Latest Silly Paper on Superdeterminism

Someone on Aaronson's blog attacked me for not wanting to read papers on superdeterminism. Here is the latest such paper, by Waegell, Mordecai and McQueen, Kelvin J., so you can see for yourself what garbage it is.

Bell’s theorem demonstrates that any physical theory that is consistent with the predictions of quantum mechanics, and which satisfies some apparently innocuous assumptions, must violate the principle of local causality.

Those innocuous assumptions include being a classical theory, so quantum mechanics can still satisfy local causality and the Bell test experiments. The whole subject is only interesting to those who want to deny QM.

What then are we to make of the scientific status of superdeterminism? Should we deem it unscientific or pseudo-scientific? ...

Superdeterminism, presently, is therefore neither scientific nor unscientific, it is better thought of as being in a pre-scientific stage, where we are still coming to grips with what such mod- els require, and we are only just beginning to propose simple toy models

This is like what Peter Woit calls Not even wrong. Not only is there no way to test it, there is no way to even say whether the theory can be made scientific or not.

The Flat Earth people say that a round Earth violates their intuitions, so they look for evidence for a Flat Earth. The superdeterminism folks are much worse. They say that QM violates their intuitions, but make no attempt to find evidence against QM. Instead they theorize that a primordial conspiracy is tricking us into thinking the evidence favors QM.

No, the superdeterminism papers are not worth reading.

Another Galina Weinstein Rebuttal

Einstein scholars have been giving bogus arguments for decades to prop up his reputation for relativity. One of the worst offenders is Galina Weinstein. I have criticized her many times, most recently here.

Now Jean-Marc Ginoux has written a rebuttal to her criticism of his Poincare book.

Unfortunately, Weinstein’s review of my book contains a number of mistakes, falsehoods and misleading criticisms that I would like to point out here. To this aim, I will follow the structure of Weinstein’s paper and show section by section all the erroneous historical facts she has reported.

Weinstein accepts Einstein's lies:

Here, the conflict of interest is obvious since the only witness on which these claims are based is Einstein himself. So, we must believe him according to Galina Weinstein because Einstein necessarily always tells the truth. This is unfortunately not the case and the biographies (see Albert Einstein Demystified, Ginoux [10]) I wrote on Einstein demonstrate this. Indeed, Einstein, like many others, lied to his wife, his children and also to his colleagues. So, why should we believe what he says about this article? Sorry but this is clearly not enough.

The takedown is brutal. I mainly argued that Weinstein's biggest arguments were demonstrably false. Ginoux details her minor claims, and finds most of them to be false also.

Most historians do credit Einstein for special relativity, and I wonder how they get away with it. Their arguments are fallacious and they ignore the hard evidence. Most of what they say is just nonsense. She is a professor at an Israel university, so maybe she never hears any Einstein criticism. She relies on Einstein historian John Stachel, who was well-trained in Communist doubletalk.

It is very surprising to observe for decades how some historians of science are able not to reconstruct but really to rewrite the development of the theory of special relativity by inventing imaginary facts or by interpreting real facts in a incredible manner. I think that the paper of Galina Weinstein is one of the best examples of what can be done in this case and it should be used to learn how to recognize fake news. ...

The third type of argument is more dangerous but very classical: "the falsehoods". As an example, she explains that in his contribution entitled "La mesure du temps" Poincaré [22] already used the concept of luminiferous ether although even the expression does not appear in this paper as it is easy to verify. ...

Here appears a new kind of argument: "same but different". Poincaré and Einstein’s results seem to be the same but they are different. Why? This is not crystal clear.

The same-but-different argument is a real head-scratcher. At best it would only show that Einstein had an improved interpretation of the previously published Lorentz-Poincare theory. But the Einstein fans would never be happy only crediting him for that.

As an example, she quotes Stachel about Einstein:

the ether he reintroduced differed fundamentally from the ether he had banished [Sta-01].

If that is their story, they should stop saying Einstein abolished the aether, and instead say he had some different subtle philosophical interpretation of it.

It is very regrettable that some historians of science are capable of using such methods to defend an indefensible point of view which does not stand up to analysis of the facts. Let us recall to them Poincaré’s words:

Thinking must never submit itself, neither to a dogma, nor to a party, nor to a passion, nor to an interest, nor to a preconceived idea, nor to whatever it may be, if not to facts themselves, because, for it, to submit would be to cease to be [27].

I wonder if Weinstein will respond to these criticisms. She has aggressively attacked other scholars who did not adequately credit Einstein. Here she stands accused of "a complete misunderstanding of the theory of special relativity". as well as misrepresenting the original sources.

In my view, the different presentations of special relativity are not all the same. Einstein's is more or less the same as Lorentz's, and Minkowski's is essentially the same as Poincare's. The Poincare-Minkowski version became the canonical one, after about 1910.

Update: The Ginoux rebuttal is also posted here.

Quantum Theory was not a Paradigm Shift

A philosopher of science says:

I mean in Kuhn's terms of course quantum 48:20 theory is a paradigm shift. i mean no one would dispute that but A paradigm shift 48:25 from what? ...

quantum mechanics is certainly a paradigm shift from Newton from 49:17 classical mechanics and and from classical electromagnetic theory, Maxwell 49:22 for sure, nobody's going to dispute that.

Yes, I dispute that. Prof. Paradigm Shift himself wrote a book on the history of quantum mechanics, and the book did not call it a paradigm shift.

In the 1960s Kuhn’s historical work turned toward the early history of quantum theory, culminating in his book Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity. ... Many readers were surprised not to find mention of paradigms or incommensurability.

A paradigm shift is when an old theory turns into a new theory with a new point of view, even though the new theory is not better in any measurable way. This notion of incommensurability is central to Kuhn's whole philosophy. His main example was the 1543 Copernicus book about the revolution of the Earth around the Sun. The ideas eventually became accepted, in spite of the lack of measurable advantages.

