Flaws in Bohmian mechanics

LuMo rightly trashes Bohm's quantum mechanics:

In the first sentence, Bohmian mechanics is promoted as "one interpretation that manages to skip... all the mysterious ideas". This is, of course, rubbish. The thing that Bohmian mechanics skips is that the world is quantum mechanical, not classical. And this "skipping" is a fundamental and lethal flaw, not a virtue, of Bohmian mechanics because it's the quantum mechanical nature of our theories that is absolutely needed to get an agreement between the reality and the experiment. It's been needed for more than 90 years. It's a long enough period of time for people to notice.

Moreover, while Bohmian mechanics is a classical theory, it in no way "skips" bizarre features. In particular, Bohmian mechanics has to introduce straight non-local influences – which are really voodoo and have been known to be prohibited by the 1905 theory of relativity. Also, it contains new classical waves that spread and their number and dilution is constantly getting out of control. A "janitor" that would clean all this mess – the spreading omnipresent wave functions that are no longer needed for any predictions and won't be observed – would be badly needed.

In spite of this, the theory still has defenders, such as this Quora article:

Physicists today remain largely unaware of the fact that quantum mechanics is perfectly choreographed by the mathematics of the de Broglie-Bohm theory, otherwise known as Bohmian mechanics. Despite the fact that Bohm’s formalism is entirely deterministic, and less vague than the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, so far it has only been widely recognized and embraced among philosophers of physics. ...

To dive right in, let us note that in addition to the Schrödinger equation, which is shared among all quantum mechanical interpretations, Bohmian mechanics[1] is completed by the specification of actual particle positions, which evolve (in configuration space) according to the guiding equation. This combination elegantly restores determinism into the dynamics of physical reality; accounting for all the phenomena governed by nonrelativistic quantum mechanics—from spectral lines and scattering theory to superconductivity, the quantum hall effect, quantum tunneling, nonlocality, and quantum computing.

On top of this, Bohm’s theory magnificently elucidates state evolution without elevating the role of the observer to something mystical.[2] This reveals that the stochastic property of the orthodox approach of quantum mechanics, which manifests in state vector reduction, is merely a reflection of the incompleteness of that approach.[3] ...

Bohm’s model has been praised as a cure to the conceptual difficulties that have plagued quantum mechanics because it elegantly does away with much of the subjectivity and vagueness found in the standard approach. Despite this, mainstream physicists haven’t embraced this interpretation, or examined it in depth. In fact, the large majority of them haven’t even heard of it. This is embarrassing, surprising and frustrating.[5] If Bohmian mechanics provides a cure to modern quantum mechanical philosophic complacency, then why have there been so few to study the richness of this elegant formalism? ...

Bohm’s model has been praised as a cure to the conceptual difficulties that have plagued quantum mechanics because it elegantly does away with much of the subjectivity and vagueness found in the standard approach. Despite this, mainstream physicists haven’t embraced this interpretation, or examined it in depth. In fact, the large majority of them haven’t even heard of it. This is embarrassing, surprising and frustrating.[5] If Bohmian mechanics provides a cure to modern quantum mechanical philosophic complacency, then why have there been so few to study the richness of this elegant formalism?

David Bohm was a Jewish Communist ex-American with peculiar beliefs and a cult following.

Some ppl claim that Bohmian mechanics is equivalent to quantum mechanics, at least for very simple systems. So you can believe in it if you wish. Where they lose me is when they claim that it is more intuitive, a causal interpretation, and explains the nonlocality of nature.

These claims are all absurd. Conventional physics, including quantum mechanics, is local and causal. Believing in Bohm's theory is like ghosts and magic, with electrons have weird nonlocal effects with no causal explanation.

Science has always been able to give causal explanations for events. Bohm abandons this for silly philosophical reasons, not because of any observations or weaknesses in theory.

No climate science evidence needed

Here is the current Rationally Speaking podcast:

Over the last two decades, the Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) movement has transformed medical science, pushing doctors to rely less on intuition or "common wisdom" in choosing treatments, and more on evidence from studies. Sounds great -- but has EBM become a victim of its own success? This episode features John Ioannidis, Stanford professor of medicine, health and policy, and statistics, and author of the famous paper, "Why Most Published Research Findings are False." John and Julia discuss how EBM has been "hijacked," by whom, and what do do about it.

Ioannidis makes a lot of great points about the fallibility of research papers in medicine and social sciences, but he loses me with this:

There's some things in science that we're very, very close to 100% certain about them. It's like 99.999% — like climate change and the fact that humans are making a difference in that regard, or smoking is killing people. It will kill a billion people in the next century unless we do something.

It's 99.999%. I think that it makes a huge difference, compared to pseudoscience claims that are “100% correct” and there's no way that you can reach a different conclusion, in that we're always open to evidence, and open to understanding what that evidence means.

I don't think we need more evidence about smoking and about climate change. I think that we've had enough.

Really? No need for more evidence?

I get worried when our most extreme skeptics refuse to be skeptical about some things. Even assuming that humans are making a difference in the climate (which is probably correct), we need a lot more evidence before we can adopt reasonable policies. We need more smoking evidence also. This opinion is strange.

Purpose versus scientific worldview

Robert Wright writes in the NY Times philosophy column:

You could call these the “Three Great Myths About Evolution and Purpose.”

Myth number one: To say that there’s in some sense a “higher purpose” means there are “spooky forces” at work.

When I ask scientifically minded people if they think life on earth may have some larger purpose, they typically say no. If I ask them to explain their view, it often turns out that they think that answering yes would mean departing from a scientific worldview — embracing the possibility of supernatural beings or, at the very least, of immaterial factors that lie beyond scientific measurement. ...

Myth number two: To say that evolution has a purpose is to say that it is driven by something other than natural selection.

The correction of this misconception is in some ways just a corollary of the correction of the first misconception, but it’s worth spelling out: Evolution can have a purpose even if it is a wholly mechanical, material process — that is, even if its sole engine is natural selection. After all, clocks have purposes — to keep time, a purpose imparted by clockmakers — and they’re wholly mechanical. Of course, to suggest that evolution involves the unfolding of some purpose is to suggest that evolution has in some sense been heading somewhere — namely, toward the realization of its purpose. Which leads to:

Myth number three: Evolution couldn’t have a purpose, because it doesn’t have a direction.

The idea that evolution is fundamentally directionless is widespread, in part because one great popularizer of evolution, Stephen Jay Gould, worked hard to leave that impression.

This is heresy to modern evolutionists and philosophers of science.

Aristotle and Darwin talked about purposes as central to scientific study, but modern scientific dogma is that nothing has a purpose. Furthermore, any talk of purpose is just a sneaky way to infect Science with God, and thus must be resisted as unconstitutional and contrary to the Scientific Revolution.

Here are Aristotles four causes:

Aristotle held that there were four kinds of answers to "why" questions (in Physics II, 3, and Metaphysics V, 2):[2][4][5]

Matter: a change or movement's material "cause", is the aspect of the change or movement which is determined by the material that composes the moving or changing things. For a table, that might be wood; for a statue, that might be bronze or marble.

Form: a change or movement's formal "cause", is a change or movement caused by the arrangement, shape or appearance of the thing changing or moving. Aristotle says for example that the ratio 2:1, and number in general, is the cause of the octave.

Agent: a change or movement's efficient or moving "cause", consists of things apart from the thing being changed or moved, which interact so as to be an agency of the change or movement. For example, the efficient cause of a table is a carpenter, or a person working as one, and according to Aristotle the efficient cause of a boy is a father.

End or purpose: a change or movement's final "cause", is that for the sake of which a thing is what it is. For a seed, it might be an adult plant. For a sailboat, it might be sailing. For a ball at the top of a ramp, it might be coming to rest at the bottom. ...

Explanations in terms of final causes remain common in evolutionary biology.[23][24] It has been claimed that teleology is indispensable to biology since the concept of adaptation is inherently teleological.[24] In an appreciation of Charles Darwin published in Nature in 1874, Asa Gray noted "Darwin's great service to Natural Science" lies in bringing back Teleology "so that, instead of Morphology versus Teleology, we shall have Morphology wedded to Teleology".

Sure, I don't mind saying that the purpose of a clock is to keep time, or that sailing is the purpose of a sailboat.

Maybe that is just unimportant semantics. But what about ppl who act with purpose? That view seem essential to understanding humans, but there are many big-shot professors who claim that this is wrong, and that we are all mindless automatons.

Update: Massimo Pigliucci offers his own rebuttal, and adds:

Regardless, I think Wright makes a very good point when he writes: “When an argument for higher purpose is put this way — that is, when it doesn’t involve the phrase ‘higher purpose’ and, further, is cast more as a technological scenario than a metaphysical one — it is considered intellectually respectable. … Yet the simulation hypothesis is a God hypothesis … Theology has entered ‘secular’ discourse under another name.”

