as new and radical things as possible, just for fun. Instead, these insights were adopted because there was absolutely no other choice and they were remarkably able to see and understand the reasons why there was no other choice. And there is still no other choice. There will never be any other choice.
When quantum mechanics was discovered in the 1920s, they were fervent about the need to reject all classical thinking in interpreting the strange results of early quantum experiments.
No. They found their amazing proofs that it was needed to reject the foundations of classical physics – and to construct the actual new theory, quantum mechanics, that can do much better. It was clearly one of the greatest revolutions in the history of science and they were only fervent once the proofs were settled down. A revolution was in no way their initial plan.
They were only as fervent as any scientist is fervent when talking about an important result that has been scientifically settled. And all competent physicists are as fervent as the founders of quantum mechanics when it comes to the need to reject all classical thinking. Who hasn't understood that to do modern physics, one must abandon classical thinking, it a crackpot – whether or not he or she has a lipstick. This fact was known already in the 1920s and it is equally known today.
One aspect was that the wave function was nothing physical but an abstract distribution of probabilities.
Again, the word "physical" is used instead of what he really means, "a classical wave". The fact that the wave function isn't a classical wave but a template for probability distributions isn't a personal opinion that may be left to the personal taste. It is one of the crucial insights that underlie quantum mechanics. A person who rejects this insight is a person who misunderstand the heart of quantum mechanics. He's clueless about everything.
In fact, the sentence "the wave function is an abstract distribution of probabilities" must be largely true even in any Bohmian mechanics approach to explain the experiments. The initial position of the Bohmian particle has to be random and has to be chosen according to the probability distribution that coincides with the initial values of the wave function (rebranded as the pilot wave). De Broglie's equations are then able to preserve this property – the Bohmian particle is distributed according to the pilot wave at later times, too – after some evolution. This preservation is really the only "achievement" of Bohmian mechanics. And it is not something to celebrate because we had to adjust as many things as the things that we got out. Bohmian mechanics' equations may be derived as the equations that have this property. There's no independent test of the theory with a good result. But it's still true that there has to be a mechanism that picks the particle position according to the probability distribution extracted from the wave function.
Proper quantum mechanics postulates that this selection takes place at the moment of the measurement – and the particle's position is unknown before the measurement. Bohmian mechanics tries to assume that the particle's position exists at all times. But it still needs to pick a particle position in the initial state and it must be picked by some – unspecified (because Bohmian mechanics is totally incomplete) – mechanism, according to the same logic of probability distributions as those in proper quantum mechanics. The fact that Bohmists never talk about the picking of the initial position from the distribution – because they would only have embarrassing things to say – doesn't mean that \(|\psi|^2\) ceases to be a probability distribution. Everyone who "interprets" the objects in quantum mechanics in a viable way must agree that it is a probability distribution. Like other crucial, physically well-defined statements in physics, this statement isn't a subjective optional "opinion" that could depend on people's moods and culture.
This required an almost mystical wave-particle duality.
There is nothing "mystical" about the wave-particle duality. Mathematically, this statement boils down to rudimentary properties of the Fourier transform. Aside from the words "almost mystical", the word "required" is demagogic, too. Quantum mechanics required the wave-particle duality but it still requires and will always require the wave-particle duality. It's textbook stuff. The past tense is another deception.
Mr Matt also tries to sling mud on quantum mechanics because of its "fundamental randomness". But any viable theory that reproduces the quantum experiments must have some fundamental randomness simply because the random results are observed and a viable theory must be compatible with the experiments. As I mentioned, Bohmian mechanics at most needs to change the moment when the random number is generated. It must be already generated in the initial state, before the evolution. But if it would try to eliminate the fundamental randomness entirely, it would immediately contradict the experiments because the randomness of the outcomes is an experimentally proven fact.
OK, Mr Matt said historically correctly that Louis de Broglie asked in 1927: Why not real waves pushing real particles? Well, there are very good reasons, they have been communicated to de Broglie, and he abandoned those ideas. Decades later, the stuff was reinvented by David Bohm in 1952. This historical portion of the video is decent. Well, except for claims such as "the pilot wave is entirely deterministic". It simply cannot be because there has to be a random generator that prepares the Bohmian particle's initial position. The random generator is just being moved to a different place, it isn't eliminated and it cannot be eliminated.