Scientists like brag about a paradigm shift when they have no measurable results to brag about.

If this sounds kooky, it is, but it is the most widely praised philosophy of science in the last century.

So I try to use the term accurately. A paradigm shift is not a scientific advance. Kuhn called that normal science. A paradigm shift has no measurable or objective advantages.

That is why the philosophy became popular. Some people, such as leftist soft scientists, like to deny objective knowledge, so they loved Kuhn's philosophy.

One could say that special relativity was a paradigm shift from Maxwell electrodynamics. Relativity was a reinterpretation of Maxwell as a relativistic theory, making all the same predictions for electromagnetic phenomena. There are Tests of special relativity, but they all require some interpretation, just like tests of the Earth's motion. The Michelson-Morley experiment tested both the Earth's motion and special relativity, but nothing happened, so it took a lot of interpretation to see what theories it supported.

This raises a paradox that I have not seen addressed. Maxwell's equations are covariant under Lorentz transformations, so the theory is fully relativistic. There are only four fundamental forces, and most ordinary phenomena are purely electromagnetic. That means that they are explainable with the Maxwell theory without relativity. So how would any experiment test and confirm special relativity?

Special relativity is considered to be experimentally confirmed, so this is a paradox.

Michelson-Morley can be explained with just the Maxwell theory. Other experiments involving time and mass are trickier. Relativity redefines how clocks are synchronized, so time is measured differently under relativity. Experiments with timings require relativity to get the times right.

There must be physics literature detailing this issue, but I do not know it.

New Ginoux Book credits Poincare for Relativity

The Einstein scholars cannot tolerate anyone but Einstein getting credit for relativity, and now Galina Weinstein has just posted:

Jean-Marc Ginoux's recent book, "Poincaré, Einstein and the Discovery of Special Relativity: An End to the Controversy" (2024), seeks to close the debate over the respective roles of Poincaré and Einstein. Yet what is presented as an "end" may instead invite a more careful analysis of how similar equations can conceal divergent conceptions. The aim here is not to rehearse priority disputes but to show how Einstein's ether-free, principle-based kinematics marked out a path that, unlike its contemporaries, became the canonical form of special relativity.

The book abstract:

1905 is probably the best-known year in physics, since it was the year of the discovery of the special theory of relativity. For decades, historiography has told us that Albert Einstein, then a patent examiner in Bern, succeeded in developing this theory on his own, overcoming all the difficulties that the greatest scientists of his time had not been able to solve. However, some have pointed out that, before Einstein’s first publication in this field, the French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré had obtained the same results, which he had published several months before Einstein. Yet today, this theory is known as Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Thus, considering the indisputable anteriority of Poincaré’s contributions, there is only one real question that needs to be answered: Why didn’t Poincaré claim the authorship of special theory of relativity? After recapping on the ideas and concepts of the special theory of relativity in a manner accessibleto non-specialists and recalling the historical context of the discovery of this theory, we will answer this question and thus put finally an end to this long-running controversy.

He wrote this rebuttal, also here, to a negative review.

The book points out that Poincare had the entire theory of special relativity, with all the equations and physical consequences, in 1905, with a short summary, a long paper, and private letters to Lorentz. These were finished and submitted long before Einstein submitted his famous 1905 paper. The summary was even published and in a university library available to Einstein, while he was writing that famous paper.

Most of this is well-known, as Whittaker's 1951 book said that Lorentz and Poincare had the whole theory before Einstein. Einstein was shown the book while he was still alive, and he had no rebuttal. His friend Max Born tried for three years to persuade Whittaker of Einstein's originality, but ultimately decided that Whittaker was right. Wikipedia says the book was well-received, but no one wanted to cite it out of fear of the Einstein controversy.

Weinstein cannot deny any of these facts, but she concocts goofy arguments on why Einstein should be credited anyway. She cites his 1955 denials that he knew about important works by Lorentz and Poincare, but admits that there is strong evidence that he relied on some of them.

She attacks Poincare:

And yet, a few years later, in his 1912 London lecture, he was speaking the idiom of Minkowski space and edging toward Einstein’s own perspective.

In his London lecture of May 1912, Poincaré spoke of a “révolution en physique.” No ether was invoked. Instead, he described how a sphere for one observer becomes an ellipsoid for another, how simultaneity dissolves once observers move with respect to each other, and how time itself interlaces with space as a fourth dimension — mathematically rotated by Lorentz transformations. One even hears the unmistakable echo of Minkowski in his remark that the fourth coordinate is best taken as t√−1. Finally, he underlined that in this nouvelle mécanique, causal influence can propagate no faster than light, so that certain pairs of events can stand in no relation of cause and effect at all [Poi12].

Read in isolation, the passage might almost pass for a lecture by Einstein himself — save for the French accent and the courtesy of quotation marks. By then, however, Einstein had already made simultaneity operational, abandoned the ether, and embraced Minkowski’s geometry. The irony is hard to miss: Ginoux asks why Poincaré never claimed authorship of relativity [Gin], yet Poincaré’s own words, in the last public address of his life, sound less like a claimant and more like a convert. The revolution, it seems, was already underway — only the naming rights remained unspoken.

No, using t√-1 as the fourth coordinate was invented by Poincare and described explicitly on p.168 of his long 1905 paper. Minkowski first used it in his 1907 paper, and he cites Poincare. Poincare was giving his own 1905 perspective, and not edging towards Einstein's perspective.

It is baffling how Weinstein could make a mistake like this. She has spent most of her career writing about 20 papers and 3 books crediting Einstein over Lorentz and Poincare for relativity, and she attacks Poincare for copying Minkowski for an idea that was plainly original to Poincare and copied by Minkowski. Einstein resisted Minkowski's approach for years and never credited Poincare.

