Boycott Math to Save Greenland

American professors have been whining about possible Trump administration budget cuts, as if this is the end of scientific research. Now Peter Woit wants to boycott the scheduled 2026 Philadelphia meeting of the International Congress of Mathematicians!

The 2022 meeting in St. Petersburg Russia was canceled, because of pro-Ukraine political activists. This was unfortunate. It only punished Russian mathematicians and conference organizers who had nothing to do with Ukraine politics. Russia was not using these conferences for political gain. Only the supposedly free westerners were.

American and European scientific organizations are sometimes more politicized than Russian ones under Stalin.

Woit is from Latvia, so maybe he hates Russia. But does he also hate Philadelphia? He laments that it may be hard to find a host country that meets his ideological purity test, as he says the world is going fascist.

John Baez chimes in that he moved to Scotland to escape Trump!

Here is the only sensible comment:

Alessandro+Strumia says:
February 26, 2025 at 2:08 am

I could attend the ICBS conference in China because it says «This conference is a purely academic event. It does not promote any political opinion». I cannot attend conferences at Perimeter, not even on zoom, because it forces to accept a Code of Conduct that contains political elements including DEI (“inclusivity, equity, diversity”) and I am not Marxist. Removing all these woke Codes of Conduct that did not exist a decade ago seems to me a better contribution to freedom than avoiding conferences in the US.

Yes, it is embarrassing that Russia and China can keep politics out of scientific conferences, but the USA and Europe cannot.

Scott Aaronson also has Trump derangement:

Trump and Vance’s total capitulation to Vladimir Putin, their berating of Zelensky in the Oval Office for having the temerity to want the free world to guarantee Ukraine’s security, as the entire world watched the sad spectacle. ...

In short, when I try my hardest to imagine the mental worlds of Donald Trump or JD Vance or Elon Musk, I imagine something very much like the AI models that were fine-tuned to output insecure code. ... It’s as though, by pushing extremely hard on a single issue (birtherism? gender transition for minors?), someone inadvertently flipped the signs of these men’s good vs. evil vectors.

He makes an analogy to AI LLM models that turn evil.

He is a smart man, but it is hard to believe that he really does not understand the USA's reluctance to guarantee Ukraine's security.

Russia and Ukraine are minor corrupt countries on the other side of the world with an ugly border dispute. It probably would have been resolved peacefully, except that the USA and Zelensky keep threatening to put NATO weapons on Russia's border. Russia says that it is defending itself from NATO expansion. Maybe Putin is lying, but USA involvement is making things worse, and it is time to pull out.

Maybe you disagree, and that's fine, but how it is that Aaronson cannot even see the logic behind Trump's position?

Professor Dave Blasts Dr. Bee Again

Professor Dave has a popular Youtube channel, with twice the subscribers of Dr. Bee. He posts a lot of good videos explaining textbook material, and sometimes debunks charlatans and quacks. I mentioned his attacks before.

Now he says she is a grifter for cash in a 1.5 hour rant:

Sabine Hossenfelder Can’t Stop Acting Like a Complete Fraud

Professor Dave Explains
3.64M subscribers

I've already made two videos about Sabine Hossenfelder's gradual decline into deception and charlatanry, but her behavior has gotten so bad lately that it's time to make another one. This time, after examining her latest pathetic stunt, it's time to bring in some physicists to comment on the ridiculous things she's been spewing. Those would be Eluned Smith, Aram Harrow, and Tracy Slatyer, all professors of physics at MIT. Most of you were already on board, but if you Sabine fanboys wouldn't listen to me before, maybe you'll listen to them.

He says a lot of her videos are okay, but she has drifted down the right-wing rabbit hole. He ends up calling her a nazi.

He interviews physics professors to explain that Physics really has been making big progress, and that he public taxpayers have benefited so greatly that they should happily fund further research.

Listen for yourself, and tell me whether you are convinced. One said that supersymmetry might have explained a few things, but those explanations have been ruled out by the LHC collider. That was progress. I agree that was progress, but I did not see any benefit to the taxpayers.

I think she is correct that most of the funded research is of no tangible value. The video guests do not directly rebut her, but instead ramble about how research often has value.

Strangely, they never address superdeterminism. Of all her videos, that is the subject where she has the greatest expertise, and it is also the one with her kookiest views. Superdeterminism is so kooky that it is reasonable to reject everything she has to say, if she believes in it. But that is not what he does.

It is true that high-energy theoretical physics has stagnated for about 50 years. We have had 50 years of 1000s of papers on new theories and models, and they have nearly all failed. The last big advance was the standard model. String theory, supersymmetry, grand unified theories, and many others have gone nowhere. Everyone thought that the LHC would discover new physics, but it did not.

He gives the argument that the electron was discovered as pure scientific research, and it had big commercial payoffs decades later. So maybe the Higgs boson will similarly have commercial payoffs someday. That is just silly. The Higgs is not going to have any commerical utility. It cost $10 billion jus to make one at the LHC accelerator.

Update: Dr. Quantum Supremacy piles on

Sabine #17: I very often agree with your acerbic takes, or at least enjoy them. Not always. To me, superdeterminism is a candidate for the most insane idea in the history of physics — certainly 1000x more insane than anything the string theorists have ever come up with. But even your superdeterminism advocacy wouldn’t merit a comparison to RFK Jr.

No, what merits the comparison to RFK Jr. is this recent video of yours. There, with comically unconvincing caveats (“I’m not necessarily saying this should happen, just that it will“), you speak approvingly about the imminent destruction of publicly-funded academic science, in favor of just letting Musk, Bezos, et al. fund whatever they feel like.

Yes, superdeterminism is insane, but so is many-worlds, and Aaronson endorsed it in 2021. So they are all promoting fringe and insane versions of quantion mechanics.

