With pompous nonsense like The Secret and What the Bleep Do We Know pumping up the upper middle classes around the world for the entire summer about how thinking very hard about something will get it to you, is it any wonder why Fred Alan Wolf is dropping by for a little visit in Istanbul?

For those of you who mercifully don't know who he is, Fred Alan Wolf is a theoretical physicist from the States. He's got the right qualifications and to be honest, he's not half as full of shit as some of the other quantum monkeys out there. But take a look at his life's work; with titles like The Yoga of Time Travel: How the Mind Can Defeat Time (2004) and The Spiritual Universe: One Physicists Vision of Spirit, Soul, Matter, and Self (1996), even that might be a lot of bull-sheet.

If you even read a few issues of Science about quantum mechanics, stuff like this is wrong enough to have you banging your head against the walls. There's too much we don't know about this new realm, Quantum effects seem to be limited to certain subatomic particles, and there's absolutely no evidence that "asking the universe" for something will get it to us through mystic-quantum magickery.

Isn't it more likely that a group of people naturally advantaged enough to dish out more than four hundred euros for a crap conference will already have the world revolving around them, so to speak?

Isn't it a bit weird that such a 'secret' that's supposedly free, universal and all-powerful still leaves the majority of the world mired in poverty, ignorance and misery, especially when, as Dr. Quantum says, "the Eastern cultures", the very societies that have the worst standards of life today, supposedly have an innate understanding of it?

Isn't it odd that the universe, which supposedly assembles itself around our perceptions, is prone to accidental tragedies, random weirdness, and billions of years of completely-unanticipated history?

I want my money back Dr. Quantum, why am I still not a god?

PS: You can read the overview of Dr. Quantum's presentation right here, it's as obscure, promoise-laden and mystical as any religious text.