Her papers mostly consist of burying the reader with technical details from original documents, so he will accept her pro-Einstein opinions as authoritative.

As you can see here, the idea of using imaginary time as the fourth spacetime coordinate was invented by Poincare, copied by Minkowski two years later, and reluctantly accepted by Einstein years after that, and she thinks that Poincare was just trying to sound like Einstein!

The book addresses the question of why there was not more of a public priority dispute between Lorentz, Poincare, and Einstein. Poincare generously credited Lorentz, and explained how their theories differed. Lorentz credited Einstein for some insights, but argued that Einstein mainly just postulated what Lorentz and Poincare proved. Einstein almost never credited anyone for anything, and could never explain how his theory was any different or better than those of Lorentz and Poincare.

Poincare did recommend Lorentz for a Nobel Prize for his 1895 invention of relativistic time. Lorentz did get the prize in 1902, but the citation only mentioned electrodynamics and not his use of time specifically. According to the book, and Weinstein, Poincare did write, in support of himself being nominated for a Nobel Prize:

I have published an article in Rendiconti in which I explain the theory of Lorentz on the Dynamics of the Electron and in which I believe I have succeeded in removing the last difficulties and giving it perfect coherence.

This was the 9th of 13 scientific accomplishments, being considered for the prize. So he did claim credit for perfecting special relativity, if a Nobel Prize were given for it. If he perfected it before Einstein and Minkowski wrote anything on the subject, then I take this as a clear priority claim.

Ginoux and Weinstein are puzzled by these two questions: (1) Why didn't Poincare publicly claim credit for relativity; and (2) Why is it that, when Poincare gave a dozen or so public lectures about relativity, he generously credited Lorentz and those coming before him, but never mentioned Einstein, Minkowski, and those who came after? And why did he teach his own version of relativity, rather than that of Einstein or Minkowski?

These questions answer themselves. Poincare publicly lectured on relativity as his theory, derived from Lorentz, and he got no part of his theory from Einstein and Minkowski. Not mentioning the plagiarists was the gentleman-scholar thing to do. There was no need to get into any arguments, as Poincare published it all in widely read journals and books. The proof was there for anyone who bothers to look.

She and the above reviewer argue that Poincare should not be credited with a new theory because he only claimed to be perfecting Lorentz's theory, while Einstein was boldly not crediting Lorentz or Poincare. This is exactly backwards. Poincare credits Lorentz and then boldly claims a new theory which is different in the way that Copernicus was different from Ptolemy. See this page of his 1905 long paper. By contrast, Einstein does not explain how his theory is any different from Lorentz's 1895 theory, as improved in 1904. Einstein derives it from postulates instead of experiments, but the resulting theory is the same, and others called it Lorentz-Einstein theory.  So it was Poincare who boldly claimed a new theory, not Einstein.

Her most outrageous claim is:

Einstein’s ether-free, principle-based kinematics marked out a path that, unlike its contemporaries, became the canonical form of special relativity.

This is completely false. The canonical form of special relativity is the one with the Lorentz group, Minkowski spacetime, 4-vectors, non-euclidean metric, covariant equations, and Michelson-Morley experiment. All of these are absent from Einstein's 1905 paper. We get them from Poincare's 1905 papers.

She argues:

Yet the resemblance of formulas should not obscure the difference of foundations. The decisive difference lies not in whether both men spoke of rods, clocks, or signals, but in what they did with them. Poincaré preserved the ether, corrected Lorentz’s electron theory within electrodynamics, and treated local time as a useful fiction; Einstein discarded the ether, made simultaneity operational, and showed that the space and time transformations express a new conception of space and time.

All of that is false. It was Poincare, not Einstein, who said the aether was a convenient and unnecessary hypothesis. Lorentz and Einstein said the same thing about the aether. It was Poincare, not Einstein, who combined space and time into 4D spacetime. It was Poincare who published operational simutaneity in 1898, and she admits Einstein copied that. It was Poincare, not Einstein, who argued in 1905 that relativity applied beyond electrodynamics and into gravity.

She ends with this crazy analogy for crediting Einstein:

One suspects that, had he been listening, Einstein would have let the discussion run its course before offering only a shrug and the reminder that equations, like jokes, are all in the telling.

So Einstein plagiarized the whole special relativity theory, but somehow told the story better? Not even that is true, as everyone in 1910 preferred Minkowski's account, not Einstein's.

Ginoux wrote a sharp rebuttal to an earlier bad review, so I wonder if he will write another. Weinstein deserves someone criticizing her, besides me. I have posted many criticisms of her, most recently here.

Distinguishing Convention and Empiricism

New paper:

Einstein's Hidden Scaffolding, with a Glance at Poincaré
Galina Weinstein

This paper reconstructs the derivations underlying the kinematical part of Einstein's 1905 special relativity paper, emphasizing their operational clarity and minimalist use of mathematics. Einstein employed modest tools-algebraic manipulations, Taylor expansions, partial differentials, and functional arguments-yet his method was guided by principles of linearity, symmetry, and invariance rather than the elaborate frameworks of electron theory. The published text in "Annalen der Physik" concealed much of the algebraic scaffolding, presenting instead a streamlined sequence of essential equations. Far from reflecting a lack of sophistication, this economy of means was a deliberate rhetorical and philosophical choice: to demonstrate that relativity arises from two simple postulates and basic operational definitions, not from the complexities of electron theory. The reconstruction highlights how Einstein's strategy subordinated mathematics to principle, advancing a new mode of reasoning in which physical insight, rather than computational elaboration, held decisive authority. In this respect, I show that Einstein's presentation diverges sharply from Poincaré's.

