Physics Bloggers go Nuts about Israel

Scott Aaronson and Peter Woit are debating Zionism against.

Your blog post is completely insane. I tried to tell you earlier this year that you should be seeking professional help about this, and things have now gotten much worse.

I will let you decide for yourself who is insane.

The politics of Zionism have definitely shifted. I will just note that Gaza could put an end to the war any any time by surrendering. But no, they are still holding hostages and killing Israelis.

Update: Woit's parting shot:

The responsibility for the war belongs partly with Hamas. The responsibility for the genocide belongs squarely with the Israeli government.

No, it is not a genocide, as the population of Gaza has not changed much. The words genocide and antisemitic are not helpful. The argument is that Israel is pursuing its enemies more aggressively than is necessary. I do not know whether that is true.

I do not know why an American would even care, unless it is a proxy for opinions about Jewish influence in world affairs. Some want that influence increased, and some want it decreased.

Update: Their debate rages on, with this image:

Aaronson has closed comments, while Woit's comments are heavily "moderated". Woit has allowed a couple of critical comments by Aaronson and others. There is no serious discussion of whether the Gaza War is really a genocide, except for someone saying that the population has increased. Woit has deleted most of the adverse comments.

Both Aaronson and Woit are hard-core Trump-haters. They both has Trump Derangement Syndrome badly enough that all their political views are questions.

Now that Zionism has overtaken Aaronson's political views, I wonder if he will flip on Trump, as Trump firmly supports Israel defending itself, and also defending against antisemitism in the USA. I doubt it.

Update: A commenter Amanda S. says:

For me, the issue is simple: an innocent child—any child, anywhere, of any faith or ethnicity—is an infinitely valuable and precious being.

If she really believes this, then she probably opposes any taking any risk in the presence of a child. I don't know how that would work. You can only be a pacifist if you avoid any real-world decisions.

I understand those who think that Israel is being too harsh on Gaza. I might even agree with it, if I knew more about it. But even if that is true, it is not clear what Israel should be doing, or what its enemies are demanding. Some of them are demanding that Israel be destroyed as a Jewish state. I have read Woit's posts, and it is not clear where he stands.

Here is praise for Aaronson's earlier position:

I want the Palestinians to have a state, comprising the West Bank and Gaza, with a capital in East Jerusalem. I want Israel to uproot all West Bank settlements that prevent such a state. I want this to happen the instant there arises a Palestinian leadership genuinely committed to peace—one that embraces liberal values and rejects martyr values, in everything from textbooks to street names.

And I want more. I want the new Palestinian state to be as prosperous and free and educated as modern Germany and Japan are. I want it to embrace women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights and the rest of the modern package, so that “Queers for Palestine” would no longer be a sick joke. I want the new Palestine to be as intertwined with Israel, culturally and economically, as the US and Canada are.

Better yet, get all the Jews and Moslems to convert to Christianity, and then they will figure out how to live in peace.

Update: One conclusion I draw from this is to disregard people who use terms like antisemitism, genocide, racism, colonialist, fascist, racism, etc. These have all become meaningless epithets, with special interest groups ever expanding and distorting their meanings. If someone has a legitimate argument, then he can use facts and principles, not name-calling.

Update: After declaring Zionism his most important issue, Aaronson explains that the one more important issue is hating Trump.

The Folly of P-hacking

This is old news, but a distinguished Cornell social science professor posted this on his blog:

A PhD student from a Turkish university called to interview to be a visiting scholar for 6 months. Her dissertation was on a topic that was only indirectly related to our Lab's mission, but she really wanted to come and we had the room, so I said "Yes."

When she arrived, I gave her a data set of a self-funded, failed study which had null results (it was a one month study in an all-you-can-eat Italian restaurant buffet where we had charged some people ½ as much as others). I said, "This cost us a lot of time and our own money to collect. There's got to be something here we can salvage because it's a cool (rich & unique) data set." I had three ideas for potential Plan B, C, & D directions (since Plan A had failed). I told her what the analyses should be and what the tables should look like. I then asked her if she wanted to do them.