Aaronson is mainly upset that Hossenfelder predicts an end to taxpayer funding of whatever academics want to study, especially fringe ideas with no real world relevance. She compares academic research to Communism, where central government committees decide what to fund, and make political decisions with little public accoutability.

He praises this comment:

For instance, there’s a whole genre of articles claiming that some experiment has shown that quantum processes can rewrite the past, foresee the future, or take a negative amount of time. The AMO physicists hopefully all know the real story is “our experiment checked that textbook QM works exactly as expected, but if QM _wasn’t_ true you’d need some crazy retrocausality to get the same results”, but they choose not to communicate that subtlety. It seems to be a game they play to get into top journals. But then the public just gets more confused, and convinced that physicists don’t know what’s going on.

Yes, you could say the same about arguments for superdeterminism, many-worlds, or Bohmian mechanics. Those arguments all depend on QM not being true, but that subtlety get omitted. Most quantum weirdness arguments work that way. For example, Bell proved that if QM were false, and were a some sort of classical theory instead, then it would have nonlocal properties.

Philosopher Promotes Determinism

I mentioned Dr. Bee promoting superdeteriminism, and philospher Stephen Maitzen also promotes determinism.

Here is his core argument:

You decided to read this post. Suppose your decision wasn’t necessitated by the prior conditions: you might have decided not to read this post despite everything being exactly as it was. If we delve into the question “Why did you decide to read this post rather than not ‒ what made the difference?”, at some stage in our ever-deeper inquiry the answer is nothing. That seems to me a perfect example of magic: there was a difference (you decided one way rather than another), but literally nothing made the difference.

If you reject magical thinking, then you ought to accept determinism.

In other words, he just declares non-determinism to be magic.

Einstein believed in determinism, but most physicists do not. Certainly nothing in textbook physics requires determinism, and many believe it is incompatible with quantum mechanics. But Maitzen argues:

Contrary to what you may have heard, determinism does not conflict with current physics. ...

One such deterministic theory is Bohmian mechanics, named for the physicist David Bohm. ...

Misinformed people say that the experimental violations of Bell’s Theorem rule out deterministic physics. Bell himself knew better: what they rule out is physics that’s both deterministic and local. Bohmian mechanics survives because it’s nonlocal, but (as Bell showed) so is quantum mechanics itself.

No, this is misinformed. Nearly all physicists reject Bohmian mechanics because it is nonlocal, and I would call it magic.

Quantum mechanics is local as far as we know. Quantum field theory is local.

Some people interpret Bell's inequality as saying quantum mechanics must be indeterministic. That appears to be the case, but there is always the possibility of some underlying deterministic theory.

Any indeterministic theory could have an underlying deterministic theory.

There is no hope of science proving determinism, so why would anyone believe in it? If you accept determinism, then you are just a cog in a machine, with no free will or any purpose to life. People make choices all the time, and it is almost impossible to live life as if all those choices are determined. I doubt that anyone can do it, except maybe for babies, comatose patients, and schizophrenics.

Dr. Bee Pushes Superdeterminism Again

I have defended Dr. Bee, as she often gives nice summaries of science outside her expertise. But not when she gets Physics in her own expertise wrong. She explains:

7:20 And then let me finally say some words about how superdeterminism 7:24 explains the quantum mechanical result. Superdeterminism is an unfortunate 7:29 term that John Bell used to describe what he thought was an implausible explanation. What 7:36 it really means is just that the probability of a measurement outcome depends on what you 7:41 measure. In the GHZ table this means that for example the result for the side of the second 7:48 coin in the third measurement can differ from the one in the first measurement, 7:53 because the measurements on the other coins are different. The result depends on the context. 7:59 The benefit of superdeterminism, and the reason why I am convinced it’s the correct explanation, 8:06 is that it is local and therefore compatible with Einstein’s theory. Superdeterminism has 8:13 no “spooky action at a distance.” Indeed, we know from Bell’s theorem that it’s 8:18 the *only way to make the results of quantum mechanics compatible with Einstein’s locality. 8:25 People don’t like this explanation because they think it’s constraining 8:29 their free will or something. But the way that I think about it is just that it’s 8:35 a consistency requirement. And yes I am working on a few more papers about this,

She is writing wrong papers. In quantum mechanics, the measurement outcome depends on what you measure. That has been accepted wisdom for a century. It is not superdeterminism, which nearly everyone rejects as not only implausible, but crazy.

Bell's theorem says that superdeterminism is the only way to make a local hidden variable theory compatible with known Physics. But again, mainstream physicists and textbooks have rejected hidden variable theories for a century.

Textbook quantum field theory is local, and compatible with relativity.

People do not like superdeterminism not just because it eliminates free will, but that it any possibility of doing a scientific experiment. It is part of The Existential Crisis Iceberg. If you accept it, there is no returning to rational thought.

Microsoft Claims a Topological Qubit

Microsoft brags in a new video:

Hear from the Microsoft team behind the recent breakthrough in physics and quantum computing demonstrated by the new Majorana 1 chip, engineered from an entirely new material that has the potential to scale to millions of qubits on a single chip.

Bloomberg piles on:

So it's an accelerator and it's very 13:52 complementary that some investors would say that this 13:55 artificial intelligence hype cycle has produced more hype than actual reality, 14:01 at least at the stage that we are Now. Is quantum computing going to be 14:04 different or follow a similar pattern?

Quantum computing is 1000x more over-hyped than AI. AI has already produced beyond what the hype was promising. Quantum computing has not delivered anything of use.