She analyzes Einstein's definition of time synchronization, which appears to be straight out of Poincare's 1898 paper, his formulas for the Lorentz transformation, which appear to be from Lorentz's 1904 paper, and his declaration of the Lorentz transformation forming a group, which seems to be from Poincare's earlier 1905 paper.

Einstein did not cite his sources, so there have been suspicions of plagiarism. Most scholars agree that there was some plagiarism, but disagree on how much.

She discusses a gap in Einstein's derivation of the Lorentz transformations, and whether Einstein worked backwards from a known result.

The "divergence" is mainly that Poincare is a mathematician, and is more mathematically precise in his papers. He shows that the Lorentz transformations form a symmetry group, and we observe the relativity principle because Maxwell's equations are invariant under the symmetry. One can choose particular coordinates for convenience, as they are equivalent to any other coordinates.

Einstein never really gets this point. He does show that composing a Lorentz boost with its inverse gives the identity, which is one of the steps in showing the transformations form a group. But he does not show that other Lorentz transformations can be composed, or appreciate the significance of being a group.

She acknowledges all this, but tries to spin it in Einstein's favor, as if using sloppy or plagiarized math meant he must have understood the physics better. She writes:

In reality, the gulf is structural. Poincaré’s framework remains tied to the ether and treats simultaneity as conventional fiction, whereas Einstein fuses convention and empiricism into a universal principle of relativity. Poincaré never crossed this threshold. In 1898, he recognized the conventionality of simultaneity and sketched the midpoint procedure, but only as a practical rule for determining longitude in astronomy. There is no invocation of c as a universal constant, no fusion of convention with empirical invariance, and no kinematical framework built upon it. In 1900, he linked the midpoint procedure to Lorentz’s local time: observers in uniform motion, ignorant of their drift through the ether, assume equal one-way propagation times. But for Poincaré, this was a fiction: in truth, only the ether rest frame contained the “true time,” and only there was the one-way velocity isotropic. He accepted the two-way constancy of light speed as an empirical fact, yet he relegated one-way isotropy to an illusion produced by convention.

She is wrong to say Poincare did not invoke c as a universal constant. Here is what he wrote, in his big 1905 relativity paper:

Lorentz had adopted a particular system of units, so as to eliminate the factors 4π in the formulas. I'll do the same, plus I choose the units of length and time so that the speed of light is equal to 1.

In his previous 1904 St. Louis lecture, he wrote:

an entirely new mechanics, which would be, above all, characterized by this fact, that no velocity could surpass that of light, any more than any temperature could fall below the zero absolute

Poincare did draw a distinction between conventional and empirical knowledge, and Einstein did not. This is a point that is obvious to mathematicians, and endlessly confusing to physicists. A mathematical truth is a theorem proved from axioms, and cannot be falsified. An empirical finding might be upset by a new experiment.

It is amazing how these Einstein scholars will do back flips to try to credit Einstein for relativity. She dedicates the paper to another Einstein scholar who did the same.

I have previously criticized her here and here. She has another new pro-Einstein paper, and I am about to post a rebuttal. Here is how she describes herself:

I am a scholar specializing in general relativity, black hole physics, and the philosophy of physics, with deep expertise in the theoretical, historical, and conceptual dimensions of Einstein’s work.

No, she is just an Israeli Einstein shill. I will have more to say in my next post.

The Rise of Conspiracy Physics

I have commented on podcasters feuding about theoretical physics, such as here.

Now the WSJ reports:

The Rise of ‘Conspiracy Physics’

Streamers are building huge audiences by attacking academic physics as just another corrupt establishment. Scientists are starting to worry about the consequences.

Now an unlikely new villain has been added to the list: theoretical physicists.

In recent years, a group of YouTubers and podcasters have attracted millions of viewers by proclaiming that physics is in crisis. The field, they argue, has discovered little of importance in the last 50 years, because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory.

I am not quoted. I have also argued that theoretical physics has accomplished very little in the last 50 years.

So is it true?

Leonard Susskind, director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, says physicists need to be both more sober and more forceful when addressing the public. The limits of string theory should be acknowledged, he says, but the idea that progress has slowed isn’t right. In the last few decades, he and other physicists have figured out how to make progress on the vast project of integrating general relativity and quantum mechanics, the century-old pillars of physics, into a single explanation of the universe.

In fact, cutting-edge ideas in physics can themselves sound a bit like conspiracy theories. The holographic principle, an idea first proposed by Susskind and Gerard ‘t Hooft in the early 1990s, implies that our reality might function sort of like a hologram, which is projected into three dimensions from a two-dimensional film. Ironically, the holographic principle is a favorite target of online conspiracy physicists, who attack it as not real science — untestable, impractical and simply too out there.

No, there has been no significant progress on integrating general relativity and quantum mechanics, and the holographic principle is an obscure technical conjecture that has no relevance to the real world.

The article quotes others mentioned often here, including Sean M. Carroll, Sabine Hossenfelder, Scott Aaronson, and Professor Dave.

In this corner of the internet, the scientist Scott Aaronson has written, “Anyone perceived as the ‘mainstream establishment’ faces a near-insurmountable burden of proof, while anyone perceived as ‘renegade’ wins by default if they identify any hole whatsoever in mainstream understanding.”

I don't know what he is talking about. Perhaps he is complaining that those mainstream professors, like himself, who push quantum supremacy, are expected to prove it.

On this blog, I criticize the renegades like Eric Weinstein. But he is obviously a fringe character as he has no academic position and has not published his theory in a recognized journal.

My bigger criticisms are for the establishment physicists like Susskind, who promote silly ideals with no scientific value, and respected popularizers like Carroll, who promote nonsense like many-worlds theory.