Every day she came back with puzzling new results, and every day we would scratch our heads, ask "Why," and come up with another way to reanalyze the data with yet another set of plausible hypotheses. Eventually we started discovering solutions that held up regardless of how we pressure-tested them. I outlined the first paper, and she wrote it up, and every day for a month I told her how to rewrite it and she did. This happened with a second paper, and then a third paper (which was one that was based on her own discovery while digging through the data).

At about this same time, I had a second data set that I thought was really cool that I had offered up to one of my paid post-docs (again, the woman from Turkey was an unpaid visitor). In the same way this same post-doc had originally declined to analyze the buffet data because they weren't sure where it would be published, they also declined this second data set. They said it would have been a "side project" for them they didn't have the personal time to do it. Boundaries. I get it.

He got a lot of negative responses, such as:

This is a great piece that perfectly sums up the perverse incentives that create bad science. I'd eat my hat if any of those findings could be reproduced in preregistered replication studies. The quality of the literature takes another hit, but at least your lab got 5 papers out.

and:

This may sound snarky, but I am genuinely curious. How many of your other 500 publications resulted from similar data fishing expeditions?

You may be unfamiliar with the heightened risk of false positives when conducting multiple comparisons. I highly recommend Daniel Lakens' Coursera course, "Improving Your Statistical Inferences": https://www.coursera.org/learn/statistical-inferences

His use of bad statistics eventually did him in, and he had to resign from Cornell.

The sad part is that he was probably following practices that were considered acceptable in the field 20 years ago, and did not know that they were statistically bogus. Few scientists are trained in statistics.

A lot of people think that the whole point of learning fancy statistical tests is to extract conclusions from what seems like random data. Actually that rarely happens. If you have a scientifically valid result, it is almost always possible to find a way to show it in a graph, without using any fancy statistics.

I just post this as an example of how bad science gets done. He was succeeding in academia, and publishing in peer-reviewed journals. His peers were not statisticians either. Entire fields can be bogus, without papers getting rejected.

Another famous example is the rat dck paper. People complained about the hilarious AI-generated figures. I do not know whether the science was valid.

It is thought that the overpubliblication of statistically bogus results was only discovered in 2010 or so, but here is a 1990 paper that spells out the problem pretty clearly.

Keating on Quantum Reality

Dr Brian Keating is a competent physicist with 320k Youtube subscribers, but he another Physics popularizer misleading us about quantum mechanics. In a new interview:

1:01 Quantum mechanics forces us to abandon one of the three fundamental beliefs about reality. Either quantum mechanics is incomplete, or 1:08 particles can instantaneously affect each other across the universe, or physical objects don't exist when we're not looking at them. 1:17 There is no fourth option. Decades later, physicist John Bell proved Einstein correct 1:22 with mathematical precision. Bell's theorem show that quantum mechanics violates locality, meaning reality either breaks 1:30 the speed of light limit or splits into parallel universes. Every time a quantum measurement occurs.

No, this is wrong. QM does not violate locality, and does not split into multiple worlds.

32:06 if you enjoyed exploring how our most successful theory might be fundamentally incomplete, 32:11 you should definitely check out my episode With cosmologist Sean Carroll, where we dive deep into the many worlds interpretation 32:18 and whether every quantum measurement literally splits reality into two parallel universes.

There is some truth to the statement that QM is incomplete in the sense that it does not describe everything you might want to be described. Often this is just a way of saying QM is not a classical mechanical theory.

It is fine if Keating and his guest want to push their favorite interpretations of QM, but they should be accurately describing mainstream Physics. Bell's theorem only shows that QM differs from local classsical theories of hidden variables. That's all. Nothing about whether QM itself is local, or splits worlds, or anything like that.

Keating also has a new interview of Sabine Hossenfelder.

Does free will exist? It's a question that's haunted philosophers for centuries. But physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has a provocative answer that might just disturb you. She says free will doesn't exist.

