How Colleges got Politicized

English professor Michael W. Clune writes:

We Asked for It
The politicization of research, hiring, and teaching made professors sitting ducks.

Over the past 10 years, I have watched in horror as academe set itself up for the existential crisis that has now arrived. Starting around 2014, many disciplines — including my own, English — changed their mission. Professors began to see the traditional values and methods of their fields — such as the careful weighing of evidence and the commitment to shared standards of reasoned argument — as complicit in histories of oppression. As a result, many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.

In reading articles and book manuscripts for peer review, or in reviewing files when conducting faculty job searches, I found that nearly every scholar now justifies their work in political terms. This interpretation of a novel or poem, that historical intervention, is valuable because it will contribute to the achievement of progressive political goals. Nor was this change limited to the humanities. Venerable scientific journals — such as Nature — now explicitly endorse political candidates; computer-science and math departments present their work as advancing social justice. Claims in academic arguments are routinely judged in terms of their likely political effects.

The costs of explicitly tying the academic enterprise to partisan politics in a democracy were eminently foreseeable and are now coming into sharp focus. Public opinion of higher education is at an all-time low. The incoming Trump administration plans to use the accreditation process to end the politicization of higher education — and to tax and fine institutions up to “100 percent” of their endowment. I believe these threats are serious because of a simple political calculation of my own: If Trump announced that he was taxing wealthy endowments down to zero, the majority of Americans would stand up and cheer.

It was all unnecessary. Colleges could have stayed out of overtly political issues, especially the ones outside their professional expertise.

Update: Here is an example of how far colleges have degenerated, from a Jewish magazine:

A man sentenced to life imprisonment for involvement in the murder of four Jews in a French synagogue bombing is teaching a “social justice” course at a Canadian university.

Dr Hassan Diab, a Lebanese-Canadian citizen, was found guilty by a French court for taking part in the 1980 bombing outside the Rue Copernic Reform synagogue in Paris, which killed four people and injured 46.

He is employed at Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada, as a teacher in sociology and is delivering a class this autumn titled “Social Justice in Action”.

Horgan defends SciAm Politicization

I mentioned that the SciAm Editor is Fired, and former SciAm writer seems to be the only one defending her.

He maligns evolutionist Jerry Coyne, who argues back. See also Jesse Singal.

I post this so that you can see that it is a real dispute. The SciAm editor would surely say that scientists should be aware of the dangers of Trump fascism or transphobia or some other political issue. I wish the magazine would stick to science. Others can debate the pros and cons of Trump.

If SciAm were to address political issues, then it should at least provide some balanced coverage. But no, it forbids any articles expressing contrary views. Sorry, that is not a scientific view.

Update: Michael Shermer adds his experience::

I wrote 214 consecutive monthly columns for Sci Am, from 2001–19. Only two of these were rejected, both in 2018.

SciAm Editor is Fired

Jerry Coyne reports:

The facts are that Helmuth had a total social-media meltdown the night of the election (see her tweets here), for which she later apologized (see tweet here).  People called for her to be fired given the tenor of what she wrote, but I’ve never done that. We don’t know if she resigned or was fired, and it really makes no difference.

Her tweets revealed her to be a crazy leftist Trump-hater, but I would not have fired her for that. I do not believe in canceling people for emotional outbursts of silly opinions.

She should have been fired for turning Scientific American into a radical woke propaganda magazine that put ideology ahead of science. Trump just announced appointing RFKjr to HHS yesterday afternoon, and SciAm already has an article attacking him!

Update: More info at Unherd:

Four years ago, it made a presidential endorsement in support of Joe Biden for the first time in its 175-year history. ...

Helmuth’s tenure also saw the publication of articles that blurred the lines between scientific research and activism. A 2021 article, “From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter”, addressed what makes various social justice movements successful. “Social movements have likely existed for as long as oppressive human societies have, but only in the past few centuries has their praxis […] developed into a craft, to be learned and honed,” the article read. Several articles argued in favour of abortions, with one headline claiming: “Third-Trimester Abortions Are Moral and Necessary Health Care.”

The outlet published numerous articles promoting transgender medical interventions. It also published articles advocating against age restrictions for these procedures. One such article claimed that “a decade of research shows such treatment reduces depression, suicidality and other devastating consequences of trans preteens and teens being forced to undergo puberty in the sex they were assigned at birth”, a proposition that has come under international scrutiny in recent years.

Tech's Longest-Running Hoax

An investor channel reports: Quantum Computing: Tech's Longest-Running Hoax

you may need 14:12 hundreds or even thousands of physical 14:14 cubits in each logical Cubit the point 14:17 is if you want to make a quantum 14:18 computer capable of doing anything 14:20 useful you will need a lot of cubits 14:22 current estimates say that you would 14:23 need 20 million cubits to break RSA 14:25 encryption if you want to cure cancer or 14:28 solve global climate change you would 14:29 need orders of magnitude more than this 14:32 today the largest quantum computers have 14:34 about 1,000 cubits so we multiple orders 14:37 of magnitude away from achieving 14:38 anything useful the Bulls say that 14:40 Quantum technology has already been 14:42 proven if the industry continues making 14:44 advances they'll eventually be able to 14:46 do something useful however there are 14:48 well-respected academics who think that 14:50 a useful quantum computer is not 14:51 possible even in theory the most notable 14:54 of these Skeptics are the Israeli math 14:56 professor Gil kalai and the Russian 14:58 physics professor male jackinov they 15:01 both argue that Quantum bits are 15:02 inherently unstable as the number of 15:04 cubits increases the number of quantum 15:06 States increases exponentially this 15:08 level of complexity makes a sufficiently 15:10 large quantum computer impossible to 15:12 control even in theory to be clear Dr 15:15 Kai and Dr dakov are in the minority the 15:18 majority of researchers in the field 15:20 argue that a quantum computer will one 15:21 day be possible there's a strong 15:24 incentive for academics to be optimistic 15:26 many academics have dedicated Decades of 15:28 their lives to study Quantum Computing 15:30 if you come out and say this was all a 15:32 waste of time that wouldn't exactly be 15:34 good for your funding or career 15:36 prospects

The video is accurate. Quantum computing companies have already gone public and then bankrupt.

Academics are Depressed about Trump

Peter Woit is depressed about the election, and rants that now we are Living in a Post-truth World

On the American democracy front, the Trump phenomenon embodies post-truth in its purest form, with the full triumph now of a movement devoted to saying whatever will get them to power, with less than no interest in whether any of it is true.

He complains that super-smart physicists promote untenable string theory, or as one comment says:

Indeed, if Physics PhDs can look you in the eye and say that they really believe that wormholes form when you entangle spins simply because Maldacena and Susskind say so, why should you be so surprised that people get taken in by demagogues?

Okay, but Woit also complains that big money was allowed to influence the election, that Fox News was allowed to be different from the other networks, and that Trump won the less educated voters and lost the more educated voters!

This make no sense. The big money outspent Trump maybe 3-to-1, or 5-to-1, in the election.

If the super-high-IQ super-educated physicsts can be wrong about string theory and entangled electron wormholes, then why can't they be wrong about Trump?

The whole idea that the Democrats are on the side of Truth, and Trump is opposed, is absurd. These Trump-haters cannot give any examples.

Kamala Harris knows nothing about science. The closest she gets is dopey babbling like:

So, let me say this: This is an issue that Josi actually highlighted in terms of the importance of this. The Governor and I and we were all doing a tour of the library here and talking about the significance of the passage of time. Right? The significance of the passage of time.

So, when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time in terms of what we need to do to lay these wires, what we need to do to create these jobs. And there is such great significance to the passage of time when we think about a day in the life of our children and what that means to the future of our nation, depending on whether or not they have the resources they need to achieve their God-given talent.

She also said she believes in Astrology!

I don't want to pick on Woit, as he lives in a bubble where no one supports Trump. Most of American elite academia have Trump Derangement Syndrome. They have no grasp of what Trumpism is about, and can only babble platitudes about Truth.

I cannot even figure out what Woit means by "post-truth", as he only gives a few hints. He mentions Newt Gingrich, who was House Speaker for several years in the 1990s. He is mostly known for passing some reforms, after the other party controlled for decades. He mentions Fox News reporting on Clinton Whitewater, but that was an investigation ordered by Clinton's attorney general. Not much came of it. Mentions a Michio Kaku book on parallel universes. Yes, that is all a big fantasy.

Perhaps Woit is alluding to Trump's reputation for exaggeration. Yes, he sometimes exaggerates. He claimed to pull off the greatest comeback in American political history, if not world history. Dubious. Nevertheless, he is a much more authentical character than Kamala Harris. He is what he appears to be. Harria was unable or unwilling to say who she is, and what her agenda is. She convinced people that she is pro-abortion and hates Trump, and nothing else. Those voting for her had very little idea what she stood for.

Harris and Walz also told a great many lies.

I think Woit is from another country, and may have very little understanding of American politics. His criticisms are lazy and stupid. Trump was President for four years, and it was four years of peace and prosperity. Disagree with him if you want, but most of the opposition to him consists of calling him a fascist. His decisive win in the election is from a common and informed view that he was the much better candidate.

Attention for Hossenfelder's Science Channel

NPR reports:

The dark days of the COVID-19 pandemic helped transform Sabine Hossenfelder into an unlikely social media star. ...