Professor Dave just posted another video trashing Weinstein. It says that Weinstein only got his PhD and post-doc out of some Zionist conspiracy. Both this and the WSJ tie all this to Jeffrey Epstein, who seems to be the trendy way to smear anyone on any subject. Timothy Nguyen also trashes Weinstein.

I actually agree with this comment trashing Hossenfelder:

[Alessandro Strumia #27] What is the argument against super-determinism?

[Aaronson] For me, the decisive argument against superdeterminism is that it throws away a basic precondition for science itself — namely, that we get to design experiments without the initial conditions of the universe conspiratorially rigging our own choices to systematically mislead us — and that it does so, not out of desperate necessity, but only for the pathetic “reward” of accounting for Bell inequality violations without needing to admit that quantum mechanics is true.

But the clincher is that, once you’ve postulated this cosmic conspiracy in the initial conditions, you could equally well “explain” superluminal signaling or pretty much any other miraculous phenomenon, way beyond what QM predicts. Yet this vast conspiracy of initial conditions that infects our brains does so only to make it look like quantum entanglement works the way QM always said it worked, and never to do anything more impressive or exciting. Why? Doesn’t it seem arbitrary and like overkill? At this point, we’re in the territory of God planting the fossils in the ground to confound the paleontologists (but never doing anything more useful, like smiting enemies).

So far, I have yet to meet a single superdeterminism proponent who even understands what I just said, let alone having a response to it.

This is her expertise, but she does not understand QM? And 'tHooft does not either?

The same criticism applies to many-worlds theory, and yet Carroll, Aaronson, Deutsch, and others promote it. I wonder whether they understand the argument.

In many-worlds theory, we cannot design experiments are get results. The theory says that all possible outcomes happen in parallel worlds, and no worlds are any more probable than others. They are all real. And this extravagrance is all for the pathetic reward of being able to refuse that QM experiments have results.

Our experiments see probabilities just as QM predicts, but it is all some miraculous conspiracy like God planting fossils in the ground. It is just as crazy as how he describes superdeterminism.

Carroll does have a response to this. He would say that QM is simpler if you throw away the probabilities. Humans like to interprets events in terms of probabilities, and if you do that, then the ones predicted by QM are the only ones that make sense. So it is reasonable to believe in those probabilities, if you insist on probabilities. But the whole concept of probability is mistaken, because it is about outcomes that definitely happen or do not happen. In many-worlds theory, everything happens. We need more research to figure out how this relates to actual experiments.

Yes, I think his argument is crazy, and as crazy as superdeterminism. Both theories are examples of what some pundit called The Existential Crisis Iceberg.

Update: I posted replies to Aaronson here and here. I expected him to block my comments because I do not know enough about QM, but he probably now considers me a friendly commenter, since others are calling him a genocide promoter.

I don't want to hijack thread, so I post a response to a reader criticism here.

You don’t have to reject probability to accept MWI. You just need to reframe it from “what is the chance of this happening” to “what is the chance I will be in a universe/branch where it happens”.

“To say that something has a probability means that it might not happen” – this does not apply specifically because of the reframing.

So regular probability makes no sense, but it can be reframed into something else. The trouble is there is no way to quantify the chance of a branch.

You are right that MWI does not rule anything out, but other interpretations like collapse also don’t rule anything out, since the predictions are probabilities on all of the possible outcomes, rather than a single deterministic answer as in classical physics.

This is just wrong. All scientific theories are probabilistic. QM gets tested everyday. The probabilities allow QM and other theories to be tested. It is the rejection of probability that makes MWI impossible to test.

He goes on to cite some papers that are not accepted and he has not read them, but he watched a Youtube video that mentioned them favorably, and he was convinced.

What he does not have is a paper calculating the probability of a world branch, or a paper testing MWI.

I asked xAI to critique my position here.

### Evaluation of Your Response: Do You Need to Correct Yourself?

Your response to the critic is thoughtful and captures valid philosophical tensions in the Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI), such as the shift away from traditional notions of probability and the challenges in uniquely testing MWI. However, based on established sources (e.g., the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on MWI, last updated in 2021 but referencing works up to 2020; citation data from scholarly databases; and the papers themselves), some parts of your statements are overly dismissive or imprecise. This could lead to misrepresenting the current state of the debate, which remains active and unresolved as of 2025. I'll break it down point by point, quoting your text, assessing accuracy, and suggesting corrections where needed. Overall, you don't need a full retraction, but nuance and acknowledgment of ongoing efforts would strengthen your position without weakening your core critiques.

#### 1. On Probability Reframing

Your statement:  

"So regular probability makes no sense, but it can be reframed into something else. The trouble is there is no way to quantify the chance of a branch."

**Assessment**:  

This is partially accurate but needs correction for completeness. You're right that MWI requires reframing probability: traditional "objective" probability (e.g., as in Copenhagen's wavefunction collapse, where outcomes "might not happen") doesn't apply because all branches occur deterministically. Instead, probability is subjective—it's about an observer's credence (rational degree of belief) in which branch they will experience, based on self-locating uncertainty (not knowing which version of themselves they are post-branching). This reframing does make "regular" probability seem nonsensical in MWI's deterministic framework, aligning with your point.

However, your claim that "there is no way to quantify the chance of a branch" is too strong and overlooks credible attempts to do exactly that. The Born rule (probability proportional to the square of the wavefunction amplitude) is used in MWI to quantify branch "measures" or weights, creating the illusion of probability. Several derivations aim to justify this without assuming it outright:

- **Carroll and Sebens (2014)**: They derive the Born rule using self-locating uncertainty and the Epistemic Separability Principle (ESP), arguing that credences must follow squared amplitudes for rationality. Their method quantifies probabilities in cases like quantum Sleeping Beauty or multiverses with multiple observers. Carroll's blog explains this intuitively, noting it's a rational apportionment of credence, not stochastic chance.