Everything is determined by the laws of physics. But here's the paradox that's fascinated me. I've talked to Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, Robert Sapolsky, all brilliant minds who agree that free will is an illusion. Yet, when I asked them if they've ever encountered someone who acts like they don't have free will, they all said no. So how can this be?

How can we all be determined by physics, yet live as if we're making genuine choices? This isn't some abstract philosophical exercise, no. Sabine's insight has real implications for artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and the future of consciousness itself.

She explains why AI may already have the same kind of agency that we do, and why quantum computers could reveal that we fundamentally misunderstand the nature of reality.

She is a super-determinist, so she thinks free will is just an illusion. It is funny how these intellectuals have claim to have beliefs that are opposite to how they live their lives.

She ends with:

I've I've uh returned to working on a 1:11:16 paper about the foundations of uh quantum mechanics because I feel like this is like my life's work and I need 1:11:22 to finish it and I need to get it out before I die.

I am confident that this paper will be wrong.

Journal Nature Calls for Science Decolonization

Evolutionary biology professor Jerry Coyne writes:

The journal Nature calls for “decolonization” of modern science

That Nature published this long comment, written by eight indigenous authors from five countries, is a sure sign of its surrender to “progressive” views that aim to change science from an endeavor finding truth about nature to an endeavor that’s a lever for social justice. Surprisingly, though, Nature allowed the authors to use the “progressive” term of “decolonization,” arguing explicitly that the science is the result of colonization of knowledge by white men from the Global North — a situation that must be recitified, pronto.

The authors give eight ways to rectify the “colonization”, all of them involving sacrificing merit for ethnicity, replacing modern science with “other ways of knowing,” and demanding both professional, monetary, and territorial reparations, even from those who never oppressed anybody.

This is just an opinion, but where is the contrary opinion?

The article is filled with racist and false statemeents like:

Dominant science (sometimes referred to as Western science) is rooted in colonization, racism and white supremacy: it has been an active participant in the assimilation, marginalization and genocide of Indigenous people1,2. Black and Indigenous people have been exploited repeatedly by dominant science for monetary and educational gain3, and many institutions were funded by money acquired after stealing Indigenous lands.

No, they have been huge beneficiaries of Western science. And most of them are not really capable of participating.

Ultimately they want Whites to supply better funding to non-white scholars.

The article keeps referring to Aotearoa, which is some sort of anti-colonialist name for New Zealand. They complain that they need to write in English, in order for anyone to read their papers.

They obviously have science envy. They come from cultures and races that have never accomplished anything, and they wonder why their bogus voodoo science is not taken seriously.

A comment:

You could just replace “indigenous” with “religious” and the arguments would be the same. After all, it was mainly white males who created the Enlightenment and destroyed religion’s control over what was considered true about the natural world.

No, this is also nutty. Those White males were Christians, and Christians never had much control over what was considered true about the natural world.

The String Theory of Security

Peter Gutmann has written a lot of excellent cryptograpy software, and is not at all worried that quantum computers will obsolete it, as you can see from his talk slides and paper.

Quantum cryptanalysis is the string theory of security

• String theory has never generated a single testable prediction

• Quantum cryptanalysis has never factored a single non-sleight- of-hand number

He argues that even a 1024-bit RSA key, which is considered obsolete, is safe in practice. A conventional supercomputer could crack it in a year, but no one would bother.

Even the Data Encryption Standard is not as bad as most people think. It was quickly realized that the key space could be expanded, with DES3 or DESX, and these are still secure for nearly all purposes.

And there has been essentially no progress in quantum computer factoring. Supposedly they can factor 15 and 21, but the quantum computers can only do one small step in these factorizations.

Sabine Explains Quantum Non-reality

I sometimes defend Dr. Bee, but she sometimes disapppoints me, such as this:

The discovery of quantum mechanics has fundamentally changed not just the field of physics but also our understanding of what reality is. Let’s take a look at just what makes quantum physics so weird and why it is so hard to reconcile with our perception of physical reality.