Hossenfelder's science channel has also become a ready platform for her somewhat contrarian views on the state of physics. Among them is what she sees as the problem of beauty, the pursuit of simplicity. Specifically, how her colleagues who try to fathom the fundamental underpinnings of the universe are obsessed with it. ...

But as we seek answers in a complex universe, Hossenfelder cautions that the quest for simplicity could be a dead end. ...

Posting videos to the internet, it turns out, generates a more reliable revenue stream to fund her work in quantum gravity.

Her videos have a lot of good info, but quantum gravity is a waste of time.

A less favorable review from Professor Dave:

Sabine Hossenfelder is a very popular science communicator who focuses largely on topics in physics. Although much of her content is effective and without issue, there is an undercurrent of anti-establishment rhetoric that has grown immensely as of late, and it is an enormous problem. Sabine is a not a charlatan like most of my other targets, and this is not a hit piece, but rather commentary on this aspect of her work and how it came to be. If you are a fan of hers, consider this perspective.

Professor Dave is not a professor, and not a physicist. His main complaint is that she has harsh words for those doing Physics research, and he says there is lots of good reseach. But her main gripes are with those doing dead-end research in certain foundational and speculative areas.

She has a new video in response, where she doubles down on her point that the last 50 years have made no progress in foundational issues.

I would say quantum gravity is one of those dead-end areas where all or nearly all research is worthless.

Actually I might argue that foundational Physics has made negative progress, as many have jumped on absurd theories like many-worlds.

Because Professor Dave is not a physicist, I don't think he appeciates how much theoretical Physics has lost its way.

Both of these channels have a lot of worthwhile videos. My main beef with her is that she subscribes to superdeterminism, a concept contrary to the whole scientific enterprise.

Update: Professor Dave has doubled down with another attack video:

I criticized some unprofessional behavior regarding her choice of titles, thumbnails, and generalized deceptive anti-science rhetoric which has clearly been fueling science denial among the public in large numbers. ... All of those people wanted to talk about academia, so let's talk about academia a little bit in this video, while also addressing an unbelievably immature response video from Sabine where she doubled down on all of her bullshit rhetoric and made things much, much worse for herself.

He goes on to say Hossenfelder is a science denier.

This is how we get politicians voted into office 4:40 with fascist leanings. This is how the slide down the slippery slope towards theocracy 4:45 gains momentum. This is how we get people trying to force religion into public schools, and into federal laws. With Trump returning to office, he may follow through with his promise 4:56 to put RFK in charge of the department of health. RFK. An anti-vaxxer who has said that chemicals 5:03 in the environment can turn kids gay and trans and that HIV does not cause AIDS, may soon be 5:10 in charge of the FDA, NIH, USDA, and CDC. Are you listening to me? ...

As a global society we are sliding towards idiocracy, 5:37 and our survival as a species is at stake. Sabine feeds people narratives that are conducive to 5:43 those modes of thought, and in doing so she is pushing them further down the pseudoscience pipeline where they are more likely to be ensnared by actual demagogues and charlatans.

Meanwhile, Dr. Bee is back with My problem with the black hole information loss problem. She has legitimate complaints about unscientific papers about black hole information physics. Prof. Dave wants to blame her for Trump getting elected.

Nature Magazine Endorsed Kamala Harris

As I write this, the election has not been called, but I want to draw attention to the Nature editorial endorsing Kamala Harris.

I don't know why a British science journal needs to get involved in partisan USA politics.

Harris said on 22 October that her administration will not be a continuation of the Biden presidency. She has said she wants to build an “opportunity economy”. Precisely what that means is yet to be defined — a science- and evidence-based approach needs to be at its core.

That record is in stark contrast to what happened during Trump’s presidency, from 2017 to 2021. As president, Trump not only repeatedly ignored research-informed knowledge, but also undermined national and global science and public-health agencies. He has denied climate science, lied about the federal government’s response to hurricane forecasts and asked scientists to investigate whether disinfectants could be used to treat people with COVID-19.

This is too stupid for science editors.

If Harris is unable or unwilling to say what she will do, why are you endorsing her? She appears to be of low intelligence, and to know nothing about science.

The Trump complaints are about how he once wrote on a weather map with a sharpie, and he once commented favorably about a medical report about disinfecting covid.

I do not think Trump said or did anything wrong in either of these cases, but even if he did, they are trivialities.

Trump was President for four years. Did science research suffer? Did he make any anti-science decisions? There is no substantive criticism of Trump, and nothing concrete about what Harris will do.

This is just more evidence about how the science establishment has lost its way.

Update: Nature endorsed Harris in July, and again just before the election, and now it panics about Trump's win.

Scientists around the world expressed disappointment and alarm as Republican Donald Trump won the final votes needed to secure the US presidency in the early hours of 6 November. On account of Trump’s anti-science rhetoric and actions during his previous term in office, many are now bracing for four years of attacks on scientists, both in and outside the government.

“In my long life of 82 years ... there has hardly been a day when I felt more sad,” says Fraser Stoddart, a Nobel laureate who left the United States last year and is now a member of the chemistry department at the University of Hong Kong. “I’ve witnessed something that I feel is extremely bad, not just for the United States, but for all of us in the world.” ...

Worries pouring in this morning align with those expressed by the majority of readers who responded last month to a survey conducted by Nature. More than 2,000 people answered the poll, with 86% saying that they favoured Harris, owing to concerns including climate change, public health and the state of US democracy. Some even said they would consider changing where they live or study if Trump won. ...

Of those who responded to Nature’s reader survey, 6% expressed a preference for Trump — usually citing concerns about security issues and the economy.

Wow, people who do not even live in the USA are complaining that we elected a President who believes in America First.

Meanwhile, they do not mention that Harris is a moron who knows nothing about science, and who believes in Astrology.

Aaronson reaches full Trump Derangement

Dr. Quantum Supremacy, Scott Aaronson previously announced he is Never-Trump From Here to Eternity, and now writes Letter to a Jewish voter in Pennsylvania.

In short, he has full Trump Derangement Syndrome. He endorses Kamala Harris, but has nothing good to say about her, except that she is not Trump. He is Jewish, and he acknowledges that his Orthodox and Israeli friends much prefer Trump. He also cites a couple of other Jews who are paranoid Trump-haters.

I am not going to try to answer it, because it is the ravings of a madman. Trump was President for four years, and it was a period of peace and prosperity, except for covid. Aaronson has no quibble with that, but is obvious triggered by Trump's personality.

He sounds like a paranoid schizophrenic. He is so crazy as to question his judgment on anything else.

He complains that he found these comments on X-Twitter:

“Shut the fuck up, Zio, and stop murdering babies.”

“Two-state solution? I have a different proposal: that all you land-thieves pack your bags and go back to Poland.”

“you Jews have been hated and expelled from all the world’s countries for thousands of years, yet you never consider that the common factor is you.”

“Your own Talmud commands you to kill goyim children, so that’s why you’re doing it.”

“Even while you maintain apartheid in Palestine, you cynically import millions of third-world savages to White countries, in order to destroy them.”

None of this is from Trump or Republicans. Since the Gaza War started on Oct. 7, 2023, a faction of the USA Left and Democrats have become anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. Aaronson is obviously unhappy about this, and firmly sides with Israel in the war, but it is completely crazy to see this as a reason to vote against Trump.

One can have political disagreements about taxes, or Ukraine aid, or abortion, or 100 other issues. That is not what is happening here. He probably agrees with Trump on a lot of those issues.

Aaronson also believes in many-worlds theory, where all possibilities happen in parallel universes. He said Google had achieved quantum supremacy by generating random numbers. Now he worries that AI will destroy mankind.

Smart people can believe in crazy stuff.

Is Light Composed of Photons?

A popular channel tries to answer What is a Photon?

The simple answer is that light is composed of photons. A photon is a ball of light. A wise guy commenter gives the more sophisticated answer:

The special relativistic wave equation that accurately describes electrons is the Dirac equation. The Dirac Lagrangian density for electrons has got a local U(1) symmetry because of local causality and local charge conservation (Noether's theorem). U(1) symmetry, because we only ever observe the absolute value squared of the wave function.

This can be modeled in gauge theory as an S^1 fiber bundle (or a U(1) Lie-algebra valued principal g-bundle) over a flat Minkowski spacetime base. Wave functions for the electron field are then sections in this fiber bundle.

To make precise the comparison of geometric data between different spacetime points (gauge covariant derivative), we introduce a connection on this fiber bundle; the electromagnetic vector potential, A_mu (just like the Christoffel symbols/Levi—Civita connection of the tangent bundle in general relativity). Basis vectors/phase can change from place to place either bc. we are using some strange coordinate system (like polar coordinates fx.) or bc. our manifold/bundle is curved (to be precise, the connection is curved). So this connection might have a holonomy/curvature (responsible for geometric Berry phase), just like how spacetime can be curved. In this case, the curvature is caused by the 4-current, just like how spacetime curvature is caused by the stress-energy-momentum tensor. We can take the exterior derivative of this Ehresmann connection 1-form (A_mu), which yields a curvature 2-form, called the electromagnetic/Faraday tensor (or the Riemann curvature tensor in the case of general relativity).

