How Quantum Theories Took Over TikTok

Quantum flapdoodle strikes again in my latest story for Slate.

Oct 20, 2022

At first glance, the video seems like an ordinary news recap. “So today the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to scientists,” says TikTok creator Sami Moog. Then things get really trippy. “Your imagination literally makes up your own personal quantum field and it constructs every single thing around you,” he says. By the end, he’s discussed vibrationally matching your desires and manifesting changes to reality.

Moog’s video is a classic example of quantum mysticism, which is the association of a set of metaphysical beliefs and spiritual worldviews with the science of quantum mechanics. Think of Deepak Chopra’s “quantum theory” that humans can control their pace of aging using only the power of their minds. Over the years, professional physicists have decried what they view as the misapplication of quantum physics principles to unrelated self-help topics—what Caltech Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann famously described as “quantum flapdoodle.”

Yet content of the flapdoodle sort is proliferating on TikTok. Moog’s video “How to Change Your Quantum Field” is among the torrent of videos tagged #QuantumPhysics and #NobelPrize on the app, hashtags that have garnered more than 207 million views across the platform. Hundreds of these “quantum” science videos claim that quantum cosmology allows humans to literally teleport between different realities or communicate telepathically with their past and future selves.

As a TikTok user, it isn’t easy to avoid this mystical element. If you watch a video of a trained scientist explaining quantum mechanics, fringe quantum takes are likely to start appearing in your content stream. That’s because TikTok’s algorithm groups the videos within the same “quantum” umbrella. And the recent announcement of the Nobel Prize for Physics has only made this worse.