QC progresses, except for market and qubits

AAAS Science mag has an article (2 DECEMBER 2016 • VOL 354 ISSUE 6316 p 1091) about the many companies pour 100s of millions of dollars into quantum computer research, promising results real soon now:

One thing is certain: Building a quantum computer has gone from a far-off dream of a few university scientists to an immediate goal for some of the world’s biggest companies.

Here is the explanation of QC, which Scott Aaronson would hate:

QUBITS OUTMUSCLE classical computer bits thanks to two uniquely quantum effects: superposition and entanglement. Superposition allows a qubit to have a value of not just 0 or 1, but both states at the same time, enabling simultaneous computation.

Entanglement enables one qubit to share its state with others separated in space, creating a sort of super-superposition, whereby processing capability doubles with every qubit. An algorithm using, say, five entangled qubits can effectively do 2⁵, or 32, computations at once, whereas a classical computer would have to do those 32 computations in succession. As few as 300 fully entangled qubits could, theoretically, sustain more parallel computations than there are atoms in the universe.

This is the way most ppl explain, but Aaronson complains that it is wrong. He says that it leads ppl to overestimate what quantum computers can do.

Buried in all the hype is a couple of admissions:

They say they have a mutual interest in publicizing their advances, not least so that potential customers can think about how they could use a quantum computer. “We all need a market,” Monroe says.

What’s more, nobody knows enough about quantum computing yet to go it alone with a single qubit type. Every approach needs refining before quantum computers can be scaled up.

In other words, there is no market for quantum computers, and the researchers have not even created one scalable qubit.

Update: I was also amused to see the article claim that 50 qubits may be needed to demonstrate quantum supremacy, and Google is claiming that it will soon get 49 qubits. My guess is that Google secretly realizes that it is not getting quantum supremacy.

Comic about quantum computing misconception

Scott Aaronson announces an SMBC cartoon about quantum computing.

Scott tries to explain quantum computing as not really a matter of qubits being 0 and 1 at the same time, but rather probabilities being negative or complex, and interfering.

There is some merit to what he says. Schroedinger's cat is not really alive and dead at the same time. If qubits could be 0 and 1 simultaneously, then we would expect exponential speedup in certain search algorithms, and we do not.

Probabilities are not really negative, so he is careful to say "probability amplitudes", but he wants you to think of them as analogous to classical probabilities.

No, this is just nonsense.

It is a little more accurate to say that the qubit is a superposition of 0 and 1. And that measuring the qubit can give 0 or 1. But to the layman, that is just like being 0 and 1 at the same time.

Many physicists explain quantum computing as using superpositions to do simultaneous computations.

Sequentially operating on bits having 0 or 1 values gives us Turing machines, like all known computers. Operating on qubits that are superpositions of 0 and 1 is supposed to give us quantum supremacy, and faster computers for certain types of computations.

Scott says the core of the quantum voodoo is amplitude interference. But all sorts of classical phenomena have interfering waves, and that is not particularly mysterious. It only becomes mysterious when you think of those amplitudes as probabilities or generalized probabilities.

Saying that they are probabilities is just a sneaky way of pretending that the qubit really is a 0 or 1 (or both). The qubit is not a 0 or 1 or a probability. A measurement gives a 0 or 1, and we can give a probability based on our knowledge of how the system was set up, but that is not what the qubit is. It is not an amplitude either. The amplitude is just a way of codifying prior knowledge.

We have no numerical equivalent for the state of a qubit.

Scott concedes that quantum supremacy has never been demonstrated and we do not know whether or not it is possible. He sure is opinionated about something that may not exist.

LuMo likes the comic, altho he cannot resist some cheap shots. He agrees that complex numbers are fundamental to quantum mechanics, because [x,p] = xp-px is anti-symmetric, and hence has imaginary eigenvalues.

This argument is unpersuasive. Lots of real matrices have that property, such as the 2x2 matrix [(0,1),(-1,0)]. (Sorry I am not using mathjax.) [x,p] is not directly observable, so the imaginary eigenvalues pose no problems. It implies the uncertainty principle, whether using real or complex numbers.

LuMo buys into Scott's line almost verbatim:

The wave functions are closer to probabilities but they're not quite the usual probabilities. Instead, they're probability amplitudes which are complex and also have the ability to constructively or destructively interfere. When one is observing anything, the amplitudes are converted to the usual probabilities only. But when no one is looking, the probability amplitudes evolve as a new entity according to new rules that have no counterparts in classical physics.

Sorry, but this is just not helpful. If you are doing classical mechanics, such as predicting the location of the Moon in 1000 years, you compute probabilities. The Moon's position has probabilities that evolve with time. Observations tell us where it really is (to within measurement error). All this talk of probabilities as being unique to quantum mechanics is misleading.

So is talk of probability amplitudes interfering. Classical waves interfere also. Probabilities do not really interfere in either classical or quantum mechanics.

There's no "splitting of the worlds" during a quantum computation. On the contrary, the splitting of the worlds may only make sense after a measurement which can only occur after decoherence – but the quantum computation depends on the absence of any decoherence (I will make the same observation again later). So a key necessary condition for the quantum computer to work – and do some things that are practically impossible on classical computers – is that there's no decoherence and no splitting of the world during the calculation.

LuMo is right for the wrong reason. I say that there is never any splitting of the worlds, and never any quantum computation.

If a quantum supremacy computation did exist, it would have to somehow take advantage of a qubit staying in a superposition, and not decohering. In the lingo of many-worlds, the qubit has to straddle different worlds. Supposedly quantum supremacy is possible because qubits can leave this world and do some of its computation in a parallel world. I am not buying it, but that is the theory.

Essays: Wandering Towards a Goal

FQXi announces:

the next $40,000 FQXi essay contest,...

This year’s theme is: Wandering Towards a Goal – How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intentions?

One way to think of physics is as a set of mathematical laws of dynamics. These laws provide predictions by carrying conditions at one moment of time inexorably into the future. But many phenomena admit another description – sometimes a vastly more useful one – in terms of long-term, large-scale goals, aims, and intentions. ...

Relevant essays might address questions such as:

* How did physical systems that pursue the goal of reproduction arise from an a-biological world?

* What general features — like information processing, computation, learning, complexity thresholds, and/or departures from equilibrium — allow (or proscribe) agency?

* How are goals (versus accomplishments) linked to “arrows of time”?

* What separates systems that are intelligent from those that are not? Can we measure this separation objectively and without requiring reference to humans?

* What is the relationship between causality – the explanation of events in terms of causes – and teleology – the explanation of events in terms of purposes?

* Is goal-oriented behavior a physical or cosmic trend, an accident or an imperative?

We are accepting entries from now until March 3, 2017, with winners announced in June.

I submitted some essays to previous contests.

Trump picks Perry for Energy

The NY Times reports:

President-elect Donald J. Trump plans to name Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, to lead the Energy Department, ...

“Oops,” Mr. Perry said in 2011 as he racked his brain during a nationally televised Republican primary debate, trying to remember the three departments he wanted to dismantle. He mentioned the Commerce and Education Departments but could not recall the third: the Energy Department.

This makes Perry a funny choice, as Trump had to realize that Perry has been endlessly mocked for this gaffe.

Trump does not take orders from his enemies, and so the Left hates him.

I am wondering about this dopey explanation:

Despite its name, the department plays the leading role in designing nuclear weapons, thwarting their proliferation, and ensuring the safety and reliability of the nation’s aging nuclear arsenal through a constellation of laboratories considered the crown jewels of government science.

Why does the paper say "Despite its name"? Does it somehow think that energy and nuclear weapons are unrelated?

Nuclear weapons are the most dramatic releases of energy known to man. The whole subject is a study of energy.

This is like saying, "Despite its name, the Astronomy Department has a telescope for studying the night sky." Or "despite its name, the National Institute of Mental Health studies treatments for crazy people."

If Perry said something this stupid, then I would be worried about his competence.

Physicist and leftist science popularizer Lawrence M. Krauss has an op-ed attacking Perry in the same paper.

In terms of qualifications, Mr. Perry, a former governor of Texas, doesn’t come close to his immediate predecessors. He would follow President Obama’s two energy secretaries: first, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate physicist, and then Ernest J. Moniz, a distinguished nuclear physicist from M.I.T. ...

I met Governor Perry once, at the World Economic Forum. He seemed like a genuinely nice guy. After finding out I was a physicist, he singled me out in the audience while he was onstage, saying, “As Professor Krauss knows, you can violate the laws of physics, but only for a while.” My answer was, “Well, actually you can’t,” which was followed by a bit of nervous laughter from the crowd. ...

In the present climate, when nuclear tensions are higher than they have been since the height of the Cold War, ...

Actually, Trump's election has dramatically lowered nuclear tensions. Hillary Clinton was the biggest warmonger presidential candidate we have seen in a long time, and was particularly hostile to Russia. So were some of the other Republican candidates. Trump stood out as someone who does not want a war with Russia. And now he has appointed a Secretary of State who believes in doing business with Russia.

Russia has the biggest nuclear arsenal outside the USA, by far, and now it is a lot less likely to use it. Russia should be our friend, not our enemy.

