You Are the Universe: Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why It Matters. By Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos. Harmony Books, New York, 2017. ISBN 978-0-307-88916-4. 288 pp. Hardcover, $16.37.
The authors of You Are the Universe are two highly qualified pseudoscientists well suited to write this title. Deepak Chopra, the guru of consciousness, needs no introduction. Menas Kafatos, however, may not be a household name. Despite being touted as a “highly respected physicist” by Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, and a “quantum physics expert” by Leonard Mlodinow, a Caltech physics professor, Kafatos is neither. He is as much respected in the physics community as Chopra is in the medical community, and his only connection with quantum theory (QT) is its alleged mystical relation with consciousness. His lack of understanding of even the basics of QT shows up on page 116: “Electrons, at least for the lowest orbits, travel in a perfect circle around the nucleus of an atom.” Every physics sophomore learns that the idea of an orbit violates the uncertainty principle.