Quantum mechanics is mysterious, but most of her examples could be applied to classical mechanics.

First she says that electrons and photons exhibit wave-like behavior that is hard to understand if they are just particles.

The same is true classically. Waves show interference, and that is hard to understand if they are just particles.

She says that if the position of a particle is known only to be a region in space, then that region of uncertainty grows over time. Yes, such regions grow classically also.

She says we do not see cat-states, where a cat is half dead and alive. But we do see coin tosses that are half heads and half tails, until you look. The quantum description of cats is not much different from the classical one.

Finally she says wave functions are not directly observable. Classical probabilities are not either.

She might have mentioned Heisenberg uncertainty, but classical waves exhibit something similar.

I would say that what really makes QM different is that observations are eigenvalues of non-commuting operators.

The stereotypical example is a particle that 3:49 is in several places at once, until you look and measure its position. 3:54 Then it’s suddenly in one place. Think again of that particle that came from the supernova and 4:01 spread out to a billion light years. How does this suddenly fit into a detector? 4:07 Physicists typically resolve this problem the way that Bohr approached it by saying 4:12 that it makes no sense to ask where the particle “really” was before you measured it.

The classical picture is similar, except that we dare to say that the unmeasured particle has a position. Quantum mechanics is different in that a particle is not really a particle. It is some sort of wave that gets observed as a particle.

Similar points are discussed in another video:

The Quantum Frontier with Brian Greene and John Preskill

Renowned Caltech physicist John Preskill joins Brian Greene for an in-depth discussion of quantum mechanics, focusing on where we are and where we're headed with quantum computing.

At 18:18, Preskill reveals that he subscribes to Everett many-worlds, saying it is the "simplest" interpretation. Supposedly it solves the measurement problem, but he admits that it does not explain why we only see one outcome to experiemnts. So it doesn't really solve the measurement problem. He says he is comfortable with Everett being the true reality, so he accepts it until experiments prove otherwise.

They agree on the big three startling ideas of QM: the world allows (1) probability; (2) superposition; and (3) entanglement.

randomness unpredictability is an 4:09 essential feature of quantum mechanics. So when we speak of probability, we mean 4:14 something different in the context of quantum mechanics than we do when we talk about probability in everyday life. 4:21 Usually we talk about probability like the probability that it's going to rain tomorrow in the sense that we're 4:28 ignorant of some of the features of the system that we're trying to predict. 4:34 Quantum mechanics is different because there is intrinsic randomness. Even if you have a complete description of a 4:41 physical system, you can't predict what you're going to see when you observe the system. That's really something new in 4:47 physics.

No, we don't know that QM really has intrinsic randomness, or even if any such thing exists.

I am surprised that he says this, when probability and randomness pervades all of science, except that he subscribes to many-worlds, where they do not exist.

He says we could have quantum computers in 20 years.

It seems to me that if QM is so strange, then the leading popularizers could explain what is strange about it.

Carroll is Upset that Copenhagen is Popular

Physicist turned philosopher Sean M. Carroll posted his monthly AMA, and leads off complaining about a poll favoring Copenhagen, with few following his favorite, many-worlds.

In the case of interpretations or foundations of quantum mechanics, the thing to complain 3:13 about is that we're not trying to get the answer.

Physicists figured it out 95 years ago, he just does not want to admit it.

the other depressing thing is that the 5:07 people, who are so convinced in like the Copenhagen interpretation which obviously is hilariously not even 5:13 defined very well so it absolutely shouldn't even be included among the respectable interpretations much less 5:20 the leading one, are just not educated about what the alternatives are.

they're 5:25 sort of proudly ignorant of what the possibilities for thinking about the foundations of quantum theory are and 5:32 they don't want to know anymore. And I think that's also something that the physics community as a whole should be 5:39 embarrassed about.

This is followed by a pitch for money.