This new field, (A_mu) the vector potential has got its own dynamics. If we derive the equations of motion with the help of the Euler—Lagrange equation, we get back the Lorentz force and Maxwell's equations in the 'classical' case. We can also apply canonical quantization and make the 'A' field values into operators. At low energies, this A field behaves like a quantum harmonic oscillator at each point of spacetime; its energy levels are going to be quantized. The number of quanta in a given frequency mode is what we call the number of photons in that mode (pure numer state/Fock state).

Very good, but it is accurate to say light is composed of photons?

I think not. Light is an electromagnetic wave, and small measurements are quantized. A photon is a measured quanta of light.

You might say, this is like saying a falling tree in the forest does not make a noise if no one listens. Likewise light is not made of photons unless measured.

The difference is that our best theories of trees and sounds say that the tree makes a sound whether anyone listens or not. Our best theories of light do not discretize light until a measurement.

You could say: No, that's wrong, QED uses Feynman diagrams of unobserved particles, including photons.

That is a point, but thinking of light as particles leads to faulty conclusions. QED is really a field theory.

Sean M. Carroll does Woo Podcast

From a Jun 2024 podcast interview:

Ellen came out with a new book at the end of last year called The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health, which is about the physiological, the health benefits of mindfulness. And it’s very interesting, she has a lot of studies, right? This is very data-based, and some of the results of these studies are kind of amazing. ... You can think of it as kind of like the placebo effect. You take some pill that really isn’t anything at all and your mind coaxes your body into getting better.

The comments are mostly negative, and a statistician responds:

I don’t think the data are there. To be precise, some relevant data exist, but, from the published papers, I don’t see these data providing good evidence for many of the claims being made.

More generally, statements such as “This is very data-based” and “the data are there” are nothing but empty hype if you can’t point to the actual data and their relation to the (justly) controversial scientific claims. Otherwise, you’re just bullshitting. You could just as well interview someone about the Loch Ness Monster or whatever and say “This is very data-based” over and over and hope your listeners don’t go and check.

I would not be too hard on Carroll, as this is out of his expertise. I just post this as a public service, in case you think that you are getting hard science from the podcast. Carroll must know that the podcast is nonsense, as comments to him explain it.

I do criticize him for many-worlds, as that is in his expertise, and there is no data to support that either.

Einstein's Happiest Moment: The Equivalence Principle

From a new paper on Einstein's Happiest Moment: The Equivalence Principle:

Einstein’s happiest thought was his leap from the observation that a falling person feels no gravity to the realization that gravity might be equivalent to acceleration. It affects all bodies in the same way because it is a property of spacetime — its curvature — not a force propagating through spacetime (like electromagnetic or nuclear forces). When expressed in a way that is manifestly independent of the choice of coordinates, this idea became General Relativity. But the ground for what is now known as the “equivalence principle” was laid long before Einstein, affording a fascinating example of the growth of a scientific idea through the continuous interplay between theory and experiment. ...

The earliest hints of something like equivalence came from Aristotle. ...

The EP can be said to have originated with Newton, as did experiments to test it.

So why would Einstein's happiest thought be a simple regurgitation of a principle that had been accepted for centuries? Wouldn't he be happier about unifying space and time, explaining Michelson-Morley, or quantizing the photon? The story is bizarre.

I have a theory about this. Einstein was proudest about relativity, but as far as I could determine, there was only one part of the theory that was original to him. He figured out in 1907 and 1911 papers that gravitational potential affected clocks. He did it by using the equivalence principle to relate it to a non-gravity scenario, where special relativity could be used to relate the clocks. I do not think this occurred to anyone else.

All the rest of relativity he stole from others. The gravity effect on clocks was his happiest because he could genuinely claim the credit.

Apple says LLMs cannot Reason

Since the Nobel Swedes have apparently decided that Physics is dead, and all the action is in Artificial Intelligence, maybe I will switch to posting about that.

Apple is desperately trying to catch up to its competitors in AI, so it is badmouthing the successes:

A new paper from Apple's artificial intelligence scientists has found that engines based on large language models, such as those from Meta and OpenAI, still lack basic reasoning skills.

The group has proposed a new benchmark, GSM-Symbolic, to help others measure the reasoning capabilities of various large language models (LLMs). Their initial testing reveals that slight changes in the wording of queries can result in significantly different answers, undermining the reliability of the models.

The group investigated the "fragility" of mathematical reasoning by adding contextual information to their queries that a human could understand, but which should not affect the fundamental mathematics of the solution. This resulted in varying answers, which shouldn't happen.

The paper uses this typical example of an LLM failure:

Oliver picks 44 kiwis on Friday. Then he picks 58 kiwis on Saturday. On Sunday, he picks double the number of kiwis he did on Friday, but five of them were a bit smaller than average. How many kiwis does Oliver have?

The paper complains that the LLMs subtract the 5 kiwis, even though the statement about them being smaller should be irrelevant.

No, this is a misguided criticism. If the LLM were strictly logical, it would refuse to answer the question as too vague and imprecise. The problem does not say how many kiwis Oliver started with, or whether he got any from other sources, or if he ate any. Without that info, no answer can be given.

The LLMs work by embedding the problem into a convex meaning space. However sloppy the problem is, it gets precise coordinates in the embedding space.

Whoever formulated this problem seemed to be saying that the 5 kiwis should not be counted. Why else is it phrased that way? Okay, it is phrased that way to be a trick question.

What would you want an LLM to do? To assign meaning in the most direct way, or try to interpret the problem as a trick question?

Apple seems to want to benchmark LLMs on trick questions. No thanks.

For another view, see Apple DROPS AI BOMBSHELL: LLMS CANNOT Reason. This video argues that Apple proved that the LLMs are worse that what people thinks, and not likely to get fixed soon.

Update: Dr. Bee discusses the Apple paper.

Aaronson Posts his Manifesto

Dr. Quantum Supremacy Scott Aaronson has posts

In nearly twenty years of blogging, I’ve unfortunately felt more and more isolated and embattled. It now feels like anything I post earns severe blowback,

It appears that I am blocked from commenting there. The following was rejected, so I repost it here:

(7) Goldbach is not a good example because if it is independent of the axioms then there is no counterexample in N, and hence true in N. There are other arithmetical statements that are independent and we have no reason to say they are true or false. "how did we even get started talking about math?" By accepting what is provable. Mathematicians do not need to have an opinion, when there is no proof.

(15) "Everett interpretation ... to result from scientifically conservative choices." By this I assume you mean you can use the Schroedinger equation to predict probabilities, but then reject those probabilities and interpret them as world-splittings instead. No, this is not scientifically conservative. It makes the theory untestable, and introduces vast unobservable worlds.

Yes, I do think his math philosophy, and his many-worlds beliefs, are untenable. In particular, it is a nutty extreme view to say that many-worlds is scientifically conservative.

Sean M. Carroll says that same thing, and I have criticized him for it. He has explained his views in detail on his podcast, so I am sure he is wrong.

The essence of many-worlds is that it takes a scientific theory that predicts probabilities, denies that probabilities exists, and postulates that all possibilities happen in parallel worlds. It is so crazy that any scientist who advocates it should be disregarded on all scientific issues.

Aaronson tries to make his other positions sound moderate, but some are nutty. Item (1) exhibits Trump Derangement Syndrome. He thinks Trump is a threat to the Enlightenment!

He is entitled to his political views, of course, but nothing he says about Trump makes any sense. Some of his viwes seem more aligned with Trump than Harris, except for his Jewish brainwashing against Trump. I say Jewish because a lot of Jews show the same derangement, even though Trump's policies are likely to be much better for the Jews.

Harris and Walz are the most vacuous candidates I can remember. They have low IQ, have nothing to say about anything, and just babble nonsense when asked questions. Surely anyone smart enough to be a professor can see that they are morons. They just support them out of some sort of leftist tribal loyalty.

The Physics News is no New Physics

Physicists must be annoyed that the Nobel Physics prize was for computer science, with no application to Physics.

Here is a defense:

All this sounds nice for computer science, or for building language translators or self-driving cars, but is it Physics? I’d argue the answer is “yes.” These ideas of network properties, stability, and transitions didn’t spring up de novo, but emerged via classic problems in statistical mechanics, one of the fundamental, core areas of physics. Hopfield’s model was, in fact, a “spin glass” model, originally developed to describe magnetic materials and phase transitions.

They were inspired by biological models of the brain also, but today's neural nets are really designed to do what can be made efficient on consumer gaming chips, and do not have much to do with either physics or biology.

I wonder why these guys even take the calls from Sweden. They insisted on interviewing Hinton in a California hotel room at 2am, and keeping him up all morning. He would still get the money if he had slept in.

It is debatable whether these guys did much that was novel. Ignoring that point, look at all the work that Physicists brag out that did not win. There were surely nominations for cosmic inflation, ER=EPR, dark matter, string theory, quantum gravity, holographic principle, supersymmetry, quantum computing, many-worlds. The Swedes have a pretty good record of resisting fads like these.

Is Physics dead? The last big advanced was the discovery of the Higgs boson about 10 years ago, confirming a theory from 50 years before that. There isn't much new and interesting coming out of Physics anymore. Not Big Physics, anyway. I guess there is still lots of good work being done in material science.

Happy Columbus Day. The discovery of the New World to Europeans in 1492 was one of the most important events in all of human history. I cannot think of any other single event that changed the world so much.

