Whether the shaman grasps why his cures work is another story. In quantum mechanics we have a purported understanding of Nature on the basis of which, step by step and quantitatively, we make predictions about what will happen if a certain experiment, never before attempted, is carried out. If the experiment bears out the prediction—especially if it does so numerically and precisely—we have confidence that we knew what we were doing. There are at best few examples with this character among shamans, priests, and New Age gurus.