Dr. Quantum Computing notes:

Commenters point out to me that buried in Nature‘s review materials is the following striking passage: “The editorial team wishes to point out that the results in this manuscript do not represent evidence for the presence of Majorana zero modes in the reported devices. The work is published for introducing a device architecture that might enable fusion experiments using future Majorana zero modes.” So, the situation is that Microsoft is unambiguously claiming to have created a topological qubit, and they just published a relevant paper in Nature, but their claim to have created a topological qubit has not yet been accepted by Nature‘s peer review. ...

Q5. Didn’t Microsoft claim the experimental creation of Majorana zero modes — a building block of topological qubits—back in 2018, and didn’t they then need to retract their claim?

A. Yep. Certainly that history is making some experts cautious about the new claim. When I asked Chetan Nayak how confident I should be, his response was basically “look, we now have a topological qubit that’s behaving fully as a qubit; how much more do people want?”

Q6. Is this a big deal?

A. If the claim stands, I’d say it would be a scientific milestone for the field of topological quantum computing and physics beyond.

Yes, very interesting, if the claim stands.

Update: Dr. Bee adds her opinion.

Update: The WSJ published some skepticism about Microsoft's claims, which go beyond what has been published.

Many-Worlds Leaves Basic Questions Unresolved

Many-worlds theory is nonsense from beginning to end. Here is an illustration.

Here is a new paper, from China:

oes the Universe Split Everywhere at Once? Rethinking Branching and Nonlocality in the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics, first pro- posed by Hugh Everett III in 1957, offers a radical solution to the measure- ment problem by positing that all possible outcomes of a quantum measure- ment occur in different worlds (Everett, 1957; Vaidman, 2021).

No, it does nothing to solve the measurement problem.

In quantum mechanics, the measurement problem is the problem of definite outcomes: quantum systems have superpositions but quantum measurements only give one definite result.[1][2]

The supposed solution is to say that all the other possibilities happen in unseen parallel worlds. But that does nothing to explain why we only see one definite result in our world.

While this interpretation avoids the need for wavefunction collapse, it introduces the contentious concept of branching — a process where the universe splits into multiple worlds whenever a quantum event occurs.

No, the wavefunction still collapses in our world. The rest of the wavefunction becomes inaccessible in our world, and related to only other worlds.

Over the past decades, the modern formulation of MWI has refined this idea, grounding branching in environmental-induced decoherence, a process that explains the emer- gence of stable, quasi-classical worlds (Wallace, 2012). However, critical questions remain unresolved: Is branching global, happening throughout the entire universe instantaneously (Sebens and Carroll, 2018; Ney, 2024), or is it local, propagating at finite speeds? (Wallace, 2012; McQueen and Vaid- man, 2019) How does nonlocality in entangled systems influence branching? Most importantly, can MWI reconcile its branching mechanism with the principles of special relativity?

With those questions unresolved, nothing is resolved. The theory has no substance.

It is amazing that trained physicists can promote this nonsense. And they complain that Pres. Trump might cut funding for it.

This paper draws its own goofy conclusions.

This paper aims to resolve key tensions by demonstrating that branching is neither strictly global nor purely local, but nonlocal for entangled systems. ... Crucially, this non- locality is apparent rather than fundamental. The multiverse as a whole retains a Lorentz-invariant structure, with no preferred Lorentz frame or superluminal influence across all worlds. This reconciles MWI with special relativity while preserving its capacity to explain quantum nonlocality.

Many-worlds is an esoteric subject, but even if you know nothing about it, it should be clear that physicists have been writing about it since 1957, and they have gotten nowhere. Nobody knows what the theory means, on any level. There is no agreement on anything. And no way to test the theory. It is nothing but an undefined fantasy.

In 1957, Everett said that if the whole universe is described by QM, then there should be a wavefunction for the universe. In particular, an observer would be included. So when an observer sees one outcome out of several possibilities, and it seems like a collapse of some local wavefunction, then presumably there is some way to interpret that collapse in the wavefunction of the universe. All that is clear enough. The weird part is making the leap to saying that the collapse is the creation of parallel universes.

Update: New video on The Huge Flaw in the Many Worlds Interpretation. It explains how hard it is to make sense out of MWI. In particular, it explains that there is no way to make sense out of probability. To believe in MWI is to reject probability as a meaningful concept. The full podcast is here. But ignore the part from 1:10:00 to 1:14:00, where he claims that everybody had gotten Bell's Theorem wrong for 60 years, including the Nobel Prize committee a couple of years ago. No, the Nobel folks did not get it wrong.

Quantum Encryption Uses Light and Color

Here is some typical quantum encryption hype:

The future of internet security faces a major challenge: quantum computers could eventually break even the strongest encryption used today, making sensitive data vulnerable. To counter this threat, researchers worldwide are working on quantum networks — systems that leverage the principles of quantum mechanics to enable ultra-secure communication.

When fully developed and globally interconnected, these networks will form the quantum internet, providing encryption that cannot be intercepted or decoded.

No, quantum computers do not threaten the strongest encryption used today. They might threaten RSA, in about 50 years. Even then, I doubt it.

Regardless, no one is going to make secure networks out of this quantum encryption. They suffer a number of defects. They are slow and expensive. They cannot use routers. They are subject to hardware attacks. They cannot be authenticated. They depend on a probability of detecting an attack. They have to shut down if there is an attack.

Many-Worlds does not avoid Spookiness

Lev Vaidman writes a new paper:

It is argued that, keeping the standard paradigm of a scientific theory, the only way to avoid (spooky) action at a distance of quantum mechanics is to accept the existence of parallel worlds created at every quantum measurement. Einsten's boxes and Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger scenario are analyzed in the framework of the many-worlds interpretation, Bohmian mechanics, and Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber collapse theory.