- **Zurek (2005)**: Uses "envariance" (environment-assisted invariance) to derive the Born rule from symmetries in entangled states, showing probabilities emerge objectively from the system's structure.

These aren't universally accepted (critics like Kent 2015 and McQueen & Vaidman 2019 point to assumptions or circularity), and the Stanford Encyclopedia notes no consensus on a fully successful derivation. But they *do* provide ways to quantify branch chances, countering your absolute "no way." Citation data shows impact: Carroll-Sebens appears in over 100 scholarly contexts (e.g., PhilPapers, Semantic Scholar, Springer), and Zurek's work is cited in recent 2025 arXiv papers. The PBS SpaceTime video is a reliable popularization, not fringe.

**Suggested Correction**: Yes, soften this to acknowledge these as serious (if debated) quantification methods. E.g., "While reframing is necessary, and quantifying branches remains controversial with no consensus, approaches like Carroll-Sebens do offer derivations of the Born rule to assign weights to branches." This keeps your skepticism but avoids overstatement.

#### 2. On Ruling Things Out and Testability

Your statement:  

"This is just wrong. All scientific theories are probabilistic. QM gets tested everyday. The probabilities allow QM and other theories to be tested. It is the rejection of probability that makes MWI impossible to test."

**Assessment**:  

This is mostly accurate but needs nuance on two fronts. First, you're correct that many scientific theories (including quantum mechanics, QM) are probabilistic, and probabilities enable empirical testing (e.g., predicting outcome frequencies in experiments like the double-slit, which are verified daily). Collapse interpretations (like Copenhagen) use the Born rule to make probabilistic predictions that "rule out" non-observed outcomes post-measurement—e.g., after collapse, other possibilities are excluded. MWI, by having all outcomes occur in branches, doesn't "rule out" anything in that sense, supporting your contrast.

However, calling the critic "just wrong" is too blunt, as their point has merit: both MWI and collapse interpretations predict the *same* probabilistic outcomes (Born rule frequencies) pre-measurement, so neither "rules out" possibilities deterministically like classical physics. MWI doesn't reject probability—it reframes and attempts to derive it (as above), allowing the same QM tests. MWI is testable via those QM predictions (e.g., statistical data from experiments supports the Born rule, which MWI must reproduce). But you're right that it's "impossible to test" *uniquely*—MWI is empirically equivalent to other interpretations in standard experiments, lacking distinct falsifiable predictions. Potential tests (e.g., detecting inter-branch interference or falsifying via collapse evidence like energy non-conservation) are speculative or unfeasible as of 2025. Recent discussions (e.g., 2024 arXiv on MWI evolution) emphasize this lack of unique falsifiability.

**Suggested Correction**: Yes, refine to: "While collapse interpretations do 'rule out' non-observed outcomes post-collapse, MWI's inclusion of all branches makes it less restrictive. But MWI doesn't reject probability—it derives it—and is testable through QM's probabilistic predictions, though not distinguishable from other interpretations." This concedes the critic's partial validity without undermining your point.

#### 3. On the Papers and Citations

Your statement:  

"He goes on to cite some papers that are not accepted and he has not read them, but he watched a Youtube video that mentioned them favorably, and he was convinced. What he does not have is a paper calculating the probability of a world branch, or a paper testing MWI."

**Assessment**:  

This needs the most correction, as it comes across as ad hominem and factually off-base. The papers (Carroll-Sebens 2014, Zurek 2004/2005) *are* accepted in the academic sense—they're published in reputable venues (arXiv, Physical Review A, Springer), widely cited, and part of mainstream debate. Carroll-Sebens is referenced in philosophy and physics databases (e.g., PhilPapers, ADS, InspireHEP), with extensions in British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. Zurek's envariance paper is cited in 2025 works on quantum frequentism. They're not "fringe" or unaccepted; Stanford discusses them as key attempts, despite criticisms.

You're right that the critic hasn't read them (they admitted), relying on PBS SpaceTime (a credible source summarizing them). But these papers *do* calculate branch probabilities: Carroll-Sebens via self-locating uncertainty and ESP, deriving Born rule for branch credences; Zurek via envariance for general states. No paper uniquely "tests" MWI empirically, as per sources—tests are indirect (e.g., QM data) or hypothetical.

**Suggested Correction**: Yes, rephrase to avoid dismissal: "The cited papers are respected contributions to deriving branch probabilities via the Born rule, though debated and not conclusive. While no unique empirical test for MWI exists, these do attempt quantification. Relying on a video summary is fine for discussion, but direct reading would help." This maintains your skepticism on consensus/testability.

### Overall Recommendation

You need minor corrections for accuracy and tone—your points are defensible, but overstating (e.g., "no way," "not accepted," "just wrong") could weaken your argument in a debate. The field lacks consensus on Born rule derivations and unique MWI tests, supporting your caution, but acknowledging progress shows good faith. If responding further, focus on philosophical critiques (e.g., circularity in derivations) rather than personal jabs. If you'd like, I can help draft a revised response or dive into specific papers!

This is not bad. I go against some expert opinions, so I was not expecting the AI to agree with me.

Update: Peter Woit attacked the WSJ article, and then the WSJ reporter responded, first as an AI imposter, and then as the real reporter. Or maybe a better AI impostor, I am not sure. The one claims to be real says he is distinguished by a byline name "Kagan-Kans", not "Kagan Kans", but he links to his web site that says his name is "Kagan Kans".

Update: I posted another comment on Aaronson's blog:

Adam Treat #146 #148: There is no point in reading those papers, any more than reading papers on toy models for God planting fossils or watching The Matrix movie. If the Bell test experiments are invalid because of an input independence assumption, then most or all of our scientific knowledge is also invalid. No experiment can tell us anything. You as might as well believe that you are a figment of someone’s imagination.