Predicted Nobel for Quantum Computing

Dr. Bee predicts:

Which is why my best bet for this year’s 1:35 Physics Nobel is quantum computing. This is clearly on the bingo card, it’s just a 1:40 matter of time until we check this box. Likely candidates are David Deutsch and Peter Shor.

No, not likely. Not yet, anyway.

Nobel prizes for theoretical advances are only given after experimental confirmation. If someone makes a quantum computer that breaks RSA encryption, then that would be an achievement that the Nobel folks would like to recognize.

IK personally think that they should have given a prize for the Higgs mechanism when it proved so essential to the stunning successes of the Standard Model in the 1970s.

Nope. Nobel does not work that way. Higgs could be confirmed by finding a new particle, and no prize was to be given until that particle is found.

There has been no prize for dark matter, despite dozens of brilliant works describing it. Until someone finds a piece of dark matter in a lab.

3:51 And as my fifth and final guess I have a topic that I think should win 3:56 the Nobel Prize but probably won’t, which is modified Newtonian dynamics. That is because, 4:03 regardless of what you think about the maths, it’s been extremely successful in making predictions. 4:09 It has predicted that the Tully-Fisher relation is valid for all types of galaxies, 4:14 it has predicted the height of the second peak of the CMB, it has predicted that galaxies should 4:20 form as early as the James Webb Telescope has observed. Even if these regularities 4:26 will eventually be explained by something else, modified gravity still predicted them correctly.

Interesting opinion, but those people deny that dark matter is a thing, so I don't think they will win a prize as long as people are looking for dark matter particles.

My fourth bet is a topic that I hope will not win, which is cosmological inflation, 3:15 that’s the idea that the early briefly underwent a phase of 3:19 exponential expansion. Astrophysicists talk about inflation as if it’s settled science, 3:25 but the evidence is sketchier than your friend who always ‘forgets’ his wallet.

It is not settled science, because we do not know what the inflation is. Inflation is not getting a prize.

Alfred Wegener discovered continental drift in 1915, one of the great scientific breakthroughs of all time. He got no prizes or respect, because he could not nail down the mechanism in a way that could be accepted and confirmed by others. Like it or not, that's how it works.

So I say, no prizes for quantum computing, inflation, or dark matter.

Here is a new Bloomberg video: The Race to Harness Quantum Computing's Mind-Bending Power | The Future With Hannah Fry. It says our communications systems will be insecure in 5-7 years. And China may be passing us up. The usual hype.

Update: The Physics prize went to two neural net researchers. Following tradition, they were awoken at 2am this morning.

Dr. Bee reports:

0:00 The 2024 Nobel Prize in physics… did not go to physicists. It went to two computer 0:06 scientists for developing the first neural networks, which became the basis 0:11 of what we now call artificial intelligence. If you still doubt that physics is in crisis, 0:16 the fact that the Nobel Prize in physics goes to computer scientists should make you think. Really, 0:21 I’m just grumpy because all my predictions were wrong. I guess my crystal ball needs 0:26 a software update.

The prize work is decades old, and not the large language models like ChatGPT that have gotten so much excitement. I am tempted to infer that the Nobel committee thought that ChatGPT and other LLMs were the hottest advance in science, so it wanted a prize to recognize that, even if the winners never worked on LLMs.

Merits of the Quantum Positivist Instrumentalist Mindset

New video:

Sean Carroll delves into the baffling and beautiful world of quantum mechanics. ...

Under the Umbrella of classical physics of 10:03 course you know that in the beginning of the 20th century quantum mechanics came along and changed everything now there's 10:10 a puzzle with quantum mechanics quantum mechanics is so profound that even though we've known about it for a 10:16 hundred years professional physicists still don't agree on what quantum 10:21 mechanics actually says and that's very embarrassing. I don't know to me anyway. I 10:26 think that we should know what our best theory of nature actually says but the weird thing is even though we don't 10:33 exactly know what the theory says, we do know what it predicts so it's pushed 20 10:39 and 21st century physicists into this sort of positivist instrumentalist mindset, where they say don't ask me 10:46 what's really going on. I can just tell you what you're going to observe in your experiment and you know what I I hate 10:52 that attitude this is very much not much not my attitude but it is the attitude we're going to take for this talk. I 10:59 wrote a whole another book called something deeply hidden about the philosophical mysteries of quantum mechanics but today we're going to be 11:05 hard-nosed physicists and ask what the Theory actually predicts.

Follow that? Sean M. Carroll says that QM was created as a wonderful theory a century ago. It perfectly predicts experiments. It was created by physicists with a positivist instrumentalist mindset. That is, they focused on the science, and not on the philosophizing.

But Carroll and some other philosophers are unhappy about it, and like weird untestable interpretations. That is all such nonsense, that in teaching QM he has to use that Copenhagen mindset of a century ago.

This is bizarre. It is like a Physics professor saying:

I am going to teach the theory of relativity, as understood by Minkowski, Einstein, and others. It passes all the tests. I am going to teach it even though it does not explain the arrow of time, and I personally think it should. It does not, so the theory is unsatifactory. Since nobody properly explains the arrow of time, I will have to teach it that way.

No, that would be ridiculous. No scientist is going to apologize for a scientific theory not answering some vaguely related metaphysical question.

What is Fundamentally Quantum?

What makes quantum mechanics so strange, and so different from quantum mechanics?

Here is a common opinion:

Following the EPR paper, Erwin Schrödinger wrote a letter to Einstein in German in which he used the word Verschränkung (translated by himself as entanglement) "to describe the correlations between two particles that interact and then separate, as in the EPR experiment."[19] However, Schrödinger had discussed the phenomenon as early as 1932.[20]

Schrödinger shortly thereafter published a seminal paper defining and discussing the notion of "entanglement." In the paper, he recognized the importance of the concept, and stated:[3] "I would not call [entanglement] one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought."

Sometimes indeterminacy or other features are said to be fundamentally quantum.

I believe this is mistaken. I have said so many times on this blog, such as here. The only thing that fundamentally distinguishes quantum from classical mechainis is the noncommutation of observables.

Flavio Del Santo, Nicolas Gisin write a new paper:P

What is fundamentally quantum? We argue that most of the features, problems, and paradoxes -- such as the measurement problem, the Wigner's friend paradox and its proposed solutions, single particle nonlocality, and no-cloning -- allegedly attributed to quantum physics have a clear classical analogue if one is to interpret classical physics as fundamentally indeterministic. What really characterizes quantum physics boils down only to phenomena that involve $\hbar$, i.e., incompatible observables.

I agree with this. Classical mechanics is not really deterministic, if you take into account the fact that the variables can only be known to finite precision. Then classical and quantum mechanics are similarly indeterministic.

THe commutator of position and momentum is ℏ, ie h-bar, Planck's constant. That is the core of the uncentainty principle and everything that is truly quantum. There is no other fundamental quantum mystery.

The authors even point out that many-worlds theory can just as easily be applied to a classical theory. Just assume that all possibilities are real. It also says that there is a classical no-cloning theorem. I will have to think about that one.

How Galileo got the Diurnal Tides Wrong

Galileo was famously prosecuted for his 1632 book onheliocentrism. He had agreed not to advocate heliocentrism, but invited to write a book presenting alternate views. So he wrote the book as a dialog, with the Pope being a foolish character named Simplicio.

One thing I have never understand is how such a brilliant scientist could write this book making his main argument based on a completely bogus theory of tides.

Apparently he was fully aware that the Mediterranean Sea had tides contradicting his theory. But he claimed that the Lisbon tides supported his theory.

That is also wrong, and he was told that it was wrong.

A new paper takes a deep dive into the issue.

Galileo’s argument that the tides of the sea are a product of the motions of the Earth in a heliocentric universe needed diurnal tides to bolster it, because the driving action resulting from those motions would be diurnal. If diurnal tides existed, he could explain away other tidal periods as being a result of the local characteristics of sea basins. Given that when writing the Dialogue Galileo had on hand (thanks to Giovanfrancesco Buonamici) information from Andrés García de Céspedes on diurnal tides occurring in the East Indies, and given the reduced length of the Dialogue’s discussion of tidal periods and its content compared to Galileo’s 1616 discourse on tides to Cardinal Orsini — which included (in error) mention of diurnal tides occurring in the Atlantic at Lisbon — it seems reasonable to suppose that Galileo somehow overlooked adding the Céspedes information to the Dialogue. It seems as reasonable to make this supposition as it is to suppose (as has been done in the absence of awareness of Buonamici’s work) that Galileo clung to an idea in the teeth of adverse evidence, evidence that he even suppressed, leaving himself open to criticisms of his tidal theory in his time, and to the criticisms of modern scholars today.

A diurnal would be one high tide and one low tide per day. That's what Galileo thought, and needed to explain the motion of the Earth. Actually, the tides are caused by gravity, with two high tides and two low tides per day.

You are probably going to say that the Church should not have prosecuted him anyway, because the Church scholars were probably not smart enough to understand the errors in the tide theory. Maybe not, but they were smart enough to recognize that Galileo did not have a compelling argument for the motion of the Earth. It is fine to praise Galileo for his good ideas, but we should also recognize his errors.