Krauss is entitled to his opinions, but Trump won the election, and he needs a cabinet consistent with his mandate. Are there any distinguished physicists who supported him? From what I can see, the physics establishment is dominated by leftist groupthink. A cabinet secretary is a political position, not a research position.

I am sure Krauss has a much higher IQ than Perry, but it does not show in his political opinions.

Update: Here is another Krauss rant against Trump.

Arguing science is against free will

A new paper details the case Against free will in the contemporary natural sciences

The claim of the freedom of the will (understood as an individual who is transcendent to Nature) in the name of XXth century scientific knowledge, against the perspective of XVIIIth-XIXth century scientific materialism, is analysed and refuted in the present paper. The hypothesis of reductionism finds no obstacle within contemporary natural sciences. ... A fatalistic or materialist view, which denies the possibility of a free will, makes much more sense in scientific terms.

The paper gives a good account of the anti-free-will position, with attention to modern science. I have attacked that position many times on this blog.

It makes a big deal about classical mechanics being deterministic, and quantum mechanics being random.

After giving all the arguments, it adds:

All the preceding argumentation would be unnecessary if we were to admit what seems to me and others seems utterly trivial: science, dealing as it does with what is objective, cannot defend the idea of freedom, which requires autonomous recognition of the subjective. The development of the argument given here is in a sense a tautology regarding the simple fact of the determination of some scientists and thinkers to deny it.

Science – past, present, and future — can never defend the hypothesis of the freedom of man. It is no longer a question of enter into a detailed discussion of quantum mechanics; neither is it a question of waiting for a new theory to provide a suitable defence. It is simply that science and freedom cannot fit into the same holdall. Libertarianism must follow a path that carries it far from science.

In other words, all of the analysis of classical and quantum mechanics was a big smokescreen. Freedom and science are such fundamental opposites that no scientific theory could ever accommodate free will.

As stupid as this sounds, I think that he is partially correct.

The paper goes into a detailed discussion of how some physical theories are deterministic and some not, but either way it reaches an anti-free-will position. So what difference does it make whether the theory is deterministic? Why do any of the properties make any difference?

Free will is rejected for metaphysical reasons that have almost nothing to do with science. Science and freedom have been defined to be incompatible.

Maybe some ppl have free will, and others are preprogrammed automatons. If you tell me that you have no sense of free will, I may choose to believe you.

Suppose it is intuitively obvious to you that you have free will, but someone tries to make a scientific argument that you don't. The details of that argument will be unimportant. The gist of the argument is that science is premised on you not having free will, and so you don't if you believe in science.

If science is defined to exclude free will, then something is wrong with science.

Listening for a black hole interior

Nature mag reports:

It was hailed as an elegant confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity — but ironically the discovery of gravitational waves earlier this year could herald the first evidence that the theory breaks down at the edge of black holes. Physicists have analysed the publicly released data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), and claim to have found “echoes” of the waves that seem to contradict general relativity’s predictions1.

The echoes could yet disappear with more data. If they persist, the finding would be extraordinary. Physicists have predicted that Einstein’s hugely successful theory could break down in extreme scenarios, such as at the centre of black holes. The echoes would indicate the even more dramatic possibility that relativity fails at the black hole’s edge, far from its core.

This is badly confused. If they are really black holes, then we can only observe what is outside the edge (aka Schwarzschild radius or horizon). No LIGO data can possibly distinguish what is just inside the edge with what is at the center.

Lubos Motl just got finished praising one of the coauthors for winning a big prize, but stops short of saying that he is actually right about something:

That controversial Polchinski et al. paper on the firewalls (AMPS) shows that they are experts in quantum gravity and quantum information but because the assumptions and conclusions are wrong, it's obvious that such a paper can't be said to have a million or multimillion-dollar value from a physics viewpoint. You simply shouldn't be getting physics awards for physically incorrect claims. The whole point of science and physics is to find correct insights about Nature, not just to show that you have mastered some tools and you can design clever, but ultimately irrelevant, arguments that derive incorrect conclusions from invalid assumptions.

This is funny. LuMo is very impressed with the string theorists like Polchinski who do a lot of fancy theorizing about extra dimensions or Planck lengths or black hole interior entropy, but if they apply it to real-world data, then he is honest enuf to call BS.

Physicists surveyed about quantum mechanics

I criticize physicists who subscribe to goofy interpretations of quantum mechanics, or who complain that the theory is nonsensical and needs a new interpretation. There are many high-profile and big-shot physicists who say such things.

A Danish student did a master's thesis survey and reports:

A survey was sent out to 1234 physicists affiliated to 8 different universities. 149 responded to the questions, which both concerned foundational issues related to quantum mechanics, ...

More and more work is done concerning quantum foundations; investigating basic properties of quantum mechanics, such as Bell’s inequality, or developing new interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as QBism. However, when one regards the results of the survey, it shows that the resurgence the topic has been undergoing in recent times still has not had an impact on the participants being familiar with foundational concepts.

The "resurgence" has not had an impact because the overwhelming majority of respondents rejected the goofy ideas.

Only 25% said that they liked some non-Copenhagen interpretation. (And some of those preferred reasonable variations of Copenhagen. Only 6% preferred many-worlds.) Only 11% believe that physical objects have their properties well defined prior to and independent of measurement. Only 3% believe that Bell's theorem implies action-at-a-distance.

The author has a different spin on this, saying his survey is "quite a validation of the whole research area concerning quantum foundations". I don't know why he says this, as very few of the answers give any credence to any work done in the last 80 years.

I am not saying that the subject of quantum foundations is completely worthless, but it has mostly just affirmed the Copenhagen consensus of 1930. The ideas that depart significantly have been either proved wrong (eg, hidden variables) or are just conceptually stupid (eg, many-worlds).

Big money prizes for phony breakthrus

Mathematical physicist Peter Woit details the 2017 Breakthrough Prizes

These prizes are often awarded for ideas about the black hole information paradox, independent of whether these ideas work. Maldacena’s citation from 2012 tells us that he got the award partly for “resolving the black hole information paradox”, and the Strominger citation tells us that “His work hints at a solution to the famous ‘black hole information paradox’”. Polchinski is rewarded for ... show[ing] that the solution to the paradox supposedly given by Maldacena actually doesn’t work (not surprising, since it was never more than a speculation). If you’re a string theorist, you don’t actually need to solve a problem to get a prize

There is no black hole information paradox. And if there were, there would be no scientific way to resolve it.

It is the modern of equivalent of the supposed medieval debate over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. (I think that it is myth about medieval monks.)

Some clever physicists figured out that they could keep writing papers taking sides on this subject, and win prizes, even if other prize-winning papers take contrary views.

Hawking's vision of the future

Physicist Stephen Hawking writes:

This is the most dangerous time for our planet

As a theoretical physicist based in Cambridge, I have lived my life in an extraordinarily privileged bubble. ...

So the recent apparent rejection of the elites in both America and Britain is surely aimed at me, as much as anyone. ...

The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, ...

These migrants in turn place new demands on the infrastructures and economies of the countries in which they arrive, undermining tolerance and further fuelling political populism.

For me, the really concerning aspect of this is that now, more than at any time in our history, our species needs to work together. ...

We now have the technology to destroy the planet on which we live, but have not yet developed the ability to escape it. ...

To do that, we need to break down, not build up, barriers within and between nations.

Yes, he has lived in a bubble. He wants to flood First World countries with Third World migrants until we can all escape to another planet.

He is entitled to his opinion, of course, but aren't there any physicists who voted for BREXIT and Trump? Who want to preserve the middle class? Who are not clinging to crazy sci-fi fantasies?

Update: LuMo piles on:

But if you look at the majority of the political questions, Stephen Hawking is just another rank-and-file leftist. And he is perhaps more radical or fanatical than the average obnoxious leftist – especially when it comes to the global fearmongering and the need for a global government and global redistribution. ...

Hawking's essay is interesting, he is a good writer, and references to his very special life always bring some added value. But ideologically, the text is full of nonsense that is basically identical to the nonsense that ideologues were offering at crazy interdisiplinary conferences more than half a century ago.

He quotes R.P. Feyman as rejecting these egalitarian fantasies:

...There was a special dinner at some point, and the head of the theology place, a very nice, very Jewish man, gave a speech. It was a good speech, and he was a very good speaker, so while it sounds crazy now, when I’m telling about it, at that time his main idea sounded completely obvious and true. He talked about the big differences in the welfare of various countries, which cause jealousy, which leads to conflict, and now that we have atomic weapons, any war and we’re doomed, so therefore the right way out is to strive for peace by making sure there are no great differences from place to place, and since we have so much in the United States, we should give up nearly everything to the other countries until we’re all even. Everybody was listening to this, and we were all full of sacrificial feeling, and all thinking we ought to do this. But I came back to my senses on the way home.

The next day one of the guys in our group said, “I think that speech last night was so good that we should all endorse it, and it should be the summary of our conference.”

I miss Feynman. He would expose crap as crap.