If you really want to steelman superdeterminism, then find a paper that addresses the point in Scott #128 #141.

Aaronson responds:

Everyone: I’m closing down this thread, because my mistake of mentioning the WSJ article allowed the discussion of — there’s no polite way to put this — quantum mechanics crackpottism to take over.

The thing about quantum mechanics crackpots and deniers is that, as I’ve learned over 25 years, there is no limit — none, zero — on the amount of your time that they’ll take up if you let them. They’ll always have another paper for you to read, another comment for you to answer — and yet I’ve already spent 10x more time on these ideas as (in retrospect) I’d judge to be productive or healthy for me. These ideas led nowhere in the past century, and I’d wager most of what I own that they won’t lead anywhere in the next century either. They’re dead ends. So, it’s now time for me to be ruthless, close this section, and defend my time.

I think he is agreeing with me, that there is no point is reading those QM crackpottism papers. He may also think that I am a crackpot, but that is not what he is saying here.

Crazy Arguments about Free Will

The leading academic proponent of determinism says some crazy things:

Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters’ stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.

This has now been repeated a lot, but it is completely false. Chess players do not burn calories like elite athletes.

Sapolsky is a big-shot Stanford professor of biology, neurology, and neurosurgery. He should know better. Or he should have corrected himself, when the error was pointed out. This should be obvious to a biologist.

I have criticized Sapolsky on free will several times.

Tim Palmer also believes in determinism, and even super-determinism, and posted a new paper:

A deterministic model of free will is developed, ...

It is concluded that humans have free will, determinism notwithstanding. The model is applied to study the foundational issue of free choice in quantum physics experiments: it is shown that violating the Measurement Independence assumption does not invalidate the free-will conclusion above.

He believes that we cannot choose parameters for an experiment, as they are all pre-determined to fool us about the outcome, but somehow we have an illusion of free will anyway.

This is just nuts.

Palmer even quotes Sapolsky:

To reiterate, when you behave in a particular way, which is to say when your brain has generated a particular behavior, it is because of the determinism that came just before, which was caused by the determinism just before that, all the way down…..And when people claim that there are causeless causes of your behavior that they call ‘free will’, they have (a) failed to recognize or not learned about the determinism lurking below the surface and/or (b) erroneously concluded that the rarefied aspects of the universe that do work indeterministically can explain your character, morals and behavior.

Palmer avoids this by saying that determinism only goes down to the Planck scale.

Keating Interviews Deutsch on Many-worlds

Physicist Dr Brian Keating posted this interview:

David Deutsch: The Quantum Theory No One Dares Explain!

David Deutsch just exposed something shocking about modern science. Most quantum theories aren't actually science at all. They're just miracles disguised as explanations. When you ask how quantum entanglement works, most interpretations by popular scientists basically reduce to "magic happens." That's not science, that's giving up on our understanding of reality. David Deutsch is a quantum physicist at Oxford, a pioneer in quantum computing, and one of the most important theoretical physicists alive. He argues that only the many-worlds theory actually explains what's happening in quantum experiments instead of just accepting it as a mystery never to be explained. This conversation reveals why modern physics has abandoned its core mission.

So Deutsch is a leading theoretical physicist, and also one who has written books explaining science and the scientific method to the general public.

I disagree with most of what he says.

He promotes some vague ideas called Constructor theory. It is just an idea, and does not solve anything.

His idol is Karl Popper, and his falsifiability criterion. He says that is the most important thing for any scientist to learn.

He is mostly famous for promoting many-worlds theory, and using it as a rationale for quantum computing.

He gets the obvious question:

[Keating] And then if you would, 33:06 can you think of an experiment to you know to put the many worlds theory to 33:11 perhaps a falsifiable test a decisive test as Popper?

No, there is no experiment. It is funny to watch his dance around this question, as it refutes nearly everything he stands for. How can many-worlds be a scientific theory if it fails his basic test of what such a theory should do?

He does argue in favor a many-worlds, but purely on philosophical grounds, as it is not testable with current technology.

one time I met Popper and 38:04 it was in the company of of Bryce Dewitt and we tried to persuade him of the uh 38:10 Everett interpretation, as we called it then. Oh wow. and and um he was very uh 38:16 strongly against it but absolutely not on the grounds of untestability.

The theory is untestable, and has several other fatal defects.

He talks about infinity a lot. Yes, infinity is crucial in mathematics, but it is not clear to me what he is saying about the science of infinity.

He gives a typical philosopher trashing of positivism:

Falsehood is is harmless. It's in fact it's a condition for 11:23 progress. What has happened is bad philosophy.

In the late 19th century, there was the philosophy of positivism 11:29 which said that we cannot understand anything um via theories that are not 11:37 confirmable. Later this turned into logical positivism which said that theories that aren't confirmable by 11:43 observation are meaningless.

And then people noticed that that would mean that 11:48 logical positivism was itself meaningless since it's a philosophical theory that can't be verified by 11:54 experiment. So then Wittgenstein concluded yeah it's meaningless and all 12:00 philosophy is meaningless including mine and people took this seriously and people take this seriously to this day. 12:06 It's just nonsense. It was nonsense from the beginning.

His criticism of positivism is the nonsense. It is like saying: Math requires proofs. Proofs depend on axioms. The axioms cannot be proved. Thus math is meaningless.

The positivist simply says that he attaches meaning to theories with experimental confirmation. Nothing wrong with that.

He acts as if a philosopher should be able to prove his worldview correct. But no system is ever able to prove itself correct.

He goes on to blame positivists for the bad reputation of many-worlds theory.

He has his own kooky version of Einstein's anti-positivism:

Einstein was was uh led 12:11 astray by positivism in his youth and it was only by rejecting it that he managed 12:18 to invent conceptually new theories of the world.