It is important to get the Galileo story correct, as it is used as an example so much. India-American activist Sunil Mehta writes:

History offers a chilling precedent. In the 17thcentury, humanity teetered on the brink of intellectual darkness when the church, then the world’s most powerful institution, sought to suppress scientific progress and perpetuate the myth of a geocentric universe. Galileo Galilei, a pioneer of physics, dared to challenge this dogma with evidence showing that the Earth revolved around the sun. Threatened with death, he was forced to recant publicly. But legend has it that despite being compelled to disavow his theories aloud, he muttered under his breath: “And yet it moves!”

Whether or not this story is true, it metaphorically represents the intellectual fight that Galileo and many other brave individuals waged on behalf of science. Thankfully, in the end, darkness was averted and truth prevailed.

What? "Whether or not the story is true ... truth prevailed." And thanks to "brave individuals waged on behalf of science."

No, he is an embarrassment to science. Truth does not prevail by telling falsehoods.

It gets worse.

Today, we stand at a similar crossroads. The world’s most powerful nation, a beacon of intellectual freedom for centuries, is now in danger of coming under the control of a demagogue who wants to build an authoritarian regime on the foundation of misinformation and lies. A plague of intellectual darkness has infected half our nation. Hollow nationalism and misguided xenophobia have taken hold. It is hard to fathom this is happening in the 21st century, but the harsh reality is that a divided country and the quirks of the Electoral College could easily pave the way for an authoritarian future.

What can we do to avert this catastrophe? We must follow the example of Galileo and his followers and fight hard on behalf of truth and facts. The candidates in the upcoming election who are weaponizing misinformation (by making outlandish claims that immigrants are eating pets, for example) need to be soundly defeated.

He has this backwards. I wonder how long he has even been in the USA. The Biden-Harris administration has been much more authoritarian than Trump's, by any measure. The Democrats are the ones trying to restrict the free flow of information. California Democrats just passed a law against political parodies.

The Haitians in Ohio are not even immigrants. They have been allowed to stay temporarily for a couple of years. They are supposed to go back. There is some dispute about what animals they eat.

Whatever your political views, how does this relate to Galileo? The Catholic Church did not seek to suppress scientific truth, and neither does Trump. The whole thing is idiotic.

The Galileo story is told as a story of an authoritarian Church suppressing Galileo's truths. It is all a lie. No truths were supressed. It was not a truth that the Earth moved, because motion is relative, and Galileo had compelling argument for it. There were legitimate scientific arguments for and against. Galileo had a mixture of good and bad arguments.

It is a historical fact that science did best in Europe, under Christian domination. If the Christian authorities were so anti-science, then you might expect science to advance more rapidly away from the Christian authorities. Nope. Science advanced best under Christianity.

Sixth Reason for Quantum Computing Skepticism

Dr. Quantum Supremacy, Scott Aaronson, posted 5 reasons for quantum computing skepticism, and why he thinks they are reduced by recent research. I tried to post another reason, but it did not go through, so I post it here.

That is a good list of reasons, but does not include the main reason for my QC skepticism.

It is plausible that QC should be able to simulate QM reactions. But what is the intuitive argument for the super-Turing computations?

You say that QM uses amplitudes instead of probabilities, and they can be negative and interfere. Fine, but all waves show interference, and you cannot build a QC out of classical waves. There must be some special QM property that makes the magic possible. Possible candidates are: (1) an electron can be in two places at once; (2) two objects can be entangled, and influence each other instantaneously; and (3) a computer can make use of a calculation in a parallel universe.

Yes, these ideas are all magical, and make QC supremacy plausible. The trouble is that they are all dependent on QM interpretations that are not generally accepted. If one of those ideas is really the key to QC, then someone should have already demonstrated it with a Nobel prize-winning experiment. There was a 2022 prize for experiments ruling out local hidden variables, but those experiments just confirmed QM and did not show anything to make QC plausible.

Now a $100 million or more has been pumped into QC research, and yet there is still no convincing proof that QC is real. Fusion power has been a similar disappointment, but at least we have proof that fusing hydrogen into helium releases energy.

Brian Greene is still chasing Einstein's Dream

Peter Woit trashes a Brian Greene Wash. Post op-ed. Woit emphasizes the failures of string theory, but I want to point out how much foolishness is based on chasing Einstein's dreams.

Decades later, string theory continues its march toward Einstein’s dream

Forty years ago this month, the physics community was electrified by a remarkable paper that hinted at the realization of Albert Einstein’s long-held dream: a unified theory of physical reality. The new approach, called string theory, captured the attention of researchers worldwide, as its elegant mathematics offered the potential to reconcile the two most successful yet conflicting frameworks in physics: Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which governs the vast structures of the cosmos where gravity rules, and quantum mechanics, which governs particles populating the subatomic world. ...

The application concerns two papers that Einstein wrote in the spring of 1935. One analyzed “entanglement,” an iconic quality of quantum physics in which the behavior of two distant particles can be so tightly choreographed, it’s as if they have a secret connection bridging the space between them. Einstein famously called this connection “spooky.” ...

Although Einstein published these papers in the span of two months, he considered them completely unrelated. ...

But the duality between Einstein’s two 1935 papers would suggest that quantum mechanics and general relativity are already deeply connected — no need for them to marry — so our challenge will be to fully grasp their intrinsic relationship.

Which would mean that Einstein, without realizing it, may have had the key to unification nearly a century ago. ...

Einstein’s math suggested the big bang, black holes, dark energy and gravitational waves — all consequences that Einstein, who was a cautious revolutionary (human nature, again) considered too exotic to be true.

String theory has produced some interesting math, but no physics. This essay is mostly about Einstein, but he did not even believe in a lot of it. He was not a mathematician, and probably would not have liked string theory.

I am all in favor of discovering new mathematics, but that was not Einstein's dream.

String theory, as Greene describes it, has nothing to do with science. It is disconnected with experiment or explaining natural phenomena.

I believe that Einstein has been a bad influence on Physics. He did some good work, but he seems to be mainly idolized for his supposed dreams about mathematizing a unified field theory. Nothing good has come out of chasing that dream.

Greene is smart enough to know that his essay is nonsense. He is just plugging his book. The new media have no interest in mathematical advances. The math coming out of string theory is hard to explain. To sell physics research, it has to be a new discovery, or it has to be an Einstein essay. He could not get this essay published, if he removed the Einstein nonsense.

Medical Science recognizes Race and Sex

SciAm podcast: In recognition of Prostate Cancer Awareness Month this September, host Rachel Feltman sits down with Alfred Winkler, chief of urology at NewYork-Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital, to discuss proactive steps individuals can take to protect themselves against prostate cancer. Black American men, in particular, face some of the highest rates of the disease in the world, with multiple factors contributing to this elevated risk. This episode explores efforts to raise awareness and promote early screening within this high-risk group. Other articles from the same magazine say Race Is a Social Construct and Human Sex Is Not Binary.

It is funny how our scientific institutions have been taken over by people willing to say obvious wrong things in order to serve misguided ideas about social justice.

Update: A new SciAm podcast today interviews a drag queen about teaching math.

SciAm goes Political Again; gets Trump Derangement

announces:

In the November election, the U.S. faces two futures. In one, the new president offers the country better prospects, relying on science, solid evidence and the willingness to learn from experience. She pushes policies that boost good jobs nationwide by embracing technology and clean energy. She supports education, public health and reproductive rights. She treats the climate crisis as the emergency it is and seeks to mitigate its catastrophic storms, fires and droughts.

In the other future, the new president endangers public health and safety and rejects evidence, preferring instead nonsensical conspiracy fantasies. ...

Only one of these futures will improve the fate of this country and the world. That is why, for only the second time in our magazine’s 179-year history, the editors of Scientific American are endorsing a candidate for president.

Harris and Walz are probably the most incompetent candidates for President in a long time. Harris avoids questions, and in the recent debate and interviews, she just babbled nonsense instead of answering the questions. When asked the simplest questions about what she plans to do or how she differs from Pres. Biden, she cannot answer.

This is science, so I looked for some example of Harris relying on science, following evidence, or learning from experience. No, there are no examples.

Trump touted his pandemic efforts during his first debate with Harris, but in 2020 he encouraged resistance to basic public health measures, spread misinformation about treatments and suggested injections of bleach could cure the disease. By the end of that year about 350,000 people in the U.S. had died of COVID; the current national total is well over a million.

This is all nonsense. Yes, thousands died under Trump, but more died under Biden-Harris. Trump never suggested injections of bleach. I don't think he even used the word "bleach". He merely commented on a scientific presentation on using disinfectants on surfaces to kill covid. Yes, Trump did downplay the shutdowns that health authorities were recommending, but we now know that the shutdowns did more harm than good.

It is hard to get any firm stand by Harris on any issue, except that she is pro-abortion, and against any restrictions on it.

Trump appointed the conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, removing the constitutional right to a basic health-care procedure. He spreads misinformation about abortion—during the September debate, he said some states support abortion into the ninth month and beyond, calling it “execution after birth.” No state allows this.

Some states do allow abortions in the ninth month, and Trump correctly cited the Virginia governor as favoring it after birth.

The Biden-Harris administration’s 2023 Executive Order on Safe, Secure and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence requires that AI-based products be safe for consumers and national security.

Really? Has that order made AI safe? Of course not. A science magazine should be able to back up what it says.

People can have political disagreements, and many will prefer Harris for various reasons. But a science magazine should stick to science. If it comments on a political race, it should be able to give evidence that a candidate is better for science.