These days, more and more serious physicists favor Bohmian ideas.
No, there are no serious physicists who "favor" Bohmian ideas. A corrected version of the sentence above would say: There are many crackpots who are keen on Bohmian mechanics and who love to call themselves serious physicists. Note that this self-confidence is observed not only on Bohmian crackpots but on almost all crackpots.
Bohmian theory differs in "special thinking". Most of the arguments for or against it are about "special thinking". Are you more comfortable with this or that?
This is just an utter lie. The reasons why Bohmian mechanics isn't considered a viable theory have nothing to do with any special thinking – just with the standard comparison of predictions with the experiments. And Bohmian mechanics simply cannot correctly explain most of the observations that are being made by the physicists.
Quite generally, unlike pop-science babblers and demagogues, physicists almost never use this kind of vague "special thinking". If a hypothesis is comparable with the data, it's considered as a possibility by almost all physicists who study these issues. Bohmian mechanics isn't seriously considered because it doesn't agree with the empirical facts. There's just almost no room for the vague subjective stuff referred to as the "special thinking" in physics. Physics – and science – simply isn't about some subjective emotional appraisals. By claiming otherwise, Mr Matt seriously distorts the very meaning and character of science in general. The "methods" he claims to be relevant in science – laymen's vague feelings, "comfort", and votes – simply have nothing whatsoever to do with the scientific method.
What are the uncomfortable features of Bohmian mechanics? Mathematically, it requires an extra equation, a guiding equation governing the evolution of the particle.
It is not a serious problem at all for a candidate theory to have a doubled number of equations. An actual problem of this kind is that one may show that the Bohmian particle position is entirely unphysical – recall that the word "physical" doesn't mean "classical", it basically means "observable by physical apparatuses". So all the quantities that seem to be added – the actual Bohmian particle positions or their generalizations – seem to be metaphysical rubbish.
But they could still exist even if it were hard or impossible to measure them. But even with these additions, the theory just can't account for the whole processes without using another theory – most likely quantum mechanics – to do the actual heavy lifting, explain the preparation of the initial state and the measurement at the end, the form of the actual equations, linearity, and other things.
Bohmian mechanics is just a silly caricature that can't be used to make any predictions a physicist cares about independently of other theories. It is a parasitic, ideologically driven superstructure that actually needs proper mechanics to be fully used – while it wants to undermine the very foundations that allow quantum mechanics do the heavy lifting.
Mr Matt discusses Bohmian "hidden variables" as another problem. That's silly because the hidden variables are exactly the Bohmian particle positions so this criticism is the same as the previous one (about the extra equation). He says something about the bad rap of hidden variables in quantum mechanics. John von Neumann has proven a no-go theorem that wasn't quite right because it excluded all hidden variables, not just "local hidden variables".
But while one might criticize some technical points of von Neumann's proof, the criticism of the overall conclusions is just totally wrong. First, since 1905, we knew that "excluding hidden variables" and "excluding local hidden variables" are equivalent things if you restrict yourself to viable theories because the laws of Nature must be local. So the difference doesn't matter – we know that non-local theories are fatally ill for other, relativistic reasons.
Second, it is simply not true that Bell's theorem is the only theorem or the strongest theorem of a similar spirit that one may prove. Bell's theorem is just one of thousands of simple homework exercises with inequalities following from classical physics that one may explicitly solve. And this particular theorem shows that the assumption of local hidden variables has some implications for the measurements of spins' correlations. Because those inequalities are violated in Nature, Nature can't run on local hidden variables.
But that doesn't mean that Nature can run on non-local variables. Even if you allowed a conflict with relativity, there are other theorems – homework exercises – that similarly exclude many well-defined classes of non-local hidden variables, too. If you need a name, Leggett-style inequalities have been used to exclude classes of non-local realist theories. I don't want to emphasize this particular work because like Bell's inequality, Leggett's inequality is just another homework exercise. You can invent thousands of additional ones. Leggett's inequalities has implications that "look" stronger than Bell's inequalities, at least from some viewpoint.
Founders of quantum mechanics didn't focus on silly high school setups such as one analyzed in Bell's papers. They looked at the physically important questions – how atoms, molecules, nuclei, solids work etc. And they have found a highly viable new theory along with the evidence that its basic properties are needed to agree with the experiments – no classical, hidden-variable theory (whether it's local or non-local) can do the same job.