Here is his argument. Say you have two boxes, A and B, and you put a particle randomly in one of them. Then you separate the boxes, and open box A, seeing whether the particle is in it. Then you immediate know whether the particle is in box B.

He says this is spooky because the knowledge seems to leap from box A to B.

Now you repeat the drill, but instead of just moving the boxes, you split the universe into two universes. One universe has the particle in box A only, and the other has it in box B only. THe new universes cannot communicate or interact in any way.

Now it is still the case that finding the particle in box A tells you immeediately that it is not in box B, but only in that universe, so it is not spooky.

This is so stupid that I do not know how anyone can believe such nonsense. Saying that the universe splits does nothing to solve spookiness, or anything else.

Top Ten Physics Myths

Other sites go after astrology and other pseudosciences. I go after bizarre beliefs held by respected physicists.

1. Matter is mostly empty space.
This is based on the idea that matter is made of quarks and electrons, and those are point particles, leaving a lot of space in between. But matter is made of fields, and fields take up space. Especially fermionic fields.
2. Bell proved that Quantum Mechanics is nonlocal.
He only proved that QM could not be replaced by a theory of local hidden variables. The key point is that hidden variable theories do not work.
3. The universe is deterministic.
Some say that a scientific outlook requires that the past determines the future. On the contrary, many things appear fundamentally unpredictable.
4. Einstein invented relativity.
The theory, as we know it, was developed by Lorentz, Poincare, and Minkowski. They were years ahead of Einstein in every detail.
5. Information is conserved.
No, information is nothing like conserved quantities like energy and momentum. Conservation laws come from symmetry princples, and there isn't one for information. If you burn a book, the information is gone.
6. Quantum entanglement is a resource.
Entanglement can be puzzling, but the idea that it is a resource that can be brought to do useful things, like cryptography, teleportation, and computation is yet to be proved.
7. String theory generalizes the standard model and gravity.
This is just wishful thinking. It has not found any relation to the real world.
8. Many-worlds is the minimalist QM interpretation.
It is not even an interpretation. It takes QM, with its useful predictions, and replaces it with a theory that eliminates the predictions and says that anything is possible.
9. The universe has infinities and singularities.
Mathematical models often have singularities at the center of black holes, and at the beginning of the Big Bang. Also, quantum fields have infinities before they have been renormalized. None of these are observed. And the idea that there are infinitely many copies of yourself floating around the universe is just fanciful nonsense.
10. The quantum world is discrete.
Bohr said there is no quantum world. QM uses continous variables. It only appears discrete when you take measurements, as we observe eigenvalues and they are sometimes discrete.

What did I miss? I am sure there are many others.

Krauss Explains Extra Dimensions

Lawrence Krauss is one of the best public expositors of Physics, but I was disappointed by this interview.

3:29 and it was Einstein's genius to realize 3:31 well they're both right. Maxwell's right 3:34 and Galileo's right. what can what gives 3:37 here and he said well maybe it's the way 3:40 we measure space and time. maybe space 3:43 and time are personal things and they 3:45 depend upon your motion and in order to 3:48 get a measurement so each person's space 3:50 is in some and time in some sense unique 3:52 to them and that was the The Genesis of 3:55 special relativity

No, that was not the genesis of special relativity. That describes what Lorentz published in 1895, and Einstein's paper was not until 1905. Lorentz used Maxwell's equations to show how space and time can change to make observations independent of velocity of the frame, such as with the Michelson-Morley experiment.

Perhaps Krauss would object that Lorentz did not say that the theory is about the way we measure space and time. But Einstein did not either. That was done by Poincare and Minkowski.

there's an 4:21 absolute in the sense that that if you 4:24 think of the world as 4:26 four-dimensional time being an extra 4:28 dimension 4:30 then when I'm moving with respect to you 4:32 what I'm really kind of doing is 4:34 rotating in this four-dimensional space 4:36 so my space is your time and your time 4:38 is my space a little bit and when those 4:40 get mixed up you explain the wonderful 4:43 results of Einstein and so we now say 4:46 that we live in a four-dimensional 4:47 melski space

That idea was Poincare's in 1905, and built on by Minkowski in 1907. Einstein did not have anything to do with it.

If instead of living in 6:34 a four-dimensional world we live in a 6:35 five-dimensional world and somehow 6:37 electromagnetism is related to the 6:38 curvature of that extra Dimension that 6:40 you can't perceive well two people uh 6:44 kuta a mathematician and Klein a 6:46 physicist independently in in 1919 to 6:50 1926 came up with the same idea and 6:52 showed that this idea actually worked 6:54 mathematically if you assumed we live in 6:57 a five-dimensional universe and this 6:58 extra Dimension was invisible I and in 7:00 fact curled up on a very small 7:02 scale it was Klein who wanted it curved 7:04 up in a very small scale by the way and 7:07 I don't know if you can figure out why 7:08 kuta didn't didn't care he was a 7:10 mathematician why did he care the clein 7:12 wanted to say if there's an extra 7:13 Dimension if you don't see it there has 7:15 to be a reason and if it's curled up on 7:17 a very small scale then you can't 7:18 measure it in in in in experiments and 7:20 we can talk about that but in any case 7:22 if there was that extra Dimension and 7:24 and you could discuss a curvature in 7:26 that extra Dimension that you couldn't 7:28 directly see it's Remnant in the 7:30 four-dimensional its projection on the 7:32 four-dimensional universe that we can 7:33 see would give the equations of 7:35 electromagnetism it was an remarkable 7:38 idea turned out to be wrong because it 7:41 it also gave a little change to gravity 7:43 which we don't see and it got left aside

It was only wrong because Kaluza and Klein botched it up. Hermann Weyl was ahead of them with a similar idea in 1918, and that idea was essentially the modern gauge theory of electromagnetism. It can be viewed as a fifth dimension of spacetime, and it is not wrong.

