The long-running rivalry is friendly, but the exchanges are sharp: Alternative medicine author Deepak Chopra calls Skeptic Magazine’s Michael Shermer a “materialist,” while Shermer calls Chopra’s pronouncements “woo woo” – his shorthand for pseudoscience.

The two are expected to square off Thursday at a Chapman University conference called the “Nature of Reality.”

Chopra, who says his work concerns the connection between mind, body and spirit, contends that science and metaphysics soon might be headed for a merger. The conference brings Chopra and like-minded thinkers together with scientists to explore such possibilities.

“I think a new science will emerge which will be a holistic understanding of all reality,” Chopra said in a recent interview.

A big component of that new science, he said, is the idea that consciousness might be a built-in property of the universe — not simply something that arises from the cells and electrical impulses of the human brain.

“I’m saying, basically, it is impossible to conceive of the universe outside of consciousness, because there’s no way of getting outside of consciousness,” he said.

Because he believes there might be hints of such a consciousness in the realm of quantum physics, he calls the idea “quantum consciousness.”

That’s just the kind of statement that Shermer, founder of Skeptic Magazine and a columnist for Scientific American, calls “woo woo.”

“He’s stringing together a bunch of scientific-sounding words, but is obscuring the meaning of these words, or the concepts,” Shermer said in an interview. “What Deepak does is, he uses words like ‘quantum consciousness’ as if that means anything. And it doesn’t.”

Shermer says he does not believe such ideas will alter science itself.

“Deepak is having no effect on science,” he said. “Scientists don’t read him and think, ‘Oh, I better do some research here.'”

But he is concerned about the potential effect on public understanding of science, and on the fostering of unproven medical claims.

“To the extent it leads people away from traditional, science-based medicine, it worries me,” Shermer said. “There is no such thing as alternative medicine. There’s just scientific medicine, and all the unproven stuff. What Deepak is promoting is a sort of alternative, complimentary medicine, and most of that is woo-woo.”

Chopra agrees that his concepts are having little effect on mainstream science — so far.

“There definitely is a merging,” he said, of physics and metaphysics. “But you can count the number of scientists bringing about that merging on your hand. Hopefully there will be more in the future. As they say, paradigm shifts occur one funeral at a time.”

For his part, he considers Shermer to be the one pushing uninformed views of science.

“I think until recently, until we started kind of sparring a little bit, he has actually not kept himself, in my opinion, abreast of some of the most fundamental, cutting-edge thought in physics and mathematics,” Chopra said. “I think he’s out of date, personally, but I like him as a person.”

Among the cutting-edge concepts in physics Chopra mentions is “non-locality,” a weird property of quantum physics — the interaction of particles at the atomic and subatomic level.

Chapman physicist Yakir Aharonov recently received a National Medal of Science from President Obama for his co-discovery of the Aharonov-Bohm effect, in which a charged particle is influenced by a confined magnetic field with which it has never come into contact.

That discovery and others raise profound questions about the nature of time and space.

But just because we don’t understand the meaning of such effects does not mean we should embrace exotic, supernatural explanations, Shermer said.

“I’m just saying we don’t have to conclude anything,” he said. “We just don’t know. We don’t have to explain everything. Let’s just keep looking.”

Chapman scientists are no strangers to the borderland between science and metaphysics.

An organizer of Thursday’s conference, physicist Menas Kafatos, attended Chopra’s conference, “Scientists and Sages — the Merging of New Future,” in Carlsbad last month.

And Kafatos, founding dean of Chapman’s Schmid College of Science, is also co-author of “The Conscious Universe: Parts and Wholes in Physical Reality.”

Kafatos has tangled with physicist Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow over their assertion that no God is needed to create the universe, made in their recent book, “The Grand Design.”

Chopra said he and Mlodinow, who also will attend Thursday’s conference, are working on a new book together that will set forth their differing opinions on physics and metaphysics.

“The book is called ‘War of the World Views,’ and I’m glad this conversation is taking place,” Chopra said.

The Nature of Reality Conference begins at 6 p.m. at Chapman’s Marion Knott Studios, Folino Theater, and costs $25 for members of the public but is free to Chapman students, faculty and staff.