Quantum satellites will not change the world

The current Scientific American has "10 ideas that will change the world", and here is No. 3:

Quantum Satellites Are a Big Step toward the Unhackable Internet

Space-based transmission of quantum cryptographic keys could make the “unhackable” Internet a reality

It is theoretically possible for a space satellite to send and receive entangled photons, and that may even be feasible soon.

Maybe someday there will even be a quantum computer router in space that can re-transmit entangled photons without collapsing the wave function.

But even if that is all achieved, it will do nothing to make the internet less hackable. The quantum key distribution is an attempt to solve a problem that is much more efficiently and securely solved by existing technologies. There is just no legitimate reason for a quantum satellite, except to show off some technology.

Google teaches robots to dream

ExtremeTech reports:

Following in the wake of recent neuroscientific discoveries revealing the importance of dreams for memory consolidation, Google’s AI company DeepMind is pioneering a new technology which allows robots to dream in order to improve their rate of learning. Not surprisingly given the company behind the project, the substance of these AI dreams consists primarily of scenes from Atari Video games. DeepMind’s earliest success involved teaching AI to play ancient videos games like Breakout and Asteroids. But the end game here is for robots to dream about much the same things humans do – challenging real world situations that play important roles in learning and memory formation. ...

One of the primary discoveries scientists made when seeking to understand the role of dreams from a neuroscientific perspective was that the content of dreams is primarily negative or threatening. Try keeping a dream journal for a month and you will likely find your dreams consist inordinately of threatening or awkward situations. It turns out the age old nightmare of turning up to school naked is the rule rather than the exception when it comes to dreams. ...

DeepMind is using dreams in a parallel fashion, accelerating the rate at which an AI learns by focusing on the negative or challenging content of a situation within a game. ... it does seem increasingly likely that AIs could soon dream of socially awkward situations like showing up to school naked.

Okay, I think that Google is trolling us. Next it will be announcing that quantum AI computers are dreaming in parallel universes.

Meanwhile, the British science journal Nature continues to whine about the American election:

he Oxford Dictionaries named ‘post-truth’ as their 2016 Word of the Year. It must sound alien to scientists. Science’s quest for knowledge about reality presupposes the importance of truth, both as an end in itself and as a means of resolving problems. How could truth become passé?

For philosophers like me, post-truth also goes against the grain. But in the wake of the US presidential election and the seemingly endless campaigns preceding it, author Ralph Keyes’s 2004 declaration that we have arrived in a post-truth era seems distressingly plausible.

Post-truth refers to blatant lies being routine across society, and it means that politicians can lie without condemnation. ...

The lack of public indignation when political figures claim disbelief in response to scientific consensus on climate change is part of this larger pattern.

There was a scientific consensus that Hillary Clinton should be, and would be, the next US President.

The elites got caught lying to us about immigration, trade deals, foreign wars, Russia, Islam, Common Core, urban crime-fighting, and an assortment of other issues.

The big-shot scientists also tell us to believe in supersymmetry, quantum computing, quantum gravity, entangled black holes, parallel universes, embryonic stem cell miracle cures, extraterrestial intelligence, and many other crazy things.

Apparently, Trump taught some ppl to question what the elites tell us, and this is very disturbing to a lot of professors.

Here is another wake-up call about modern science:

A bug in fMRI software could invalidate 15 years of brain research ...

Functional MRI (fMRI) is 25 years old, yet surprisingly its most common statistical methods have not been validated using real data. Here, we used resting-state fMRI data from 499 healthy controls to conduct 3 million task group analyses. ...

but instead we found that the most common software packages for fMRI analysis (SPM, FSL, AFNI) can result in false-positive rates of up to 70%. These results question the validity of some 40,000 fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of neuroimaging results.

Oops. For some reason, both experts and the general public are extremely gullible on subject of scientific claims based on DNA or brain scans.

Ruling scientific elite hates Trump

The highly prestigious British science journal Nature endorsed Hillary Clinton for US President, and attacked Donald Trump at every opportunity. Here is how it announced the election results:

Donald Trump's US election win stuns scientists ...

Although science played only a bit part in this year’s dramatic, hard-fought campaign, many researchers expressed fear and disbelief as Trump defeated former secretary of state Hillary Clinton on 8 November.

“Trump will be the first anti-science president we have ever had,” says Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington DC. “The consequences are going to be very, very severe.” ...

Some researchers are already thinking about leaving the United States in the wake of the election. ...

“This is terrifying for science, research, education, and the future of our planet,” tweeted María Escudero Escribano, a postdoc studying electrochemistry and and sustainable energy conversation at Stanford University in California. “I guess it's time for me to go back to Europe.” ...

“It’s going to badly tarnish the image of the United States,” he says. “Roughly half of the population has voted for somebody who by almost any measure is unfit to serve as president.”

The comments were mostly pro-Trump.

Of course no one can explain how Trump is anti-science as a comment remarks:

OK, so Donald Trump is anti-science. How so? Is he against gravity? Is he against medicine? Is he against scientific research? Is he against mathematics or engineering? is he against chemistry? Or may he is against the scientific method? Who is speaking here for all scientists? Did they conduct a poll so that they could say that Trump's election stunned scientists? Or maybe since his election stunned everyone, they are just assuming it stunned scientists as well? That's not really news is it - since it stunned most people! I still don't understand how Donald Trump is anti-science. I've never heard him say such a thing. Did he threaten to take away funding for scientific research? I think he realizes the valuable role science has played in the history of the US and my guess is that he expects real science will continue to propel the US forward. First anti-science President? Hmmmm. I have a sneaking suspicion that what he means is that if Donald Trump doesn't take his side in every single scientific issue, he is anti-science. I'm not worried at all! Up until now, everyone has been afraid of being labelled anti-science and so they have adopted as gospel truth, whatever unsubstantiated claims scientists made. I doubt Trump is afraid of that label which actually may be just what science needs to free itself from the grips of the ruling scientific elite.

Yes. we have a ruling scientific elite that suffers from Trump derangement syndrome. Here is an example of such ppl worried about privacy, and the leftists are the ones who are really anti-science.

Just keep this in mind when Nature or some other elitist science publication tells us we have to do something about global warming or some other alleged problem. These folks are blinded by ideology.

Microsoft searches for the first qubit

The NY Times reports:

Microsoft is putting its considerable financial and engineering muscle into the experimental field of quantum computing as it works to build a machine that could tackle problems beyond the reach of today’s digital computers.

There is a growing optimism in the tech world that quantum computers, superpowerful devices that were once the stuff of science fiction, are possible — and may even be practical. If these machines work, they will have an impact on work in areas such as drug design and artificial intelligence, as well as offer a better understanding of the foundations of modern physics.

Microsoft’s decision to move from pure research to an expensive effort to build a working prototype underscores a global competition among technology companies, including Google and IBM, which are also making significant investments in search of breakthroughs. ...

Microsoft now believes that it is close enough to designing the basic qubit building block that the company is ready to begin engineering a complete computer, said Todd Holmdahl, ...

“Once we get the first qubit figured out, we have a road map that allows us to go to thousands of qubits in a rather straightforward way,” Mr. Holmdahl said.

There is still a debate among physicists and computer scientists over whether quantum computers that perform useful calculations will ever be created.

Reading carefully, we learn:

1. No one has shown that quantum computers are even possible.
2. No one has even made that first qubit.
3. Big bucks are being spent, with big promises.

If physicists and computer scientists are debating whether quantum computers performing useful calculations will ever be created, then they may be impossible, and talk about them is speculation.

This situation has not changed much for about 20 years, except that much more money is being pumped into R&D, and more ppl are claiming that a breakthru is imminent.

I say it is all a scam. Five years from now, we still will not have a scalable qubit. Quantum supremacy will still be an unproven concept.

Update: Scott Aaronson adds:

I don’t really know more about this new initiative beyond what’s in the articles, but I know many of the people involved, they’re some of the most serious in the business, and Microsoft intensifying its commitment to QC can only be good for the field. I wish the new effort every success, despite being personally agnostic between superconducting qubits, trapped ions, photonics, nonabelian anyons, and other QC hardware proposals — whichever one gets there first is fine with me!

Big money, serious ppl, extravagant hype, and no one understands how they are going to achieve anything.

Physicists have math phobia

UPI reports:

Math is hard, even for physicists. New research suggests physicists are less likely to lend their focus to theories underpinned by complex mathematical details.

The findings -- detailed in the New Journal of Physics -- are compelling because they suggest a "fear," or at least an avoidance, of math is prevalent even among scientists well-trained in high-level mathematics.

"We have already showed that biologists are put off by equations but we were surprised by these findings, as physicists are generally skilled in mathematics," study co-author Andrew Higginson, a researcher at the University of Exeter, said in a news release.

The new study and resulting hypothesis is based on analysis of 2,000 papers published in a leading physics journal. The researchers tallied citations of previous studies in each paper. They found studies with an abundance of mathematical equations on each page were less likely to be referenced in new papers.