He then rambles about string thoery having 22 extra dimensions. That theory really is wrong, or as Peter Woit would say, not even wrong.

You could say that the Standard Model has a group structure U(1)xSU(2)xSU(3) with 12 extra dimensions. We do not see them as spatial dimensions, as they have symmetries such that we only see the curvature effects. In that sense, we do have extra dimensions that are mostly hidden because of symmetries.

Here is Krauss giving a similar explanation of extra dimensions. He describes the extra dimensions as something that theorists have liked since 1919, but which have always failed. Maybe new accelerator experiments will detect extra dimensions.

It baffles me that he can say all this without mentioning that our very best modern Physics theory, the Standard Model, is a theory of extra dimensions. He talks about extra dimensions that are too small or too big or obscured for some other reason. In the Standard Model, the extra dimensions are obscured by gauge symmetries.

A Century of Quantum Mechanics

Physicist Sean M. Carroll writes a high-profile Nature essay:

Why even physicists still don’t understand quantum theory 100 years on

Quantum mechanics depicts a counter-intuitive reality in which the act of observation influences what is observed — and few can agree on what that means.

He did not write those titles. He does not deliver on the titled promises.

PHysicists understand quantum mechanics just fine, and there is broad agreement on what it means. There is a faction of philosopher wannabes like him who believe in many-worlds or some other goofy variant, but the real work is being done by those who follow Copenhagen or say shut up and calculate.

Most of what he writes is reasonable:

It was the German physicist Werner Heisenberg who, in 1925, first put forward a comprehensive version of quantum mechanics. ... So it is fair to celebrate 2025 as the true centenary of quantum theory. ...

Whereas in classical physics, a particle such as an electron has a real, objective position and momentum at any given moment, in quantum mechanics, those quantities don’t, in general, ‘exist’ in any objective way before that measurement. Position and momentum are things that can be observed, but they are not pre-existing facts. That is quite a distinction. The most vivid implication of this situation is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, introduced in 1927, which says that there is no state an electron can be in for which we can perfectly predict both its position and its momentum ahead of time2.

This is because position and momentum are non-commuting operators.

He starts to go off the rails:

As a result, the probability of observing one particle to be somewhere can depend on where we observe another particle to be, and this remains true no matter how far apart they are.

Actually, classical probabilities work the same way. Probabilities nearly always depend on other observations.

Bohr, along with Heisenberg, was willing to forgo any talk about what was ‘really happening’, focusing instead on making predictions for what will happen when something is measured.

The bizarre logic of the many-worlds theory

The latter perspective gave rise to ‘epistemic’ interpretations of quantum theory. The views of Bohr and Heisenberg came to be known as the Copenhagen interpretation, which is very close to what physicists teach in textbooks today.

Yes, that is the mainstream view. Science is all about what can be observed, not speculations about imaginary parallel universes.

Mercifully, the paywall blocked me from reading the rest, which presumably rambles into many-worlds nonsense. I can only get the above link to a 2019 essay:

At the beginning of Something Deeply Hidden, Sean Carroll cites the tale of the fox and the grapes from Aesop’s Fables. A hungry fox tries to reach a bunch of grapes dangling from a vine. Finding them beyond his grasp, but refusing to admit failure, the fox declares the grapes to be inedible and turns away. That, Carroll declares, encapsulates how physicists treat the wacky implications of quantum mechanics.

Carroll wants that to stop. The fox can reach the grapes, he argues, with the many-worlds theory.

That is where we get the term "sour grapes". In this case, the many-worlds theory really is inedible. Carroll is misleading everyone.

Update: Nature magazine also has an essay on Two-Eyed Seeing:

This Perspective focuses on the integration of traditional Indigenous views with biomedical approaches to research and care for brain and mental health, and both the breadth of knowledge and intellectual humility that can result when the two are combined.

It means mixing science with voodoo.

Three Geometrizations in History

Juliano C. S. Neves writes a New paper:

There have been three geometrizations in history. The first one is historically due to the Pythagorean school and Plato, the second one comes from Galileo, Kepler, Descartes and Newton, and the third geometrization of nature begins with Einstein's general relativity. Here the term geometrization of nature means the conception according to which nature (with its different meanings) is largely described by using geometry. ...

Undoubtedly, the history of the geometrized nature begins in the ancient Greek period. ...

Then the third movement into the geometrization of nature begins with Einstein (1916) and general relativity, which I call geometrization 3.0. However, following Lehmkuhl (2014), contrary to the common opinion in physics, it is worth emphasizing that Einstein did not consider general relativity as the theory that geometrizes gravity. But, as we will see, general relativity brings a lot of geometrical concepts to describe the phenomena.

For attempts to take geometry out of general relativity, see Anderson 1999 and Brown 2009.

So if Einstein did not geometrize gravity, who did? Everyone else accepted relativity as a geometric theory.

Brown explains that Einstein took decades to come around to the geometric view that Poincare and Minkowski had in 1905-8.

Why this lapse on Einstein’s part? I wonder if it was not because of the misgivings he had about the way he formulated his 1905 paper, misgivings which grew throughout his life. First, there is little doubt that right from the beginning he was aware of the limited explanatory power of what he called “principle theories” like thermodynamics. Secondly, when he confessed in 1949 to having committed in 1905 the “sin” of treating rods and clocks as primitive entities, and not as “moving atomic configurations” subject to dynamical analysis, he was merely repeating a point of self-correction he made in 1921. Finally, it is fairly clear that Einstein was increasingly unhappy with the central role that electrodynamics, and in particular the behaviour of light, played in his 1905 paper.