There is no sign Harris understands any science issue. Reporters confronted her on her flip-flops on fracking, and she was unable to explain her views, and may not even know what fracking is.

New Research in Quantum Fault-tolerance

Dr. Quantum Computing has spent the last couple of years working for OpenAI, and returns to announce:

Let me end by sticking my neck out. If hardware progress continues at the rate we’ve seen for the past year or two, then I find it hard to understand why we won’t have useful fault-tolerant QCs within the next decade. (And now to retreat my neck a bit: the “if” clause in that sentence is important and non-removable!)

I think they created one logical qubit that lasts for a millisecond or so. Or something like that, I did not read the details.

I am just passing this prediction along. Seems doubtful to me.

The Invention of Large Language Models

Most people think that LLMs were invented by Google in 2016, or by OpenAI several years later.

AI expert Andrej Karpathy wrote on his blog:

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks

May 21, 2015

The concept of attention is the most interesting recent architectural innovation in neural networks.

He constructs some LLMs, and his results seem pitiful compared to what is done today, but I would say he has a proof of concept.

Google introduced the transformer in Attention Is All You Need, a 2017 paper. As you can see, attention was already a hot idea at the time.

I am not sure who should get credit for inventing LLM. The basic ideas of neural nets go back decades. They got a whole lot smart when gaming GPU chips became fast and widely available, and AI researchers figured out how to use them efficiently.

No Quantum Nonlocal Effects

This is an elementary fact about quantum mechanics.

Dr. Bee explains:

Most importantly, if you do something to one of the pair of entangled particles, 4:46 that does nothing to the other. Say you turn the spin of the particle on the right upside-down 4:53 even though you don’t know what it is. Then the spin of the other particle doesn’t change at all. 4:59 No, it doesn’t. You wouldn’t believe how often I see even physicists get this wrong. I just 5:05 the other day heard a talk from someone who works on quantum computing for heaven’s sake 5:10 who said that if you manipulate one of a pair of entangled particles then that will non-locally 5:16 affect the other. It will not. It’s just that if you make a measurement on one of the particles, 5:23 then that will tell you something about the other. Because they’re correlated. ...

The person who 5:50 makes a measurement on one end can’t tell that a measurement was even done on the other end. 5:56 So: Entanglement is real, we know that. Whether spooky action is real is still a matter of debate, 6:04 but you can’t send information faster than light with either.

She is correct. No one has ever found any nonlocal quantum effects. Just correlations.

It should not be complicated. The same happens classically.

What she says about "spooky action" is a little confusing, so here is her explanation.

2:36 Strange or not, Bohr said that when we measure a particle, 2:40 this superposition “collapses” and suddenly the particle is in only one place. It’s this collapse 2:47 that Einstein referred to as spooky action. Because it would indeed be faster than light. 2:53 The moment you find the particle in one place, you instantaneously know it can’t be elsewhere. 3:00 Einstein disagreed with Bohr. Einstein thought that quantum particles are really only in one 3:06 place and that the sudden update of the wave-function just means that you 3:10 have learned the particle isn’t elsewhere. And his main argument, here it comes, was that by 3:17 claiming the collapse is a physical process, Bohr was introducing a “spooky action at a distance”. 3:26 Even if this spooky action existed though, it couldn’t transfer information. Just because you 3:32 find out what’s going on elsewhere doesn’t mean you sent information there.

When you find a classical particle, you immediately know it cannot be elsewhere. If that is spooky, then classical mechanics is spooky. Regardless, no information or anything else goes faster than light.

Usually she branches into a plug for superdeterminism. Mercifully, she did not this time.

Five Ways to Think About Quantum Supremacy

Aventine reports:

When Google announced that it had achieved quantum supremacy in 2019, the headlines were thrilling.

The world of quantum computing had taken a remarkable step. Google, with its Sycamore quantum processor, had performed a calculation in 200 seconds that, the company claimed in the journal Nature, would take a supercomputer 10,000 years.

This feat, named quantum supremacy by John Preskill, a theoretical physicist, back in 2012, promised to usher in a new world of computing performance. ...

Only it didn’t play out the way Google hoped or expected. ...

And then, earlier this summer, researchers from Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in China completed the same task in just 14.22 seconds, driving a final stake through the heart of the Google quantum supremacy claim.

It’s not the only warning sign for the industry. Venture capital investment in the sector has fallen off a cliff, from $2.2 billion globally in 2022 to about $1.2 billion in 2023.

It then reports the opinions of five experts, but none of them say that quantum supremacy has been achieved. The closest is Scott Aaronson who says:

Quantum supremacy can be achieved and then unachieved later. It’s a little bit of a moving target in that sense. But all expect that we’ll eventually get to a place where quantum computers are just routinely doing things that classical computers cannot replicate within thousands of years or millions of years, and at that point there’s no more arguing about it.

Achieved and then unachieved? This is a bit like a mathematician saying something was proved, and then disproved. If it was later disproved, then it was never really proved.

Gil Kalai argues that quantum supremacy is impossible, and explains further here.

ChatGPT is better at English than Tigrinya

From a recent Nature magazine podcast:

0:00 chat GPT has a language problem so my language is called T it's spoken in in 0:07 Ethiopia and also in a Syria ...

how we design 3:38 this technology how it could be used and the impacts it could have in this podcast we are going to 3:45 explore the relationship between llms and languages and ask what must be done 3:50 to ensure that AIs work for 3:56 everyone. I think everybody in the community agrees that we need to democratize AI there should not be 4:02 disproportionate benefit in one language versus the other, right? so we want Fair 4:08 access you know and we want to empower communities in different 4:13 [Music] 4:24 languages

I never heard of this language, so I google it:

Tigrinya is a Semitic language spoken in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia and central Eritrea1.

Actually, ChatGPT does surprisingly well in this language.

No, nobody agrees that ChatGPT should be equally beneficial in all languages. It is impossible. Most of the worthwhile training materials are in English, and English is well-suited to being the world's language of choice.

I post this as an example of how the leading science publication has gone Woke.

Albert explains Weirdness of Quantum Mechanics

David Z. Albert is one of the leading popularizers of quantum mechanics, and is on this podcast:

David Albert is the Frederick E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, director of the Philosophical Foundations of Physics program at Columbia, and a faculty member of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics. This is David’s eighth appearance on Robinson’s Podcast.

I think he is mostly known for trying to give a philosophical defense of string theory, in the absense of any evidence.

He tries to explain what is weird about QM

24:01 what's often considered striking and unsettling about quantum 24:08 mechanics is that at the beginning of the 20th century people start doing all 24:15 kinds of experiments where unlike in the Newtonian case where we're just taking 24:20 it for granted that yeah there're you know you look at these little dust Moes 24:26 or something like that how they're moving around they themselves presumably consist of billions upon billions of 24:33 these Elementary Point particles which we can't actually see we're sort of taking it for granted that things are 24:38 going to work out in the beginning of the 20th century people fooling around with cathode ray tubes and and stuff 24:46 like that begin to be able to keep track 24:51 of the Motions of individual Elementary particles 24:58 and these particles um um are behaving in ways that are almost 25:08 inconceivably bizarre okay in 25:13 particular people manag to convince themselves by doing lots of experiments 25:19 with these Elementary particles that things like electrons for 25:26 example could be in you you know um it's possible for an electron to be located 25:31 at this point in space and possible for an electron to be located at that point 25:37 in space those are the familiar Newtonian possibilities here or here or 25:42 here or here or here what these experiments at the beginning of the 20th century suggested 25:49 to people and I'm condensing here 30 years or so of wrestling with 25:56 the with the results of these experiments in the beginning of the 20th century there are certain sets of 26:03 experiments so-called interference experiments um double slit experiments 26:10 if you can read about this want to read about this in the literature Neutron interferometry experiments stuff like 26:16 that there's a whole um family of of experiments which 26:23 slowly persuades people that um 26:29 um that apparently there are certain states that 26:34 electrons can be in electrons and neutrons and all elementary particles 26:41 can be in um once again there's a possible state where the electron is at 26:46 Point a there's a possible state where the electron is at point B what people became convinced of is that in addition 26:54 there are possible states of electrons such that the very question is it 27:01 located at Point a or is it located at point B or is it located at neither of 27:07 them fails to make sense okay that um that the question that there are certain 27:15 situations in which the question is the electron in box a or in box b or in 27:22 neither of the boxes is like um is is is is like a 27:32 question of the form um um is the number five Married 27:38 okay or or what is the weight in grams of Catholicism okay or something like 27:45 that um questions that philosophers often refer to as category mistakes okay 27:51 um that there can be situations of a material particle an electron okay where 27:59 asking whether or not it's in box a is somehow like asking what the marital 28:06 status of the number five is or what the weight and grams of Catholicism is okay 28:12 um this strikes people is absolutely bizarre people felt forced to 28:18 conclusions like this because if you tried to tell the story of these 28:23 experiments in a way that used locutions like well at this this point in the story the electron I suppose must have 28:30 been here or at this point in the story the electron must have been there or even if you just insist that at this 28:37 point in the story there must be some place where the electron was because after all it got from here in the 28:43 beginning of the experiment to there at the end of the experiment it must have gone by some particular route either 28:51 through this route or through that route you try to insist on that you try to tell yourself a story about how these 28:59 experiments went okay that's consistent with the results you got you find that 29:05 every particular Claim about which route the electron might have taken somehow collapses into nonsense becomes 29:13 inconsistent with certain of the results of these experiments that you actually did okay so an idea grows 29:21 up um um that it appears to be a feature 29:28 of the way these fundamental particles behave that for every pair of states 29:34 that such a particle could be in that is the state of being located at a and the state of being located at B there's also 29:42 another radically unfamiliar but physically possible state which is 29:47 referred to as the superposition of being located at a and being located at b or the quantum 29:54 mechanical superposition of being located at a or being being located at and being located at B which is which 30:03 which we can we can argue from our experiments is not a case of being 30:08 located at a and not a case of being located at B and not a case of being 30:14 located at both A and B as you often find in the popular literature when they 30:19 try to talk about superposition and that's very bad too and that would reduce the mysteriousness of this way 30:27 below what it actually is what these experiments suggest is that it is wrong 30:33 to say under those circumstances that the electron is located at a and that it's wrong to say that it's located at B 30:40 and that it's wrong to say that it's both at A and B and that it's also wrong 30:45 to say that it is neither at a nor is it at B okay if you think there must always be a 30:53 fact of the matter about where the electron is that exhausts the line iCal 30:58 possibilities okay um um and so people felt 31:04 forced um to acknowledge that what these experiments seem to be screaming at us 31:12 okay is that for any two states that an electron could be in A and B there are 31:18 other physically possible States in in in you know which can't be rightly 31:25 characterized by saying that they're at a can't be rightly characterized by saying it's a b can't be rightly 31:31 characterized by saying it's a both and can't be rightly characterized by saying it's a neither okay and rather you seem 31:41 to be confronted with a situation in which um asking whether the 31:47 electron is at A or B is like asking about the marital status of the number five okay it's just a 31:55 nonsensical question good um