Maybe physicists are intimidated by the math, and do not read and understand the papers with heavy math.

But there are other possibilities. Maybe the math-heavy papers are of poorer quality. Maybe they are more likely to be obscure technical results that are not of use to anyone. Maybe the math is used to disguise the intellectual weakness of the papers.

Maybe a lot of papers get cited just to provide a source for some background material. For example, suppose you are writing a physics paper and you know that black hole entanglement is a hot topic, so you find a contrived way to tie it in. Then you will need a reference on black hole entanglement, even tho you know little about the subject. Are you going to cite a paper that is mostly math or mostly English? You will take the paper in English because you can skim it in about 10 minutes and determine that it is relevant. A paper with technical math results will be less likely to be cited.

So this finding may not mean anything.

Entangled black holes and other delusions

Scientific American has a cover story by theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena on an idea known to the experts as ER=EPR.

I thought this was a joke where some physicist tried to show how clever he is by pretending that two unrelated papers are related. SciAm takes this way too seriously.

The idea is that two black holes might be entangled by their interiors being connected by a wormhole. A wormhole is a science-fiction shortcut thru spacetime.

This kooky. It is not science. It is not even science fiction.

What is the appeal of this? Among those who hate quantum mechanics, they have never been happy with the idea that two distant particles could have correlated properties. It seems magical that a measurement of one could predict a measurement on the other. So maybe they would rather believe that the particles are connected by an invisible wormhole!

Meanwhile, Scott Aaronson is still an emotional wreck from the election. I don't want to get too political here, but maybe there is some relation between belief in entangled black holes and belief in various liberal myths. Scott has his second post-election rant:

It’s become depressingly clear the last few days that even most American liberals don’t understand the magnitude of what’s happened. ...

Finally, I wanted to share some Facebook postings about the election by my friend (and recent interviewer) Julia Galef.  In these posts, Julia sets out some of the same thoughts that I’ve had, but with an eloquence that I haven’t been able to muster.  It’s important to understand that these posts by Julia — whose day job is to run rationality seminars—are far and away the most emotional things I’ve ever seen her write, but they’re also less emotional than anything I could write at this time! ...

I realized it’s not clear to many people exactly why I’m so upset about Trump winning, so let me elaborate.

What upsets me the most about Trump’s victory is not his policies (to the extent that he has coherent policy positions). It’s not even his racism or sexism, though those do upset me. It’s what his victory reveals about the fragility of our democracy.

Trump incites violence at rallies. He spreads lies and conspiracy theories (birtherism, rigged elections) that damage the long-term credibility of the political process, just for his own short-sighted gain. He’s ruined [EDIT: tried to ruin] journalists’ careers for criticizing him, and bragged about it.

Really? Is that the core of her gripes?

99% of the political violence in the last year came from Democrats, not Republicans. Clinton incited violence far more than Trump.

Believing that the President should be a natural born citizen is not a lie or a conspiracy theory. It is reading the Constitution.

Clinton promoted the lies that racist cops are killing innocent blacks for no reason, with Ferguson being the prime example.

About 95% of journalists are opposed to Trump, and they print lies and nasty accusations against him on a daily basis. Their editorials compare him to Hitler.

And somehow Trump is the bad guy for criticizing some of the jounalists who are smearing him?

They mention the well-known gay blogger Andrew Sullivan, and he is infected with the same anti-Trump hysteria. If you ask him about Hillary Clinton, he will launch into a detail monologue about how she is a terrible person in nearly every way. Dishonest, corrupt, incompetent, hateful, warmonger, wrong side of key issues, etc. He gives detail and convincing explanations of why someone like her should never be President. But ask him about Trump, and he degenerates into mindless name-calling and incoherent babble.

It is funny how these folks can act as if they are smarter than everyone else, and especially Trump voters. If they were, then they would be able to give some reasoned arguments to back up their positions. As it is, they appear deranged and delusional.

Update: Scott Adams (aka Dilbert) writes:

Earlier this week CNN.com listed 24 different theories that pundits have provided for why Trump won. And the list isn’t even complete. I’ve heard other explanations as well. What does it tell you when there are 24 different explanations for a thing?

It tells you that someone just dropped a cognitive dissonance cluster bomb on the public. Heads exploded. Cognitive dissonance set in. Weird theories came out. ...

This brings me to the anti-Trump protests. The protesters look as though they are protesting Trump, but they are not. They are locked in an imaginary world and battling their own hallucinations of the future.

Yes. The physicists who talke about entangled black holes and Trump-Hitler comparisons are locked in an imaginary world.

Skeptics will not be skeptical about GMO foods

Apparently much of the "Skeptic" community believes that scientists and skeptics should not criticize genetically-modified (GMO) foods for failing to meet their claims, because then leftist crackpots will use that as ammo to ban scientific progress in the field.

Italian-American philosophy professor Massimo Pigliucci explains this, and writes:

In the early part of the 20th century philosophers of science were looking for ways to explain why science is an objective enterprise. Think the logical positivists, or Karl Popper. Then came the so-called “historicist” turn, with Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, and philosophers finally realized that science is not, in fact, intrinsically objective at all. (Many scientists haven’t matured to that point yet.) ...

Of course, all of the above matters much less now that the United States has elected a fascist to the Presidency and given absolute control of power to a bunch of regressive sexists and homophobes.

Once you start going down the path of denying the existence of objective truth, then you usually end up babbling nonsense.

It is very strange to claim that historicism shows that science is not objective. The history of science is primarily a story of man finding objective truths.

Some ppl argue that in physics, relativity and quantum mechanics killed the idea of objective truth. No, they did not. They reinforced the virtues of sticking to objective truths.

Brilliant men have political blind spots

U Texas complexity theorist Scott Aaronson rants:

I’m ashamed of my country and terrified about the future. When Bush took power in 2000, I was depressed for weeks, but I didn’t feel like I do now, like a fourth-generation refugee in the United States — like someone who happens to have been born here and will presumably continue to live here, unless and until it starts to become unsafe for academics, or Jews, or people who publicly criticize Trump, at which time I guess we’ll pack up and go somewhere else (assuming there still is a somewhere else).

If I ever missed the danger and excitement that so many European scientists and mathematicians felt in the 1930s, that sense of trying to pursue the truth even in the shadow of an aggressive and unironic evil — OK, I can cross that off the list. ...

There is no silver lining. There’s nothing good about this.

My immediate problem is that, this afternoon, I’m supposed to give a major physics colloquium at UT. The title? “Quantum Supremacy.” That term, which had given me so much comedic mileage through the long campaign season (“will I disavow support from quantum supremacists? I’ll keep you in suspense about it…” ), now just seems dark and horrible, a weight around my neck. Yet, distracted and sleep-deprived and humor-deprived though I am, I’ve decided to power through and give the talk. Why? Because Steven Weinberg says he still wants to hear it. ...

And there were Jews who stupidly supported him. I’ve been emphatic, in all my previous posts, that I don’t see Trump as a Hitler figure. ... But what Trump has decisively shown is that the United States is not special in its anti-authoritarian, anti-loon defense mechanisms — i.e., that there’s nothing about its people or its institutions that protects it from the darkest forces that have ever gripped human civilization.

Scott is starting to persuade me of the merits of parallel universes, because he seems to live in one.

The NY Times says that Peter Thiel has become an outcast in Si Valley because he endorsed Donald Trump. Academia is even more saturated with Trump-haters. If anyone is the loony authoritarian seeking to stifle his academic freedoms, it is Hillary Clinton, not Trump.

Trump or the Alt Right would never bother him about giving a talk about "quantum supremacy". Only the Clinton partisans and the Ctrl Left go around trying to pressure ppl to disavow support from various groups. Only the Ctrl Left would try to make him feel bad about a lecture title.

Scott has been a victim of the Ctrl Left persecution, when he said that he only agrees with 98% of their feminist propaganda. They have attempted to shame and humiliate him.

It is funny how he can be a brilliant complexity theorist, and have such political blind spots.

Speaking of Weinberg, see Lubos Motl's rant against him for saying goofy things about quantum mechanics. Weinberg probably voted for Clinton also. He might dare to criticize the most successful scientific theory of the last century, but he would never dare to express public support for Trump.

Einstein said American men are toy dogs

The NY Times reported on July 8, 1921:

Dr. Albert Einstein, the famous scientist, made an amazing discovery relative to America on his trip which he recently explained to a sympathetic-looking Hollander as follows:

“The excessive enthusiasm for me in America appears to be typically American. And if I grasp it correctly the reason is that the people in America are as colossally bored, very much more than is the case with us. After all, there is so little for them there!” he exclaimed.

Dr. Einstein said this with vibrant sympathy. He continued:

“New York, Boston, Chicago and other cities have their theatres and concerts, but for the rest? There are cities with 1,000,000 inhabitants. Despite which what poverty, intellectual poverty! The people are, therefore, glad when something is given them with which they can play and over which they can enthuse. And that they do, then, with monstrous intensity.