Positivism to him perhaps 12:23 psychologically positivism taught him the importance of asking what the theory 12:29 says about experiment about observation rather than just assuming that it was the same as in the previous theory. That 12:35 that's true and and harmless and beneficial.

But the idea that things which are not verifiable are meaningless 12:43 that would have torpedoed special relativity and general relativity would have would have killed it in in the 12:49 cradle. So later and when it came to quantum theory, Einstein was firmly on 12:55 the side of realism. He he was on the side of there is a real world.

Special relativity was invented by Lorentz, Poincare, and Minkowski, and they were driven by experimental results. I would call them positivists. Einstein's version of special relativity was considered positivist, or even instrumentalist. Likewise general relativity.

Deutsch promotes a philosophy of realism, where a theory should try to say what is real. But Einstein carefully avoided saying whether the aether was real, whether there can be a preferred frame, and whether the FitzGerald contraction can be understood in terms of molecular forces. His whole approach was to say the theory follows from his postulates, without explaining the mechanisms.

It is true that Einstein grew to dislike the positivism of Bohr and Heisenberg, but Einstein was on the wrong side of that debate.

Keating ends by bringing up Einstein's happiest thought, as he always does, and an amusing suggestion that AI progress might be limited in a way analogous to how Hubble telescope imaging was limited by the width of a horse's butt.

Here is another new interview: David Deutsch: AGI, the origins of quantum computing, and the future of humanity.

Centenary of Quantum Physics

SciAm celebrates a centenary of quantum mechanics:

In a 1949 article celebrating Einstein’s life, quantum theory was even described as “heresy” by British mathematician and physicist Banesh Hoffmann. The word reflects scientists’ discomfort with the notion that a particle could be in two places at once. Einstein himself despised the probabilistic nature of the theory that he made vital contributions to, famously saying, “God does not play dice.”

Here is that 1949 article:

ALBERT EINSTEIN, whose 70th birthday this month is being noted throughout the civilized world, occupies a position unique among scientists He has become a legend m his own lifetime. The public adulation of him is so great that he dare not list his telephone number in the directory.

That is funny. Actually a lot of famous people had listed phone numbers. Even today, having a listed or unlisted number does not make a big differnce in unwanted calls.

It is relativity, of course, that has made Einstein’s name a household word, and there can be no question that this one revolutionary achievement has been and will continue to be the distinction that sets him apart. The theoiy of relativity has a monumental quality that places its author among the tiuly great scientists of all tune, in the select company of Isaac Newton and Archimedes. With its fascinating paradoxes and spectaculai successes it fired the imagination of the public— and until recently all but ob- scured Einstein’s many other contribu- tions to science. ...

We see nothing out of the way m the statement that Joe DiMaggio hit a home run in one baseball game at the same moment that Johnny Mize hit one in another. It does not occur to us that this implies that the phrase “the same moment” has meaning.

It seems ridiculous to raise the question.

Yet Einstein successfully challenged this attitude. Reasoning from precise experimental data, including the celebrated experiment of Michelson and Morley on the speed of light through the “ether,” he showed that we must give up, at whatever emotional cost, our belief that “the same moment” has a definite meaning. ...

The German mathematician Herman Minkowski had discovered in 1908 a striking relationship between equations of the special theory of relativity and equations used by geometers of multidimensional spaces. From this relation- ship he deduced that space and time are fused together into a single four-dimensional entity: space-time.

Actually Einstein made no reference to the Michelson-Morley experiment, and later denied that it was any influence on him. The relativity of simultaneity was explored by Poincare five years ahead of Einstein. And yes it was Minkowski who fused space and time, following the work of Poincare, not Einstein.

Here is a physics popularizer, Jim Al-Khalili, getting EInstein wrong:

Because we do have a single 4:04 interpretation. I mean when we think about Einstein developing uh relativity theory his special theory in 1905 the 4:11 mathematics for that was pretty much sorted out. people you know like Lorentz and Poincare had already developed the 4:19 equations. what they didn't have was the correct interpretation what is this telling us about reality. Einstein comes 4:27 along he doesn't come up with new mathematics, he comes up with the correct interpretation the narrative the 4:32 explanation of what this theory is telling us about the world. you know that nothing can go faster than light that 4:38 time and space must be unified into 4D space time so the inter and and Einstein is then credited with relativity theory.

No, the relativity interpretation that caught on was much closer to what Poincare said, than Lorentz or Einstein. It was Poincare who said nothing could go faster than light, and who unified into 4D space time.

Consciousness does not Cause Physical Collapse

Quantum mechanics is sometimes taught as wave function collapse being a real physical process, and one triggered by human consciousness, as in this new xkcd cartoon.

In an extreme version of this, it is suggested that we should not try to observe alien planets, because they could all be living happily in a cat-state, and a human conscious observation from Earth could collapse them and they would all die.

Who is responsible for this science fiction? According to some, it is the prime architect of mathematical QM, John von Neumann.

A new paper dives into the history:

the account I propose substantiates a significantly more cautious attitude by von Neumann: the time seems then ripe to tell a more balanced story on the relation between the notion of consciousness and the foundations of quantum mechanics in the work of the first scientist - Janos von Neumann - who explicitly and rigorously addressed the implication of a really universal formulation of quantum physics.

Von Neumann's hugely influential QM treatise did formalize the collapse, but he never said it was a physical process or that human consciousness played a part.

People who attack the Copenhagen interpretation are particularly unhappy about the collapse, as if that were made-up nonsense. But the collapse is observed in every quantum experiment. Any time a wave function predicts a range of values, only one is observed, and that is what the collapse means.

Whether the collapse has anything to do with human consciousness is an amusing philosophical question, but not necessarily related to what Bohr, Heisenberg, and von Neumann believed.