This last aspect of Einstein’s reasoning brings us to the main point of this subsection. Einstein wrote in 1935:

The special theory of relativity grew out of the Maxwell electromagnetic equations. ... [but] the Lorentz transformation, the real basis of special-relativity theory, in itself has nothing to do with Maxwell theory. (Einstein 1935).

Similarly, in a 1955 letter to Born, Einstein would write that the “Lorentz transformation tran- scended its connection with Maxwell’s equations and has to do with the nature of space and time in general”. He went on to stress that “the Lorentz-invariance is a general condition for any physical theory.” (Born et al. 1971, p. 248). What is clear is that for the mature Einstein, the principle of Lorentz covariance, which applies to all the non-gravitational interactions, not just electrody- namics, is the heart of special relativity.8 In stressing this point, Einstein was distancing himself from his formulation of 1905 with its emphasis on fundamental phenomenological postulates (one of which being the “constancy” of the speed of light relative to the “rest” frame).

So Einstein finally adopted in 1935 the geometric view of relativity that Poincare published in 1905 and Minkowski improved and popularized in 1908. In that view, the Lorentz transformation is a symmetry of spacetime. It is a symmetry for any physical theory, and not just the Maxwell theory.

My theory is that the third geometrization occurred with Poincare and Minkowski in 1905-8. They both described it as a radical break from existing thinking. Poincare said that the new geometry was like Copernicus replacing Ptolemy, and Minkowski said that henceforth space and time will be united. The essence of special relativity is that there is a non-euclidean geometry on spacetime. Einstein missed it, but it is what make special relativity so popular with others.

Here is Sean M. Carroll describing the geometry of relativity, in his recent book:

But he didn’t go quite so far as to advocate joining space and time into a single unified space-time. That step was left to his former university professor, Hermann Minkowski, in the early 20th century. The arena of special relativity is today known as Minkowski space-time. ...

But, says relativity, just as the distance as the crow flies is generally different from the distance you actually travel between two points in space, the duration of time that you experience generally won’t be the same as the universal coordinate time. You experience an amount of time that can be measured by a clock that you carry with you on the journey. This is the proper time along the path. And the duration measured by a clock, just like the distance traveled as measured by the odometer on your car, will depend on the path you take. ...

The difference is this: In space, a straight line describes the shortest distance between two points. In space-time, by contrast, a straight path yields the longest elapsed time between two events. It’s that flip from shortest distance to longest time that distinguishes time from space.

Euclidean geometry has the shortest distance between two points is given by the Pythagorean theorem. Distances in the non-euclidean geometry of spacetime work differently.

Of course he does have to give some goofy reason to credit Einstein, as everyone else does:

The development of relativity is usually attributed to Albert Einstein, but ...

Einstein’s contribution in 1905 was to point out that the ether had become completely unnecessary, and that we could better understand the laws of physics without it.

No, this is a myth. What Einstein said about the aether was nearly identical to what Lorentz said ten years earlier. That is, they both rejected theories that depended on aether motion or motion against the aether, and their theories avoided mentioning the aether. Einstein could never explain how his theory was different from Lorentz's. Poincare and Minkowski did explain how their relativity theory was different, and the difference was non-euclidean geometry, not aether.

Professor has Trump Derangement Syndrome

Scott Aaronson is going nuts again, and posting crazy anti-Trump rants.

I cannot even figure out what he is complaining about. I expect him to complain for four years, no matter what.

He is entitled to his political views, but he cannot explain how Kamala Harris would have been better than Donald Trump on anything.

He believes in many-worlds theory, so I should not expect him to be rational about anything.

Update: Here is a physicist trying to reason with his fellow academic leftists:

The thoughtlessness of guilt by association

We cannot judge ideas on the basis of the people who happen to hold them

I am surprised that this needs to be said. You would think that professors would be trained to judge ideas on their merit. No, he says the leftists are engaged in an ideological war, where leftists favor transgendering children in order to maintain an opposition to right-wingers like Trump.

Summarizing Many-Worlds Theory

A new paper summarizes many-worlds:

Revolutionizing Quantum Mechanics: The Birth and Evolution of the Many-Worlds Interpretation

The Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics has captivated physicists and philosophers alike since its inception in the mid-20th century. This paper explores the historical roots, evolution, and implications of the MWI within the context of quantum theory. ...

One common critique of the MWI is its apparent lack of empirical testability. Critics argue that the MWI’s postulate of multiple parallel universes is inherently unobservable, making it difficult or impossible to distinguish experimentally from other interpretations of quantum mechanics. ...

Another criticism centers on the ontological status of the branching worlds in the MWI. Critics question whether the proliferation of parallel universes is necessary or justified, arguing that it introduces unnecessary complexity and violates principles of parsimony [32].

Yes, those criticisms are devastating.

One of the key impacts of the MWI is its resolution of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. Unlike other interpretations that invoke wavefunction collapse or hidden variables to explain the transition from quantum to classical behavior, the MWI provides a deterministic and unitary description of the evolution of the quantum state. According to the MWI, measurements are merely instances of branching within the multiverse, with each possible outcome manifesting in a separate branch.

Saying that we just see one branch is no more satisfying that saying that we just see the collapse. It fails to solve the measurement problem in the same way. One theory says the wavefunction collapses, and the other says it splits into branches. The differnce is that MWI posits the existence of zillions of other branches we do not see.

Furthermore, the MWI has profound implications for our understanding of quantum superposition and entanglement. In the MWI, superposition is viewed as a fundamental feature of quantum systems, with different branches of the multiverse corresponding to different states of the system.

We do not see those other branches, so they cannot explain entanglement.

