Einstein Objecting to using Observables

Einstein's unhappiness with quantum mechanics was already clear in 1926, within a year of the theory being formulated.

Heisenberg told this story:

In the spring of 1926, I was invited to address this distinguished body [University of Berlin] on the new quantum mechanics, ...

[Einstein said] "What you have told us sounds extremely strange. You assume the existence of electrons inside the atom, and you are probably quite right to do so. But you refuse to consider their orbits, even though we can observe electron tracks in a cloud chamber. I should very much like to hear more about your reasons for making such strange assumptions."

“We cannot observe electron orbits inside the atom," I must have replied, "but the radiation which an atom emits during discharges enables us to deduce the frequencies and corresponding amplitudes of its electrons. After all, even in the older physics wave numbers and amplitudes could be considered substitutes for electron orbits. Now, since a good theory must be based on directly observable magnitudes, I thought it more fitting to restrict myself to these, treating them, as it were, as representatives of the electron orbits."

"But you don't seriously believe," Einstein protested, "that none but observable magnitudes must go into a physical theory?"

[Heisenberg] "Isn't that precisely what you have done with relativity?" I asked in some surprise. "After all, you did stress the fact that it is impermissible to speak of absolute time, simply because absolute time cannot be observed; that only clock readings, be it in the moving reference system or the system at rest, are relevant to the determination of time."

"Possibly I did use this kind of reasoning," Einstein admitted, "but it is nonsense all the same. Perhaps I could put it more diplomatically by saying that it may be heuristically useful to keep in mind what one has actually observed. But on principle, it is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe.

Einstein is credited with abolishing the aether, absolute space, absolute time, etc., but maybe that is not how he thought about it at all. He went on to try to develop unified field theories that were completely detached from observation.

Generating Quantum Randomness

I posted about someone claiming to prove quantum randomness, and now the journal Nature has published an article on Experimental randomness amplification. The article is paywalled, but here is the 2024 preprint.

In this context, randomness is defined as being fundamentally unpredictable, which means that the laws of physics forbid the prediction of its values. ...

Conventional random number generators, rooted in classical physical processes, grapple with a foundational concern — the potential for adversaries to predict their outputs by scrutinizing the microscopic degrees of freedom, thereby eroding their essential unpredictability.

Quantum-mechanical processes, on the other hand, feature innate randomness and therefore offer a natural ground to build such devices.

This is foolishness. There is no law of physics forbidding prediction.

When you measure X-component of electron spin, then the wave function collapses, and the Y-component has 50-50 chances. Heisenberg uncertainty prohibits measuring the X and Y components at the same time. So the theory is sometimes not able to predict spin. But that is not quite saying that prediction is forbidden. Maybe there is some way to predict, and we do not know how yet.

This paper does not even talk about spin. It merely assumes that you are doing Bell test experiments. Under some assumptions, you can make some random choices, and get even more random outputs.

This method could be used to generate random numbers for practical purposes like cryptography, but I do not think it is any better than tossing coins, or pointing a webcam at a lava lamp.

The Evidence for Quantum Supremacy

A newly revised paper reviews the outstanding evidence for quantum supremacy:

A brief history of quantum vs classical computational advantage
Ryan LaRose

In this review article we summarize all experiments claiming quantum computational advantage to date. Our review highlights challenges, loopholes, and refutations appearing in subsequent work to provide a complete picture of the current statuses of these experiments. In addition, we also discuss theoretical computational advantage in example problems such as approximate optimization and recommendation systems. Finally, we review recent experiments in quantum error correction -- the biggest frontier to reach experimental quantum advantage in Shor's algorithm.

So has it been proved, or not? No, not really.

It seems at this moment in history we are just on the boundary between quantum and classical computational advantage, and in the near future we expect the status of computational advantage to continue shifting between quantum and classical. We hope that this brief history helps to propel readers to the research frontier and develop new ideas which advance both classical and quantum computation.

There is still no convincing experiment that quantum computers are possible.

I would have predicted that by 2026, quantum computing would be proved possible, or investor money would dry up. I was wrong. Investor enthusiasm for QC is stronger than ever. The Trump administration just instested $2 billion into QC, mostly in startup companies. There are about five of these companies worth about $10B apiece. Most of them went public in sneaky financial maneuvers where they did not have to disclose all their risks.