No, this is not weird. The same thing happens in classical mechanics. If you put a ball in a box and shake it up, you do not know where it is. When you open the box, you find it in one position, and not others.

Why is it surprising that electrons behave this way, when classical balls do also?

He goes on to strongly attack Bohr for saying that it does not make sense to talk about the exact location of an election in a box, until you open the box and look at it. Then he praises various alternatives, such as hidden variables and many-worlds.

Bohr was right, and Albert is wrong. The electron is not a particle. If you ask for the exact location of the election, you are basing the question on the faulty premise that the electron is a particle, and it has no answer because it is a meaningless question. As Albert complains, the Physics community accepted Bohr's philosophy about a century ago.

Albert is one of many QM expositors who argue that the textbooks do not make sense so there must be something better. They are just wrong. The textbooks present a perfectly good theory, and all the alternatives have horrible defects.

Sabine Hossenfelder is another one. She just posted a podcast on Can Quantum Physics Explain Consciousness After All? Her answer is No, of course, as she ends up saying Bell's Theorem requires superdeterminism.

She is a free will denier, but see the new paper Decision theory presupposes free will. You have to reject a lot of good science, if you reject free will.

Peebles on Philosophy of Physics

Astrophysicist P. J. E. Peebles writes:

I argue that research in physics operates under an implicit community philosophy, and I offer a definition I think physicists would accept, by and large. I compare this definition to what philosophers, sociologists, and historians of science, with physicists, say we are doing.

He argues that there is an unspoken phylosophy of Physics that most physicists agree with, and they do not necessarily agree with what philosophers say.

Recall Weinberg’s remark that “no one has been able to think of any way to change quantum mechanics in any way that would preserve its successes without leading to logical absurdities.”

I agree with that. People complain about quantum mechanics a lot, but all their alternatives are absurd.

Einstein offered the elegant thought that (in the English translation by Sonja Bargmann 1954)

The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction.

I wrote a whole book on how Einstein ruined Physics with this sort of thinking.

People think that Einstein's greatest accomplishment was discovering relativity in 1905 from universal laws. My book shows that relativity was actually developed by others who worked directly from experimental results.

The above essay is a good summary of mainstream physicist thinking.

Cantor and the Theology of Infinity

Kateřina Trlifajová wrote a new paper on infinity:

Discussions surrounding the nature of the infinite in mathematics have been under way for two millennia. Mathematicians, philosophers, and the- ologians have all taken part. The basic question has been whether the infinite exists only in potential or whether it exists in actuality. Only at the end of the 19th century a set theory was created that works with the actual infinite. Ini- tially, this theory was rejected by other mathematicians. The creator behind the theory, the German mathematician Georg Cantor, felt all the more the need to challenge the long tradition that only recognised potential infinite.

The issue turns surprisingly theological, with St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Pope on the side of Cantor.

Cantor was convinced that the knowledge of infinite numbers had been revealed to him by God, who guided his steps from pure mathematics to an interest in theol- ogy and philosophy so that he could improved a proper understanding of God and nature.

Cantor's papers from 1883 to 1895 were met with skepticism, but by 1897 Mathematicians were on board with his theory of infinities.

Xkcd just had a cartoon about large numbers, explained here.

Weinberg blamed Religion for Scientific Ignorance

Physicist Steve Weinberg is deceased, and said this in a recently released interview:

7:12 expensive uh we waste enormous amounts 7:14 of money on man space flight which have 7:17 has no uh scientific function 7:21 um I worry about that and maybe a more 7:26 important worry is whether or not um 7:30 the forces of uh religious 7:33 zealotry uh which are 7:36 uh so obvious in the Islamic world but 7:40 not entirely absent in the west uh will 7:44 lead to us turning away from science 7:47 because after all the Scientific 7:49 Revolution uhu of course did occur in 7:53 the uh 16th century and 17th century but 7:58 uh there had been a great period of 8:00 scientific Advance before that in 8:02 helenistic times which then came to an 8:05 end uh it was continued for a while in 8:08 the Arab world it disappeared in the 8:10 Christian world and then after the 13th 8:14 century it really uh did not pick up 8:17 again in any real way until the time of 8:20 Galileo uh we may not 8:23 continue with the great 8:26 um great tradition of science uh for 8:29 reasons which are even deeper and more 8:31 frightening than the lack of funding

Weinberg is putting a lot of blame on Christianity here. He praises ancient Greeks because they were pre-Christian, and Galileo because he had a dispute with the Pope.

Other people do say stuff like this, but I do not agree with it.

This "Scientific Revolution" took place in Christian Europe. The scientists were Christians, and acting under Christian sponsorship. Areas dominated by other religions did not make these scientific advances. Is that just a coincidence? I don't think so.

How Michelson-Morley was Crucial for Relativity

Alejandro Cassini, Leonardo Levinas write a new paper:

How the Michelson and Morley experiment was reinterpreted by special relativity

They note how relativity textbooks describe M-M as being crucial for relativity, and discuss whether this is historically accurate. It includes some interesting history, but omits the most important pieces to the puzzle.

Einstein's 1905 paper does not mention M-M. Later on he admitted that M-M was crucial for special relativity, but denied that he paid any attention to it.

FitzGerald, Lorentz, Poincare, and Minkowski all described relativity as a consequence of M-M. This paper does not even mention Poincare or Minkowski. It discusses Einstein a lot.

A paper on the influence of M-M on relativity should primarily be on those who were influenced, not Einstein.

In the years immediately following the M-M experiment, there was no inclination to conclude that the ether was non-existent, nor that the speed of light was constant even though the light source was in motion relative to the ether. Moreover, no one thought that the principle of relativity - the equivalence of all inertial frames of reference for the description of electromagnetic phenomena- would be confirmed. Nor did anyone think the hypothesis that the speed of light was invariant, that is, the same in any inertial frame of reference, would be confirmed.1 What exactly did this experiment confirm or refute?

Not true. In those years, Lorentz and Poincare did say that the speed of light was constant, and Einstein got that postulate from Lorentz. Poincare did say that the principle of relativity was confirmed, and Einstein got that terminology from him.

Lorentz did think that M-M refuted the aether motion theories.

M-M does not actually refute the aether. Belief in the aether is consistent with relativity. Einstein said so himself. M-M just refuted the idea that the Earth had a measurable motion against the aether.

As is well known, FitzGerald in 1889 and independently Lorentz in 1892 proposed a different interpretation. They argued that the experiment refuted the hypothesis that the length of the arms of the instrument remained unchanged when it was in motion relative to the ether, a tacit assumption of the M-M experiment. They then formulated the hypothesis that the length of rigid bodies that move with respect to the ether is not invariant, but rather contracts in the direction of motion

That's right. They saw the M-M as finding that measuring the speed of light did not depend on the frame of reference, and used that to deduce the Lorentz transformation.

It was similar to what Einstein did in 1905, except that Einstein did not use the M-M, but rather what Lorentz had deduced from Maxwell's equations and M-M -- that the speed of light is constant and appears the same in different frames.

At the time Einstein formulated it, it was the only explanation of the M-M experiment that was compatible with all known phenomena about the propagation of light, such as stellar aberration, Fizeau's experiment, and many others.28

No, that was all done by Lorentz in 1895. Lorentz even got a related Nobel Prize in 1902. Einstein did not attempt to explain M-M at all. You might say that Einstein was trying to give a recapitulation of Lorentz's 1895 theory, without mentioning M-M or other experiments.