Moreover, the MWI has led to new insights into the nature of probability in quantum mechanics. In the MWI, probabilities arise from the relative frequencies of different outcomes across multiple branches of the multiverse, rather than from inherent randomness or observer-dependent collapses of the wavefunction. This perspective offers a coherent and objective interpretation of probability in quantum mechanics, resolving longstanding debates about the nature of quantum uncertainty.

Here it goes off the rails. The MWI folks have never been able to make sense out of different branches having different frequencies or probabilities. They cannot calculate probabilities that way.

Additionally, the MWI raises philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness and free will. If every possible outcome of every quantum measurement occurs in a separate universe, then every possible choice or decision is realized in some branch of the multiverse. This perspective challenges traditional views of free will as the ability to choose between alternative possibilities, suggesting that free will may be illusory or relative within the context of the MWI.

Nothing good has come out of those questions.

It is an embarrassment that modern Physics takes this nonsense seriously. It is like a child's fairy tale. You get to imagine whatever you please, with no connection to reality.

The biggest failure is its misunderstanding of science and probability. Science is all about figuring out what can happen, and what is likely. You get the probability by maybe enumerating equally likely events, and dividing the count of predicted events by the count of all possibilities. Or something similar. MWI throws that all out the window, says all possible events are real, and refuses to say that any worlds are more likely than any others. It cannot give probabilities. It is profoundly contrary to the scientific method, and cannot be used for anything but stimulating a philosophical discussion.

Dr. Bee Pushes Superdeterminism Again

Sabine Hossenfelder discusses an obscure paper on quantum momentum, and then argues:

The total momentum is the same in both cases. But the 5:34 change is non-local. And that isn’t compatible with Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. 5:41 The only way you can solve this problem is to violate measurement independence, 5:47 that’s what’s sometimes called superdeterminism. It's probably, 5:52 by Bell’s theorem, the only way to fulfil local conservation laws in a measurement process. 6:00 This is so obvious. And all I can do is repeat this, hoping that eventually one day, 6:07 they’ll understand it. But if that day comes, we can then say that science progresses one 6:13 YouTube video at a time and you made it happen, so don’t forget to subscribe.

She says that the only theory compatible with quantum mechanics and relativity is superdeterminism, and this was proved by Bell's theorem.

This is just nonsense. There is no superdeterministic theory that is compatible with quantum mechanics, or relativity, or anything else.

Bell opened up the possiblity of Physics being governed by a local hidden variable superdeterminism theory. But no one believes in either hidden variables or superdeterminism.

She gets some criticism for talking about science that is outside her expertise, but this is squarely within her core expertise. She should know better.

Typical Atmospheric Mind

FBI assessment of Paul Erdos:

[Erdos] is in the abstract field of mathematics and is purely a mathematician with typical atmospheric mind as related to factual things, that is, he is of the genius type who lives within his mental scope, and that it is difficult to know him personally.”

More in this recent video. Apparently they wondered why he avoided national loyalties, and how he has good ties in Communist countries.

The Existential Crisis Iceberg

Youtuber Alex O'Connor summarizes The Existential Crisis Iceberg.

There is an assortment of philosophical theories that deny our existence, and make everything not what they appear to be. I have discussed examples here, such as the simulation hypothesis, many-worlds theory, and superdeterminism. There are more.

Most of these cannot really be proved true or false, but believing them requires abandoning science as we know it.

Yes, I think it is beneficial to be aware of these theories, even it is kooky to believe in them.

Many worlds offers quantum immortality. Hugh Everett believed in this, reportedly. He would die in various branches of the universal wave function, but there would always be a branch in which he lives, and his consciousness would persist in that branch, so he would be immortal.

If you really believed this nonsense, you could buy a lottery ticket, and rig a machine to kill you if you do not win the jackpot. Your consciousness will then go with the branch that wins the lottery, and you will be rich.

Many physicists say that they believe in many-worlds theory, but they sure do not act like it.

Here is David Deutsch, trying to explain away the quantum suicide paradox. He describes a scenario, where you can stay at home and risk getting killed by a meteor from outer space, or drive to the grocery store and get killed in a car crash. A normal person would say that the meteor is so unlikely as to not worry about it.

But if you believe in many-worlds, it does not make sense to compare the probabilities of the parallel worlds. Both are just as real as each other. So why not play Russian roulette, or buy that deadly lottery ticket?

He says that he solved this problem. He says you have to make decision somehow, and a rational person will make decisions as if the probabilities are meaningful, so we get the same human behavior whether we believe in many-worlds or not.

I am not persuaded. Maybe I did not understand his argument. Listen for yourself.

Statistician Denies Probability Exists

Some say that quantum probabiliities are real and physical, while other say that all probabilities are just subjective estimates of human belief. I think neither is quite right.

David Spiegelhalter writes in SciAm:

Probability Probably Doesn’t Exist

All of statistics and much of science depends on probability—an astonishing achievement, considering no one’s really sure what it is ...

My argument is that any practical use of probability involves subjective judgements. ...

At the sub-atomic level, the mathematics indicates that causeless events can happen with fixed probabilities (although at least one interpretation states that even those probabilities express a relationship with other objects or observers, rather than being intrinsic properties of quantum objects). ...

There is a limited range of well-controlled, repeatable situations of such immense complexity that, even if they are essentially deterministic, fit the frequentist paradigm by having a probability distribution with predictable properties in the long run. These include standard randomizing devices, such as roulette wheels, shuffled cards, spun coins, thrown dice and lottery balls, as well as pseudo-random number generators, which rely on non-linear, chaotic algorithms to give numbers that pass tests of randomness.

In the natural world, we can throw in the workings of large collections of gas molecules which, even if following Newtonian physics, obey the laws of statistical mechanics; and genetics, in which the huge complexity of chromosomal selection and recombination gives rise to stable rates of inheritance. It might be reasonable in these limited circumstances to assume a pseudo-objective probability — ‘the’ probability, rather than ‘a’ (subjective) probability. ...