New Scientist magazine just posted a video on Quantum Computers Are More Dangerous Than You Think:

On Q-Day, your privacy will be at stake. This is the moment when quantum computers break the encryption protecting the modern world, bank transactions become readable, private messages get exposed and even state secrets become vulnerable.

For years it sounded like sci-fi, something that was decades away from happening, if it happened at all. But now, research suggests that we may be hurtling towards Q-Day at a rapid speed.

In this video, New Scientist uncovers why many experts think the countdown to Q-Day may already have begun, and explains how quantum computers work and why these machines could both threaten the security of the modern world and unlock breakthroughs that could change our lives. Special thanks to Quantum Motion for letting us film at its facilities.

If and when the countdown to Q-day starts, I think that we will have about ten years. Only the computer security companies, NIST, and the US Dept of War need to prepare now.

For most people, SSL/TLS/SSH is just a way of getting assurance that a web site is real, and that no one is stealing a password or credit card number. If Q-day hits, you will just update your browser and not notice the difference.

The Bitcoin blockchain would have to be restructured, and that is feasible as long as there is a consensus on how to do it. A consensus could take a couple of years.

New Carroll Podcast to Defend Many-Worlds

Sean M. Carroll is frustrated by physicists preferring Copenhagen over many-worlds, so he posted a podcast with his views:

Solo: Looking Quantum Mechanics in the Eyeball | Mindscape 355

One of the major obstacles to understanding quantum mechanics is the difficulty we have in simply accepting what the theory itself is telling us. The problem is that we know what the everyday world looks like -- stuff, arranged in space, evolving through time. So we can't resist the temptation to impose that picture on the quantum description, even if it's not actually there. In this solo episode I talk about what it means to take quantum mechanics at face value, and the difficult work involved in understanding how the everyday world of our experience fits into the picture.

For a more technical description, he refers to his paper, Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space.

This podcast is a defense of many-worlds theory. He says people believe in textbook QM because they are stupid:

And I suspect that most of the people in the physics survey who said that they're Copenhagenists don't actually have that view themselves, but mostly because they haven't thought about it very carefully.

He has learned that he loses his audience if he talks about the parallel universes too much.

[24:35] Many worlds by contrast and we're not going to get into the worlds aspect of many worlds that much because it's actually not relevant for what we're talking about today. I've often said that many worlds is not mostly about the worlds. The worlds come along. They're there, no doubt. But what many worlds is really about is saying there's no such thing as collapse.

I think the problem here is that he makes several serious conceptual errors.

First, he misunderstands probability. Probability is not a real physical thing, like energy or temperature, but it is essential to all scientific theories. Let me repeat. All scientific theories are based on probability predictions.

You might say: No, when Nasa sent the Artemis II rocket around the Moon, it was all deterministic Newtonian physics.

I say: Not correct. Nasa calculated the splashdown location as a probability distribution.

Next, a probability is a prediction that something will happen, with other things not happening. If I say a coin toss has a 50% chance of heads, I am referring to getting heads, and not getting tails. If I get heads, I can then disregard any possibility of that toss being tails. For example, if I toss a coin three times, and the first is heads, then I can immediately eliminate the possibility of three straight tails.

The core concept behind many worlds does not even have anything to do with QM. It is: Throw away probabilities. Throw away definite outcomes. Assume all possibilities happen, in parallel universes.

If you toss a coin and get heads, it just means that you are in the universe with heads, and a parallel universe has tails. You cannot even say that the universes are equally likely.

When Carroll says (above) that "there's no such thing as collapse", he means that if you toss a coin and get heads, you cannot say that tails did not happen.

Carroll has no evidence for anything he says. His big argument is that it somehow simplifies QM to never predict any probabilities, never do any experiments, never accept any outcomes, and never reject any possibilities.

By eliminating QM's relations to the real world, he says we get more a pure and abstract theory where we do not have to worry about issues like what defines a measurement.

At 1:42:20, he denies that there should be any experimental test for many-worlds theory. He says "that's just not how science works."

On YouTube, a comment points out:

A very good introduction to the subject, but you dodge all the important critiques:

- Probability (Born Rule) is a huge problem for Many Worlds, but I know you are working on that.