“Above all things there are the women who, as a literal fact, dominate the entire life in America. The men take an interest in absolutely nothing at all. They work and work, the like of which I have never seen anywhere yet. For the rest they are the toy dogs of the women, who spend the money in a most unmeasurable, illimitable way and wrap themselves in a fog of extravagance.

It followed the next day:

“Chicago Women Resent Einstein’s Opinions”

Men, However, Seem to Agree on “Toy Dogs” and Dominance of Wives

Chicago, July 8. – Professor Einstein’s opinion of America, and of American women in particular, as expressed in an interview cabled from Berlin to THE NEW YORK TIMES yesterday and reprinted in Chicago this morning, brought forth indignant protests from Chicago women today. They took particular exception to Professor Einstein’s characterization of American men as the “toy dogs” of American women.

Chicago men, however, seemed to agree with Professor Einstein on the dominance of women and the “toy dog” charge, while professors at the University of Chicago contented themselves with a few nervous tut-tuts and the comment that the German scientist had obtained a warped view of America because of the short time he spent here. ...

Professor W.P. Evans of the chemistry department at Northwestern University said: “It seems incredible that a man of Dr. Einstein’s attainments should make the statements credited to him. If these statements are correct, they go far to prove the fact that, although he understands thoroughly, we hope (don’t forget to put in the “we hope”), the theory of relativity, he has not the essential qualities for judging the scientific and industrial achievements of a great nation.”

Academics endorse Democrats

I used to think that universities had the smartest ppl. But if they were really intelligent, then they would be able to think independently.

On political subjects especially, they just mindlessly recite what they have been told.

Just today, I see Scott Aaronson and Peter Woit urging votes against Donald Trump.

Woit writes:

There’s little evidence Trump has fixed views on any policy issue ...

Most damaging though is the behavior of the mainstream media, in particular that of the New York Times, whose coverage of this issue has been atrociously unfair to Clinton.

Trump is hated for his views. If you do not know what they are, then you are not paying attention.

I read the NY Times, and it prints crazy attacks on Trump every day. It might call him a Nazi, or complain that he refuses to concede the election, or bring up a recording of a private conversation 20 years ago where he uses the word f*ck, or some such nonsense.

The stories about Hillary Clinton have a direct bearing on her corruption and bad judgment in public office.

Hardly anyone can even make an argument for Clinton without mentioning Trump. 70 Nobel prize (and Bank of Sweden prize) winners attempted:

To preserve our freedoms, protect our constitutional government, safeguard our national security, and ensure that all members of our nation will be able to work together for a better future, it is imperative that Hillary Clinton be elected as the next President of the United States. ...

We need a President who will support and advance policies that will enable science and technology to flourish in our country and to provide the basis of important policy decisions.

Really? These are not reasons that would persuade anyone. Clinton and Trump hardly have any differences in science and technology policy.

Obviously the Nobel and economics prize winners are not telling us their real reasons.

Hardly anyone is able to explain some agreement with some actual Clinton policy or decision.

I remember in 2008, all these brilliant scientists told us that we had to elect Barack Obama because he was going to fund stem-cell research that was going to have paralyzed ppl walking again in about 2 years. It was just a big lie. It is now 8 years later, and no medically useful treatments have come out of that research at all.

Update: Lubos Motl piles on. It is funny when his rants make more sense than the opinions of big-shots.

In search of Quantum Supremacy

Computer complexity theorist had 5 minutes to explain quantum computers, and said:

But what quantum supremacy means to me, is demonstrating a quantum speedup for some task as confidently as possible.  Notice that I didn’t say a useful task!  I like to say that for me, the #1 application of quantum computing — more than codebreaking, machine learning, or even quantum simulation — is just disproving the people who say quantum computing is impossible!  So, quantum supremacy targets that application.

What is important for quantum supremacy is that we solve a clearly defined problem, with some relationship between inputs and outputs that’s independent of whatever hardware we’re using to solve the problem.  That’s part of why it doesn’t cut it to point to some complicated, hard-to-simulate molecule and say “aha!  quantum supremacy!”

I accept this, but the important points is that quantum supremacy has never been demonstrated. Yes, there are regular press releases and news stories about advances in new and better quantum computers, but no one has ever shown a quantum speedup over regular Turing computers.

Charles H. Bennett responds:

An experimental demonstration of what is infelicitously called quantum supremacy (I prefer “classical retardation”) would be way less earthshaking than the Higgs boson. It would be much more like the experimental demonstrations of Bell and CHSH violations: a validation of what we have every right to expect, based on the unblemished success of quantum theory so far.

I do not agree. Quantum theory is unblemished in confirming Bell violations, yes, but the computational speedups are speculative and have not been shown. I doubt that they will ever be shown.

It is not Ptolemy

Statistician Andrew Gelman has done some good work debunking shoddy social science about the "power pose":

I don’t care about power pose. It’s just a silly fad. I do care about reality, and I care about science, which is one of the methods we have for learning about reality. The current system of scientific publication, in which a research team can get fame, fortune, and citations by p-hacking, and then even when later research groups fail to replicate the study, that even then there is the continuing push to credit the original work and to hypothesize mysterious interaction effects that would manage to preserve everyone’s reputation . . . it’s a problem.

It’s Ptolemy, man, that’s what it is. [No, it’s not Ptolemy; see Ethan’s comment below.]

Okay, I won't criticize him much, because he did correct himself. But obviously he was relying on a popular stereotype that equates Ptolemy with bad science.

A comment says:

Why the knock on Ptolemy? His epicicyle model made predictions verifiable with the measurement methods of his time. There will be no Kepler to update the power pose.

Epicyclical motion is used in the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek astronomical device for > compensating for the elliptical orbit of the Moon, moving faster at perigee and slower at apogee than circular orbits would, using four gears, two of them engaged in an eccentric way that quite closely approximates Kepler’s second law.

As an indication of exactly how good the Ptolemaic model is, modern planetariums are built using gears and motors that essentially reproduce the Ptolemaic model for the appearance of the sky as viewed from a stationary Earth.

Mocking Ptolemy is like mocking modern planetariums. It shows a very bizarre view of what science is all about.

Ptolemy and Kepler were two of the greatest scientific geniuses of all time. A recent paper on Galileo (1564-1642) and Kepler (1571-1630):
the modern scientist and the mystic points out that Kepler is also underrated, compared to Galileo.

Perhaps the most instructive example of a clash between Galileo's smooth "rational thinking" and Kepler's "mysticism" is provided by their different approaches to the theory of tides. In 1616 Galileo published (in Italian) his Discorso on the topic. In his view, it provided The decisive proof that the Earth moves [S], p. 224 (the idea having come to him in a flash on one of his frequent trips from Padua to Venice in a
large barge whose bottom contained a certain amount of water). Kepler had the right intuition that the tides are caused by the moon's attraction - a view confirmed and further elaborated by Newton and Laplace of the next generations.

Update: Gelman followed up with another strange attack on Ptolemy, referring to some faulty research:

I call this reasoning Ptolemaic because it’s an attempt to explain an entire pattern of data with an elaborate system of invisible mechanisms.

So I won't credit him for understanding his mistake.

Many outstanding theories of science, such as all field theories, rely on a system of invisible mechanisms. I thought that Gelman started out in Physics, but he badly misunderstands what theoretical science is all about.

Brain entropy said to explain consciousness

PhysicsWorld reports:

Consciousness appears to arise naturally as a result of a brain maximizing its information content. So says a group of scientists in Canada and France, which has studied how the electrical activity in people's brains varies according to individuals' conscious states. The researchers find that normal waking states are associated with maximum values of what they call a brain's "entropy". ...

The latest work stems from the observation that consciousness, or at least the proper functioning of brains, is associated not with high or even low degrees of synchronicity between neurons but by middling amounts. Jose Luis Perez Velazquez, a biochemist at the University of Toronto, and colleagues hypothesized that what is maximized during consciousness is not connectivity itself but the number of different ways that a certain degree of connectivity can be achieved.

Perez Velazquez's colleague Ramon Guevarra Erra, a physicist at the Paris Descartes University, points out that there is only one way to connect each set of neurons in a network with every other set, just as there is only one way to have no connections at all. In contrast, he notes, there are many different ways that an intermediate medium-sized number of connections can be arranged.

To put their hypothesis to the test, the researchers used data previously collected by Perez Velazquez showing electric- and magnetic-field emissions from the brains of nine people, seven of whom suffered from epilepsy. ...

Perez Velazquez and colleagues argue that consciousness could simply be an "emergent property" of a system – the brain – that seeks to maximize information exchange and therefore entropy, since doing so aids the survival of the brain's bearer by allowing them to better model their environment.

Maybe consciousness is an emergent property. Maybe it can be related to how neurons form connections. Maybe these researchers are on to something. But calling it brain entropy seems like a stretch.

Brain entropy said to explain consciousness

PhysicsWorld reports:

Consciousness appears to arise naturally as a result of a brain maximizing its information content. So says a group of scientists in Canada and France, which has studied how the electrical activity in people's brains varies according to individuals' conscious states. The researchers find that normal waking states are associated with maximum values of what they call a brain's "entropy". ...