No, textbook quantum mechanics is not something to be embarrassed about.

He is saying that essentially every physicist you have ever heard of is blindly accepting a nonsensical theory, and is ignorant of the alternatives.

And his chief alternative is many-worlds theory!

Professor Dave blasts Sabine for criticizing some eminent physicists, but Carroll is calling them all ignorant. No, they are not ignorant. They all know that many-worlds is a crackpot theory. The big majority of them do, anyway.

Professor Dave is Back on the Warpath

Sabine Hossenfelder posted The 10 Biggest Physics Paradoxes and Problems. It is a reasonable list.

Professor Dave Explains posted a 3.5 hour video on Further Exposing Sabine Hossenfelder With Six Physicists:

At this point, everyone who watches my content is well aware that Sabine is a disgusting fraud peddling propaganda for fascist oligarchs. But there are some who absolutely refuse to watch a single second of me exposing her simply because I'm not a physicist. Well that's an easy fix. Let's talk to some physicists and see what they have to say about her, shall we?

Special thanks to Christian Ferko, Sam Gregson, Michael Peskin, Daniel Whiteson, Ivano Basile, and Nick Warner for their phenomenal commentary.

If you ask a string theory professor about the merits of string theory, of course he will promote it.

Last week he also posted Avi Loeb is a Fraud Now:

Avi Loeb is a Harvard astronomer turned pseudoscience-peddling fraud. Since 2017 he's been spewing horseshit about how everything is aliens when it definitely isn't, just to sell a bunch of books to credulous laypeople. Predictably, when the scientific community politely pushes back on his bullshit, he throws a toddler tantrum. I wonder what will happen if someone exposes him in a not so polite manner? Let's find out.

So Dave is a non-physicist criticizing a Harvard professor with fringe ideas. Okay, but what's all the hostility to Sabine doing something similar?

I criticize some of these peoplee also, so nothing wrong with criticism.

Peskin gets asks whether theoretical physics has made progress in the last 70 years. He points to big progress in the 1960s and 70s, and says that current work could take centuries.

The reality is that theoretical physics has made very little progress since the 1970s. Hugely expensive projects get sold based on past glory, and they are unlikely to deliver much.

And she says that there's no precedent 1:24:24 for this uh kind of situation in physics. But actually there's a very 1:24:30 interesting precedent which goes back to the 16th century in Copernicus. 1:24:35 So in the 16th century it was very important to predict the motion of the planets the moon uh because astrology 1:24:44 was very important to all of the political figures at that time. Uh that was the way to predict the future. To 1:24:50 predict the future you had to know what the stars were telling you.

And over 1:24:55 thousands of years uh from the time of Talamy in the uh um Alexandrian period 1:25:03 uh people had been studying the cosmos and derived a quantitative theory of the 1:25:09 motion of planets and it worked extremely well. You could predict how um 1:25:15 visible planets uh like Jupiter and Saturn, Venus would move across the sky. 1:25:22 The problem with this theory was that it actually made no sense. It had odd 1:25:28 elements to it. For example, if you watch Mars in the sky, you'll see that 1:25:34 at certain points in its orbit, it has what's called a retrograde motion. It goes it turns around and goes backwards 1:25:40 for a while and then it goes forwards again. And this was explained by adding 1:25:46 things to uh the tameic theory. Um things called epicycles where you have 1:25:52 motion. Talmatic theory was based on everything going around the earth but then you would add little circles and uh 1:26:01 um extra pieces to the orbit in order to fit the data. Mhm.

And this is more or less what we have 1:26:07 today with the standard model. It gives us a good quantitative understanding of 1:26:13 the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interaction. But it's built on a foundation of sand.

He does not like Sabine because she is negative about building new particle colliders.

If he has to cite Copernicus, you know his argument is weak.

I wonder about the politics of this. Dave is a Woke Leftist, and he has somehow decided that his targets are right-wingers. Sean M. Carroll also has fringe ideas, but he is a fellow leftist and gets a free pass.