In several of those situations, a math calculation gives a probability that is accurate to several digits. This clearly reflects an objective physical reality, and not just a human belief. On the other hand, I don't think that probability is as real as energy or momentum. Probability cannot be directly measured, but only indirectly estimated by running repeated samples.

The proponents of many-worlds theory also deny that probably exists, for other reasons. They believe that all possibilities happen in their own universes, and that it makes no sense to say any are more likely than others.

Mathematical Truths can be Proved

SciAm gives this explanation of Goedel's theorem:

You will never be able to prove every mathematical truth. For me, this incompleteness theorem, discovered by Kurt Gödel, is one of the most incredible results in mathematics. It may not surprise everyone — there are all sorts of unprovable things in everyday life — but for mathematicians, this idea was a shock. After all, they can construct their own world from a few basic building blocks, the so-called axioms. Only the rules they have created apply there, and all truths are made up of these basic building blocks and the corresponding rules. If you find the right framework, experts long believed, you should therefore be able to prove every truth in some way.

But in 1931 Gödel demonstrated otherwise. There will always be truths that elude the basic mathematical framework and are impossible to prove. And this is not a purely abstract finding, without implications for practical situations. Shortly after Gödel’s groundbreaking work, the first provably unprovable problems emerged. For example, it will never be possible to clarify how many real numbers exist within the mathematical framework currently in use.

This is a typical explanation, and I know what they are trying to say, but it is misleading.

In spite of this, it may well be possible to prove every mathematical truth from the axioms, in some way. How would we ever know that it is the truth, unless it is proved in some way? It just might not be provable within a particular system.

People read this and conclude that the method of mathematical axioms and proofs does not work. But it does. Every provable statement is true in every model, and every statement true in every model can be proved from the axioms. Goedel proved that. That is what justifies using first order logic as the basis for mathematics.

ZFC serves as a suitable axiom system for all of mathematics.

Even before Goedel, it was known that set theory had countable models, so a model of the real numbers might have only countably many reals in use. Yes, it seems strange, but it does not undermine the use of axioms and proofs to find truths about reals. The set that enumerates those reals is not in the model.

People say it is shocking that a mathematical system cannot prove, from within the system, its self-consistency. But not really. Such a proof would not make much sense anyway. Inconsistent theories can prove their own consistency, as they can prove anything.

Goedel's incompleteness theorem was indeed a profound and important theorem, but popularizations of it are so misleading as to be not helpful.

Quantum Computer Stocks Rise and Fall

Quantum computer startup stocks have been skyrocketing, as Dr. Bee notes, but Nvidia just threw cold water:

The shares of IonQ Inc. and other companies linked to quantum computing tumbled on Wednesday, after Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said that “very useful” quantum computers are likely decades away.

“If you kind of said 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that would probably be on the early side. If you said 30, it’s probably on the late side,” Huang said in a question-and-answer session during Nvidia’s analyst day. “If you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it.”

Shares in Quantum Computing Inc., D-Wave Quantum Inc. and Rigetti Computing Inc. dropped more than 30%, while IonQ fell about 29%. These stocks have soared in recent months amid excitement about the technology’s potential, which was heightened last month following a quantum computing breakthrough by Alphabet Inc.

Nvidia has been profiting, a little, from the quantum computer hype and people simulate the QC on its processors.

I think that having a useful quantum computer in 20 years is optimistic. People do not usually invest, based on waiting 20 years to get a return.

Update: Dr. Quantum Supremacy weighs in:

yes, there’s a lot still to be done, and twenty years might well be correct. ...

On the other hand, I can’t say with certainty that high valuations are wrong! ...

For whatever it’s worth, my own family’s money is just sitting in index funds and CDs. I have no quantum computing investments of any kind.

Update: One of those QC companies responds:

Today’s classical computing hardware is limited by computational capacity and power requirements in ways that will likely prohibit society from ever being able to solve some of its most pressing problems.

IonQ’s current #AQ 36 Forte Enterprise systems are already providing insight to solutions for customers today, and our upcoming #AQ 64 Tempo systems in 2025 and next-generation #AQ 256 systems will enable us to tackle increasingly complex problems to deliver near-term business value. One of the areas facing the most significant potential disruption is strong AI, where we believe natively quantum AI will outperform classical AI.

No, quantum AI will not outperform classical AI in the next 50 years.

More Useless Quantum Teleportation

Quantum teleportation is a technology in search of an application.

News story:

An engineering team at Northwestern University has achieved a breakthrough in quantum teleportation, demonstrating the feasibility of transmitting quantum information alongside classic internet traffic. As research advances, we could enter a new era in communication technology, where quantum and traditional networks can coexist to offer unprecedented levels of security and speed.

Engineers at Northwestern University have demonstrated quantum teleportation over a fiber optic cable already carrying Internet traffic. This feat, published in the journal Optica, opens up new possibilities for combining quantum communication with existing Internet infrastructure. It also has major implications for the field of advanced sensing technologies and quantum computing applications.

Quantum teleportation, a process that harnesses the power of quantum entanglement, enables an ultra-fast and secure method of information sharing between distant network users. Unlike traditional communication methods, quantum teleportation does not require the physical transmission of particles. Instead, it relies on entangled particles exchanging information over great distances.

How can anyone make sense of this?

We already have cables efficiently and securely sending internet traffic. Now Northwestern engineers have figured how to use those cables to send messages over those cables without sending any particles! And they do it without interfering with the internet traffic on those cables! If they are not sending anything over the cables, whe do they need them?

I think I see what they are trying to say, but I do not see how it is of any value. It does not "offer unprecedented levels of security and speed." It is just a curiosity.