The contraction hypothesis is usually considered to be purely ad hoc since it was proposed solely to accommodate the result of the M-M experiment in order to save the quiescent ether hypothesis from refutation. This affirmation is debatable and depends on what is understood by the concept of an ad hoc hypothesis.13

Here, "ad hoc" means deduced from M-M or other experiment. A theory is not ad hoc if it abstracts out principles from the experiment. There are some anti-positivist philosophers who consider ad hoc to be a bad thing.

The M-M really was crucial for relativity. Those who discovered the Lorentz transformations and spacetime all said so.

Posulating the Constant Speed of Light

D V Redžić writes in a new paper:

The historical path to special relativity starts from the second postulate introduced by Einstein in 1905 [10]. Immediately after the publication of reference [10],

No, the historical path starts with Maxwell's 1865 theory, and the motion invariance tests of it by Michelson in the 1880s.

A popular interpretation of the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment was that the speed of light was the same for all observers.

Newton, and all physicists before Einstein (including Voigt, Larmor, Lorentz and Poincar´e [15-18]), took it for granted that there was only one ‘time,’ absolute Newtonian time, for all observers in motion with respect to one another. Einstein was bold enough to venture that each inertial observer has her/his own absolute Einsteinian time.

No. Moving objects had they own "local time" in Lorentz's 1895 relativity theory. Poincare accepted this, and believed that motion affects time. Not sure about Voigt and Larmor, but they gave equantions for time changing; what else could they have thought?

It is amazing that someone could write a commentary on on the historical path of relativity, and act as if it all started and ended with Eeinstein's 1905 paper.

Google Quantum Supremacy is Smashed

NewScientist reports:

Google's claim of quantum supremacy has been completely smashed

Google's Sycamore quantum computer was the first to demonstrate quantum supremacy – solving calculations that would be unfeasible on a classical computer – but now ordinary machines have pulled ahead again

In 2019, Google claimed that its Sycamore quantum computer could perform calculations that would take even the world’s most powerful classical supercomputer 10,000 years to complete – but now it seems that a non-quantum computer crunches the numbers several times faster than Google’s machine, and uses less energy doing so.

Quantum computers have the potential to carry out some kinds of calculations vastly more quickly than classical computers, but are still in their infancy. Google announced in 2019 that Sycamore had achieved “quantum supremacy” – the point at which a quantum computer can…

The rest is paywalled, and I haven't read it, but I don't think I need to. Others have said the Google claim was refuted.

I was skeptical in 2019 for the simple reason that Google did not do something that known to be computationally difficult.. It merely generated some random numbers and then claimed that it would be hard for a classical computer to simulate it.

Then some Chinese researchers showed that it was not so hard to simulate it. Meanwhile the Google team moved on to other problems, rather than defend the integrity of their biggest accomplishment.

Without quantum supremacy, the whole field of quantum computing is a sham. No good can come of it.

David Z. Albert Plugs Bohmian Mechanics

New podcast, with a physicist interviewing a philosopher of physics:

Could physics serve as our best guide to metaphysics? What fundamental metaphysics is best motivated by quantum mechanics? And what’s the deal with the age-old feud between philosophers and physicists?

Here to shed light on all these questions and more is none other than David Z. Albert, professor of philosophy and director of the MA program in The Philosophical Foundations of Physics at Columbia University in New York. David is a prominent American philosopher and physicist widely recognized for his contributions to the philosophy of quantum mechanics and the foundations of physics. He has published four popular books and numerous articles on quantum mechanics.

I have some disagreements, but I was especially struck by this comment at the end:

1:19:40 last question, this one comes from my friend Professor Luke Barnes at Western Sydney. Luke. Yeah, he's a great friend of the show. 1:19:47 He's been on multiple times. he has he makes a controversial claim, as if bohmian mechanics have been proposed. First. 1:19:54 No one would have proposed the Copenhagen interpretation. Right. Your thoughts, sir? I think that's absolutely right. 1:19:59 I think, you know, somebody, somebody had discovered about me in mechanics. 1:20:06 And you imagine before then walking into a room and saying, no, I've got a whole new view. 1:20:12 Okay. it's much more elegant. It respects the symmetry between position 1:20:18 space and momentum space, blah, blah, blah. The only little catch is that you have to give up on the idea 1:20:25 that there's a real external world out there. Okay, I think you would have been laughed out of the room, right?

No, this is bizarre. Albert has written a lot about the philosophy of quantum mechanics, but this comment is so foolish that we should disregard everyone he says on the subject.

Bohmian mechanics is weirdly deterministic and nonlocal. While it has its own cult following, it is nearly useless for practical physics. It was invented to make a theoretical point about hidden variables, but not because it is a satisfactor interpretation.

Earlier, Albert said that quantum logics were too confusing, because he doesn't how to reason about it if regular logic is abandoned. I feel similarly about locality. Give it up, and I am not sure what you mean by experiments anymore, because you cannot isolate any physical processes.

Does E=mc^2 Require Relativity?

Physicist Tony Rothman has a new paper arguing that one can get the famous Einstein mass-energy equivalience E = mc² before Einstein's 1905 paper, and without relativity. In particular, it appears in a 1900 Poincare paper.

Many physicists, for instance, are under the impression that ℰ=m⁢c² can be established by employing the four-vector formalism of special relativity. An early draft of Wikipedia’s page on mass-energy equivalence in fact offered exactly such a “derivation.” Four-vectors, however, are defined in order to be consistent with ℰ=m⁢c²; consequently any argument based on them to prove the relationship is circular. ...

A universal, assumption-free proof of ℰ=m⁢c² is no more attainable than a universal proof of conservation of energy or momentum, and the very idea that all physics can be derived from a master Lagrangian without experimental input must be doomed to failure. For that reason, all demonstrations of mass-energy equivalence rely on specific assumptions and approximations. The closest thing that exists to a general proof of ℰ=m⁢c² is the Laue-Klein theorem [16, 17, 18] of 1911 and 1918, which in essence states that if ℰ=m⁢c² holds for a point mass, then it also holds for an extended closed system, under specified boundary conditions. If radiation can escape to infinity, for example, the boundary conditions are evaded.

Einstein was aware of the inadequacies of his 1905 article and attempted to correct them in six further papers, but as Ohanian argues [19], none is free of errors and inconsistencies. Physicists who have actually read the 1905 paper know that the dubious step is the final one, in which Einstein relies on the Newtonian value for the kinetic energy. ...

Can one arrive at ℰ=m⁢c² in a consistent and plausible manner using only Galilean mechanics and “perhaps Maxwellian” electrodynamics?

Okay, but Maxwellian electrodynamics is a fully relativistic theory, if interpreted correctly. The whole theory of special relativity is mostly a recognition of that fact.

Another Misreading of Bell's Theorem

There is a steady stream of crackpot papers that misrepresent Bell's Theorem. The Wikipedia description is adequate:

Bell's theorem is a term encompassing a number of closely related results in physics, all of which determine that quantum mechanics is incompatible with local hidden-variable theories, given some basic assumptions about the nature of measurement.

It does not say anything about reality, or quantum mechanics, except that we cannot replace QM with a local hidden variable theory.

Here is a new paper that gets it wrong:

Allori, Valia (2024) “Hidden Variables and Bell’s Theorem: Local or Not?”. [Preprint] ...

Equation (2) might misleadingly suggest that Bell’s reasoning only applies to hidden variable theories. This is not the case, as discussed later: Bell has shown that all quantum theories, not just hidden variable ones, must be nonlocal. ...

To summarize the result of the previous section, Bell’s theorem shows that, assuming locality, the perfect (anti)correlations can only be explained by non-contextual hidden variables; however, non-contextual hidden variable theories have been empirically falsified by the violation of Bell’s inequality, when seen as a constrain that such theories need to obey to. Therefore, they only other option to explain the perfect (anti)correlations is to assume that there are nonlocal interactions. ...

Some have argued that Bell’s nonlocality result is unacceptable and have tried to get around it. One possibility which has recently received attention is to reject a hidden assumption called statistical independence. ...

Let’s grant that Bell’s theorem has proven that reality is nonlocal. One theory which respects this theorem is the pilot-wave theory, a hidden variable theory which is explicitly nonlocal. ...

It has been argued that retaining locality would be a desideratum for making quantum mechanics and relativity compatible. However, since locality has to come together with superdeterminism, it is not going to help with much at all.

No. Bell's reasoning does only apply to hidden variable theories. It only gives reasons to accept QM, and reject Bohm's theory and superdeterminism.

The main point of this paper is to argue that superdeterminism is no better than Bohm's theory. As opposed to people like Sabine Hossenfelder who argue for superdeterminism.

A lot of people, like Sean M. Carroll, were hoping that the 2022 Nobel Prize would endorse Bell nonlocality. But it pointedly did not.

The Wikipedia article occasionally has someone inserting text that Bell figured out how to get rid of the hidden variable hypothesis, and apply the theorem to all theories. But that is nonsense, of course.

New video: The 'spooky' side of quantum physics | Tim Maudlin on astonishment and fear in #quantumphysics.

Maudlin admits at 10:30 that you get a similarly spooky and incomplete theory if you tear a dollar bill in two, and send the halves to Alice and Bob. When Alice opens the envelope, she immediately knows what Bob got.

So the entanglement itself is not spooky or surprising. The only surprising part is that QM cannot be completed with local hidden variables. Maybe Maudlin explains that later. Reply