Tag Archives: solipsism

What happens if you don't understand math? Just replace it with solipsism, and you can get published!

About four years ago, I wrote a post about a crackpot theory by a biologist named Robert Lanza. Lanza is a biologist – a genuine, serious scientist. And his theory got published in a major journal, “The American Scholar”. Nevertheless, it’s total rubbish.

Anyway, the folks over at the Encyclopedia of American Loons just posted an entry about him, so I thought it was worth bringing back this oldie-but-goodie. The original post was inspired by a comment from one of my most astute commenters, Mr. Blake Stacey, where he gave me a link to Lanza’sarticle.

The article is called “A New Theory of the Universe”, by Robert Lanza, and as I said, it was published in the American Scholar. Lanza’s article is a rotten piece of new-age gibberish, with all of the usual hallmarks: lots of woo, all sorts of babble about how important consciousness is, random nonsensical babblings about quantum physics, and of course, bad math.

Continue reading