The latest work stems from the observation that consciousness, or at least the proper functioning of brains, is associated not with high or even low degrees of synchronicity between neurons but by middling amounts. Jose Luis Perez Velazquez, a biochemist at the University of Toronto, and colleagues hypothesized that what is maximized during consciousness is not connectivity itself but the number of different ways that a certain degree of connectivity can be achieved.

Perez Velazquez's colleague Ramon Guevarra Erra, a physicist at the Paris Descartes University, points out that there is only one way to connect each set of neurons in a network with every other set, just as there is only one way to have no connections at all. In contrast, he notes, there are many different ways that an intermediate medium-sized number of connections can be arranged.

To put their hypothesis to the test, the researchers used data previously collected by Perez Velazquez showing electric- and magnetic-field emissions from the brains of nine people, seven of whom suffered from epilepsy. ...

Perez Velazquez and colleagues argue that consciousness could simply be an "emergent property" of a system – the brain – that seeks to maximize information exchange and therefore entropy, since doing so aids the survival of the brain's bearer by allowing them to better model their environment.

Maybe consciousness is an emergent property. Maybe it can be related to how neurons form connections. Maybe these researchers are on to something. But calling it brain entropy seems like a stretch.

Brain entropy said to explain consciousness

PhysicsWorld reports:

Consciousness appears to arise naturally as a result of a brain maximizing its information content. So says a group of scientists in Canada and France, which has studied how the electrical activity in people's brains varies according to individuals' conscious states. The researchers find that normal waking states are associated with maximum values of what they call a brain's "entropy". ...

The latest work stems from the observation that consciousness, or at least the proper functioning of brains, is associated not with high or even low degrees of synchronicity between neurons but by middling amounts. Jose Luis Perez Velazquez, a biochemist at the University of Toronto, and colleagues hypothesized that what is maximized during consciousness is not connectivity itself but the number of different ways that a certain degree of connectivity can be achieved.

Perez Velazquez's colleague Ramon Guevarra Erra, a physicist at the Paris Descartes University, points out that there is only one way to connect each set of neurons in a network with every other set, just as there is only one way to have no connections at all. In contrast, he notes, there are many different ways that an intermediate medium-sized number of connections can be arranged.

To put their hypothesis to the test, the researchers used data previously collected by Perez Velazquez showing electric- and magnetic-field emissions from the brains of nine people, seven of whom suffered from epilepsy. ...

Perez Velazquez and colleagues argue that consciousness could simply be an "emergent property" of a system – the brain – that seeks to maximize information exchange and therefore entropy, since doing so aids the survival of the brain's bearer by allowing them to better model their environment.

Maybe consciousness is an emergent property. Maybe it can be related to how neurons form connections. Maybe these researchers are on to something. But calling it brain entropy seems like a stretch.

Brain entropy said to explain consciousness

PhysicsWorld reports:

Consciousness appears to arise naturally as a result of a brain maximizing its information content. So says a group of scientists in Canada and France, which has studied how the electrical activity in people's brains varies according to individuals' conscious states. The researchers find that normal waking states are associated with maximum values of what they call a brain's "entropy". ...

The latest work stems from the observation that consciousness, or at least the proper functioning of brains, is associated not with high or even low degrees of synchronicity between neurons but by middling amounts. Jose Luis Perez Velazquez, a biochemist at the University of Toronto, and colleagues hypothesized that what is maximized during consciousness is not connectivity itself but the number of different ways that a certain degree of connectivity can be achieved.

Perez Velazquez's colleague Ramon Guevarra Erra, a physicist at the Paris Descartes University, points out that there is only one way to connect each set of neurons in a network with every other set, just as there is only one way to have no connections at all. In contrast, he notes, there are many different ways that an intermediate medium-sized number of connections can be arranged.

To put their hypothesis to the test, the researchers used data previously collected by Perez Velazquez showing electric- and magnetic-field emissions from the brains of nine people, seven of whom suffered from epilepsy. ...

Perez Velazquez and colleagues argue that consciousness could simply be an "emergent property" of a system – the brain – that seeks to maximize information exchange and therefore entropy, since doing so aids the survival of the brain's bearer by allowing them to better model their environment.

Maybe consciousness is an emergent property. Maybe it can be related to how neurons form connections. Maybe these researchers are on to something. But calling it brain entropy seems like a stretch.

SciAm on relativity in 1911

Here is the first SciAm article on relativity:

“In 1905, came a fundamental and (as the fu-
ture historian will probably say) an epoch-
making contribution in the shape of an unas-
suming and dry-looking dissertation, ‘Con-
cerning the Electro-dynamics of Moving
Bodies,’ by A. Einstein, a Swiss professor of
physics. It appeared in the Annalen der
Physik, the German counterpart of our Philo-
sophical Magazine. It created no sensation at
the time. It was hardly noticed. Yet, at the pres-
ent time, you cannot open a journal devoted
to physics without finding some fresh contri-
bution to the ever-increasing literature on the
subject: Einstein’s Principle of Relativity.
—E. E. Fournier D’Albe”
Scientific American Supplement, November 11, 1911

I think that it is correct that Einstein's 1905 paper was considered no big deal, and that relativity did not start to take off until 1908. By 1911 relativity was huge, and textbooks were starting to appear.

So why did relativity become so popular in 1908-1911, but not 1905-1908? The obvious explanations are (1) Einstein's paper was not appreciated at first, but it was after 3 years, and (2) Einstein's paper was inconsequential, and Minkowski's 1908 paper made relativity popular.

I say that explanation (2) is better. Minkowski's paper was bold, geometric, and rigorous. It was reprinted and distributed widely. The 1911 works were based on Minkowski's theory, not Einstein's. I do not see any proof that Einstein's paper had much influence on the early development of relativity at all. It seems to have influenced Max Planck, but hardly anyone else. Minkowski learned relativity from David Hilbert, Lorentz, and Poincare, not Einstein.

Hermann Minkowski declared in 1908:

The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.

Minkowski died in 1909, but his 1908 paper was the most widely read relativity paper at the time. Nearly all subsequent relativity work was based on Minkowski's formulation, not Einstein's.

It is odd that Einstein's 1905 paper would be credited as being so influential. I cannot find much actual influence at the time. Everyone considered an embellishment of Lorentz's theory, and some called it the Lorentz-Einstein theory. Apparently it persuaded Planck, but not Minkowski or everyone else. It appears that many people, including this SciAm writer, decided years later than the paper must have been influential. But it was not.

Colonizing the universe

Retired mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson writes:

When humans begin populating the universe with Noah’s Ark seeds, our destiny changes. We are no longer an ordinary group of short-lived individuals struggling to preserve life on a single planet. We are then the midwives who bring life to birth on millions of worlds. We are stewards of life on a grander scale, and our destiny is to be creators of a living universe. We may or may not be sharing this destiny with other midwife species in other parts of the universe. The universe is big enough to find room for all of us.

Some ppl are ready to go:

Elon Musk is preparing to reveal further details of his hugely ambitious plan to build a city on the surface of Mars.

Tomorrow, the billionaire’s SpaceX is holding an event called “Making Humans An Interplanetary Species” which will shed light on the Red Planet exploration scheme.

Ahead of the event, Musk shared images of a new rocket booster called the Raptor, which will power an “Interplanetary Transport System”.

His firm has carried out a test-firing of the device, which is designed to propel a spaceship all the way to the Red Planet.

But even Dyson does not believe in quantum gravity.

Cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss wrote last year:

How can we tell if gravity is quantum?

Freeman Dyson, who is a brilliant physicist and a contrarian, he had pointed out based on some research — he’s 90 years old, but he had done some research over the years — I was in a meeting in Singapore with him when he pointed out that we really don’t know if gravity is a quantum theory. Electromagnetism is a quantum theory because we know there are quanta of electromagnetism called photons. Right now they’re coming, shining in my face and they’re going into the camera that’s being used to record this and we can measure photons. There are quanta associated with all of the forces of nature. If gravity is a quantum theory, then there must be quanta that are exchanged, that convey the gravitational force; we call those gravitons. They’re the quantum version of gravitational waves, the same way photons are the quantum version of electromagnetic waves. But what Freeman pointed out is that there’s no terrestrial experiment that could ever measure a single graviton. He could show that in order to build an experiment that would do that, you’d have to make the experiment so massive that it would actually collapse to form a black hole before you could make the measurement. So he said there’s no way we’re ever going to measure gravitons; there’s no way that we’ll know whether gravity is a quantum theory.

What I realized, and Frank and I codified in our paper, is that actually the universe acts like a graviton detector, in [the] sense that processes in the early universe produced phenomena that could be observed today as gravitational waves. But those events, those processes, will only work if gravity is a quantum theory. If gravity isn’t a quantum theory, we won’t see these gravitational waves from the very early universe, which BICEP thought they saw. Now BICEP may not have seen gravitational waves from the early universe, but the fact that we recognize that if this phenomena called inflation happens in the very early universe, and if it produces gravitational waves, that will tell us that gravity is a quantum theory; therefore, all of the problems of quantum gravity will need to be addressed by theorists, giving job security for generations.