People like Matt try to present Bell's theorem as some ultimate, crowning achievement in physics that forever defines what can be excluded and what cannot. But this is totally wrong. Bell's theorem is just one particular example of a situation explicitly showing how classical physics and quantum mechanics produce seriously differing predictions. And it's really just the ancient, known-to-be-incorrect, classical side of the calculation that was carefully analyzed by Bell and where the inequality was derived. Bell's inequality doesn't say anything about theories that are correct or may be correct; it only carefully studies theories that were believed to be incorrect from the 1920s.
In almost all other situations, classical physics and quantum mechanics differ, too. They often differ in different ways than in Bell's theorem. The idea that you understand the bulk of quantum mechanics if you follow Bell's derivation of the inequalities is absolutely preposterous. The derivation takes place in classical physics so you obviously don't learn anything about quantum mechanics if you only study that derivation, just like you don't learn too much about electric cars by playing with the steam engine.
Experiments indicate that some type of non-locality is real whether or not we accept pilot waves
No, experiments unambiguously imply that the amount of non-locality in Nature (at least in the absence of quantum gravity phenomena) is exactly zero. There is no non-locality in Nature, this fact was settled by Einstein in 1905, and everyone who claims otherwise is a crackpot or a liar or both.
OK, bouncing droplets as a proof of Bohmism, my stomach has run out of patience. At least in the final minute, Mr Matt admitted that the pilot wave theory is "at best incomplete" because it doesn't account for relativity. Too bad that he has previously called it "complete".
Pilot wave theory hasn't gotten there (to relativity and QFT) yet. But there is good effort in that direction.
Statements like that are absolutely fraudulent, too. In science, hypotheses are abandoned – falsified – when they contradict the empirical data. Anything that has been presented as "Bohmian mechanics" contradicts the relativistic, characteristically quantum-field-theory-based observations in particle physics. So Bohmian mechanics is excluded. Claims about "directions" are just rubbish. There is no interesting "direction" from death. Whoever buys promises about "good efforts" and "directions" and dilutes his totally sharp and obvious understanding of the fact that e.g. Bohmian mechanics is ruled out because it contradicts relativistic, QFT-like observations in particle physics, is a brainwashed dimwit. He is being fooled into imagining a completely different theory – a hypothetical theory in some "direction" or transformed by some unknown promised "effort" – than one that is actually being pushed down his throat.
Sorry but these are two different theories. There is one Bohmian mechanics that has been spelled out and that unequivocally contradicts relativity and is therefore excluded; and then there is a hypothetical future Bohmian (a misnomer) theory that doesn't suffer from these lethal flaws. The disadvantage of the latter theory is that it just doesn't f*cking exist. But if you don't have a problem when someone conflates these two theories, the wrong one and the non-existent one, and after hearing some totally cheap, vague, and moronic words about "efforts" and "directions", you conclude that there is a viable theory, then you have the IQ of a bumpkin (which rhymes in Czech).
The testing of hypotheses just isn't about promises of efforts and directions. We may only test hypotheses that have been formulated in one way or another, at least to a well-defined nonzero extent so that they imply something, and when they disagree, they're dead.
When we talk about gravity, no sort of quantum mechanics has sorted it out.
That's a complete lie, too. If you want a totally complete and consistent, really specific, 1925-like version of a quantum mechanical theory that contains a full sector of quantum gravity with everything it needs to contain, why don't you study the BFSS Matrix theory – a light-cone gauge description of string/M-theory? Or some version of AdS/CFT? For simpler purposes, like neutrons bouncing in the Earth's gravitational field, the original Schrödinger's equation with an extra Newton's gravitational potential term is just fine (and experimentally validated), too. And even for the broad features (and perturbative expansions) of the Hawking radiation of black holes, quantum field theory on curved spaces is enough.
Mr Matt repeats some of the misconceptions again at the end. Perhaps, some of them are said a bit more carefully but it's still terrible. There are just so many illogical, deceitful, idiotic, demagogic things in this kind of videos – and books and articles – that I am losing any optimism that more than "thousands" of people in the world can ever learn how the things work. If there were 3 mistakes, one could imagine that they're fixed. But the whole way of thinking about everything and anything – including the very meaning of the scientific method – that is promoted by similar videos seems to be absolute rubbish and such a starting point is probably pedagogically hopeless.