Dyson is right here, and all the talk about quantum gravity is unscientific speculation.

Junk science in TED Talk

Jerry Coyne reports on some populist bogus social science:

The second most popular TED talk of all time, with over 32 million views on TED, is by Harvard Business School associate professor Amy Cuddy, called “Your body language shapes who you are”. (You can also see the talk on YouTube, where it has over 10 million views. Cuddy appears to be on “leave of absence.”)  Her point, based on research she did with two others, was that by changing your body language you can modify your hormones, thus not only influencing other people in the way you want, but changing your own physiology in a way you want.

The kindest thing you can say is that her results were not replicated. All the other studies gave opposite conclusions.

Statistician Andrew Gelman also laments the sorry state of social science. It is overrun by poor studies and p-hacking.

No-Cloning is not fundamental

Complexity theorist Scott Aaronson makes a big deal out of the No-cloning theorem:

The subject of this talk is a deep theorem that stands as one of the crowning achievements of our field. I refer, of course, to the No-Cloning Theorem. Almost everything we’re talking about at this conference, from QKD onwards, is based in some way on quantum states being unclonable. ...

OK, but No-Cloning feels really fundamental. One of my early memories is when I was 5 years old or so, and utterly transfixed by my dad’s home fax machine, ...

The No-Cloning Theorem represents nothing less than a partial return to the view of the world that I had before I was five. It says that quantum information doesn’t want to be free: it wants to be private. There is, it turns out, a kind of information that’s tied to a particular place, or set of places. It can be moved around, or even teleported, but it can’t be copied the way a fax machine copies bits.

So I think it’s worth at least entertaining the possibility that we don’t have No-Cloning because of quantum mechanics; we have quantum mechanics because of No-Cloning — or because quantum mechanics is the simplest, most elegant theory that has unclonability as a core principle.

No-Cloning sounds fundamental, but it is not.

The theorem says that there is no physical process that always perfectly duplicates a given physical entity. You can have a laser beam that emits identical photons in identical states, but you can not have some trick optical device that takes in any photon and copies it into an additional photon in the same state.

The proof assumes that any such process would have to perfectly represent the entity (eg photon) by a wave function, to apply a unitary transformation to duplicate it, and to perfectly realize that result.

So you have to believe that a physical entity is exactly the same as a mathematical wave function, and a physical process is exactly the same as a unitary transformation.

But isn't that the essence of quantum mechanics? No, it is not.

Quantum mechanics is a system of using wave functions to predict observables. But there is no good reason to believe that there is a one-to-one correspondence between physical entities and wave functions.

The no-cloning theorem is a big headache for quantum computing because it means that qubits can never be copied. Ordinary computers spend most of their time copying bits.

But scalable qubits may not even be possible.

The no-cloning theorem is not something with any direct empirical evidence. It is true that we have no known way of duplicating an atomic state, but that is a little misleading. We have no way of doing any observations at all on an atomic state without altering that state.

China claims to invent quantum radar

ExtremeTech reports:

The Chinese military says it has invented quantum radar, a breakthrough which, if true, would render the hundreds of billions of dollars the United States has invested into stealth technology obsolete. Like the original invention of radar, the advent of modern artillery, or radio communications, quantum radar could fundamentally transform the scope and nature of war. ...

Quantum radar would exploit quantum entanglement, the phenomena that occurs when two or more particles are linked, even when separated by a significant amount of physical space. In theory, a radar installation could fire one group of particles towards a target while studying the second group of entangled particles to determine what happened to the first group. The potential advantages of this approach would be enormous, since it would allow for extremely low-energy detection of approaching enemy craft. Unlike conventional radar, which relies on an ability to analyze and detect a sufficiently strong signal return, quantum radar would let us directly observe what happened to a specific group of photons. Since we haven’t invented cloaking devices just yet, this would seem to obviate a great deal of investment in various stealth technologies.

China is claiming to have developed a single-photon radar detection system that can operate at a range of 100km, more than 5x that of a lab-based system developed last year by researchers from the UK, US, and Germany. Research into quantum radar has been ongoing for at least a decade, but there are significant hurdles to be solved.

Let me get this straight. The quantum radar entangles two photons, and fires one at the stealth plane. Then there is no need to look for any return signal because you can figure out what happened by examining the entangled photon that never left.

This is impossible, of course. Either someone has some massive misunderstandings of quantum mechanics, or someone is perpetrating a scam. Or maybe China thinks that Americans are dumb enuf to believe a story like this.

Nobel site on relativity

The Nobel Prize site has a page on the History of Special Relativity

1898 Jules Henri Poincaré said that "... we have no direct intuition about the equality of two time intervals."

1904 Poincaré came very close to special relativity: "... as demanded by the relativity principle the observer cannot know whether he is at rest or in absolute motion."

1905 On June 5, Poincaré finished an article in which he stated that there seems to be a general law of Nature, that it is impossible to demonstrate absolute motion. On June 30, Einstein finished his famous article On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, where he formulated the two postulates of special relativity.

Here is that 1905 Poincare paper. It is really just an abstract of a longer paper. Poincare states that general law of nature in the first paragraph.

The most important points in that Poincare abstract are that the Lorentz transformations form a group, and that all forces, including electromagnetism and gravity, are affected the same way. Poincare is quite emphatic about both of these points.

Einstein had access to Poincare's abstract before writing his
1905 relativity paper, but he does not quite get these two points, altho he is often credited with them. Here is what they say.

Poincare: "The sum of all these transformations, together with the set of all rotations of space, must form a group; but for this to occur, we need l = 1; so one is forced to suppose l = 1 and this is a consequence that Lorentz has obtained by another way."

Einstein: "we see that such parallel transformations — necessarily — form a group."

Poincare: "Lorentz, in the work quoted, found it necessary to complete his hypothesis by assuming that all forces, whatever their origin, are affected by translation in the same way as electromagnetic forces and, consequently, the effect produced on their components by the Lorentz transformation is still defined by equations (4). It was important to examine this hypothesis more closely and in particular to examine what changes it would require us to make on the law of gravitation."

Einstein: "They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good."

As you can see, Poincare had a deeper understanding of relativity, and he published it first.

Randomness does not need new technology

SciAm reports:

Photonic Chip Could Strengthen Smartphone Encryption

The chip uses pulses of laser light to generate truly random numbers, the basis of encryption. Christopher Intagliata reports.

Random numbers are hugely important for modern computing. They're used to encrypt credit card numbers and emails. To inject randomness into online gaming. And to simulate super complex phenomena, like protein folding or nuclear fission.

But here's the dirty secret: a lot of these so-called random numbers are not truly random. They're actually what’s known as "pseudo random numbers," generated by algorithms. Think of generating random numbers by rolling dice. If you know the number of dice, it’s simple to figure out something about the realm of possible random numbers—thus putting probabilistic limits on the randomness.

But truly random numbers can be generated through quantum mechanical processes. So researchers built a photonic chip — a computer chip that uses photons instead of electrons. The chip has two lasers: one shoots continuously; the other pulses at regular intervals. Each time the two lasers meet, the interference between the light beams is random, thanks to the rules of quantum mechanics. The chip then digitizes that random signal, and voila: a quantum random number generator.

This distinction between truly random and pseudo random numbers is entirely fallacious.

They act as if quantum hanky panky magically makes something more random than other random things.

See the Wikipedia article on Hardware random number generators. There are lots of them on the market already. They are already cheap enuf for smart phones, if there were any commercial need.

I actually think that it would be nice to have such a random number function in PCs and phones. But the fact is that there are suitable workarounds already. There is no need for a fancy 2-laser device like in this research.

Massimo Pigliucci is a philosophy professor who specializes in calling things pseudoscience, and argues strenuously that it is a useful term:

Pseudoscience refers to “any body of knowledge that purports to be scientific or to be supported by science but which fails to comply with the scientific method,” though since there is no such thing as the scientific method, I would rather modify the above to read “with currently accepted scientific standards.” ...

Burke then goes on to cite a 2011 dissertation by Paul Lawrie that argues that “dismissing… scientific racism as ‘pseudo-science,’ or a perversion of the scientific method, blurs our understanding of its role as a tool of racial labor control in modern America.”

Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. But scientific racism is a pseudoscience, and it is widely recognized — again by the relevant epistemic community — as such.

It seems to me that the term pseudoscience is mainly used for political purposes and unscientific name-calling, such as for denouncing racism.

But if anything is pseudoscience, then why not the creation of "truly random numbers"? Why is it acceptable to distinguish truly random numbers from not-truly random numbers, but only pseudoscience to distinguish Caucasians from Orientals?

Current philosophers like Pigliucci should be called pseudo-philosophers. They sound as if they are doing philosophy, but they fail to follow minimal standards.