- The Schrodinger equation is obviously wrong because spacetime is an assumed background. You dealt with space/locality a few times. There is work on entanglement creating space, and I agree so far, but how can QM/QFT get time to be emergent when it is a parameter not observable? (momentum is just a thick slice of time for mass position? - someone needs to handle that. What is the calculus of position and momentum in background-free local (infinitesimal) proper time?

- It seems that Hilbert Space changes dimension with the number of 'entities' in the system. But we know that 'entities' are variable (n particle quantum number is not defined). So we must immediately leap to the HS of the whole universe: a total matter/field equation that must be fixed, which defines everything (Wheeler/DeWitt). Anything less becomes some strange variable dimensional complex space - I don't buy that. [My personal world is computation and variable size matrices are just ... mathematically impossible. ] What happens with particle creation/destruction and second quantization - hint total hack!

- I don't see any contact with gravity - yes, AdS/CFT and holography, maybe perhaps with actual finite dS boundary defined by SR light cones, etc. but that has to emerge from large (in)finite HS, I don't buy it (yet). My tendency is to trust/believe the criticism from GR gravitationalists (Sir Roger, et al). I don't think you have addressed any of those criticisms (yet). You have to admit that background-free GR is much much more beautiful than background-dependent QFT (yeah, okay, subjective).

- Of all the symmetries in the SM, matter/antimatter and chirality asymmetry are the frontier. Yes, RH/LH neutrinos are vague/undecided/outside SM, and (maybe heavy dark) RH neutrinos could be the answer (cue Neil Turok) but GR people also have tentative answers for the background (Twistors, PIN decompositions, etc) I don't hear solutions coming from pure QFT formalisms.

I could go on, but enough already.

Carroll's excuse for ignoring all these points is "I have to confess that the whole idea of steelmanning is not really my vibe". [10:00]

Einstein's Friend Wrote a Relativity Paper

Hector Giacomini writes a new paper:

This note examines an apparently unpublished manuscript on special relativity written by Conrad Habicht in 1914 and made available online by the ETH-Bibliothek Zürich in December 2024. To the best of my knowledge, no study of its content has yet been published. Habicht was one of Einstein's closest companions during the Bern years. ...

The manuscript offers a clear and pedagogical presentation of special relativity.

Habicht was a friend of Einstein before 1905, so this might have given insights on where Einstein got his relativity ideas. Unfortunately it does not.

Habicht’s manuscript is much closer to the 1907 exposition than to the original 1905 paper. The 1905 article is remarkably austere in its historical framing: it begins with the magnet-and-conductor asymmetry, formulates the two postulates, defines simultaneity, and proceeds directly to the transformation laws and their consequences. It contains no historical reconstruction of Lorentz’s theory, no explicit discussion of the Michelson–Morley experiment, and no narrative account of the ether problem. The 1907 review article, by contrast, restores much of this background. It places special relativity within the history of the conflict between the Galilean principle of relativity, Maxwell–Lorentz electrodynamics, the stationary ether, negative optical experiments, and Lorentz’s work....

Habicht’s manuscript shows that, within a circle personally close to Einstein, special relativity could be presented through the more historical, Lorentz-centered, and electrodynamical framework that Einstein himself had adopted only two years after the 1905 paper. This manuscript reminds us that the history of special relativity was not transmitted only through the paper of 1905, but also through later acts of exposition, recollection, simplification, and reorganization.

When Lorentz's work is presented, it is really hard to understand what Einstein did that was original. In 1907, the theory was known as Lorentz-Einstein theory.

There is no reference to Poincare. This is bizarre, as it is known that Habicht and Einstein read and discussed some of Poincare's papers before 1905. Poincare's 1904-05 relativity papers were widely read in Europe. It is likely that Einstein knew about them in 1905. Even if he did not, he certainly knew in 1907, and Habicht knew in 1914.

The above paper says "the history of special relativity was not transmitted only through the [Einstein] paper of 1905". That 1905 paper was not even historically very significant. Much more important were Lorentz's 1895 and 1904 papers, Poincare's 1898-1905 papers, and Minkowski's 1907-08 papers. Special relativity as we know it came from those papers, and almost nothing came from Einstein's 1905 paper.

I think this Habicht paper is mostly interesting for what it does not say. If Einstein had some of the main ideas behind special relativity before Lorentz and Poincare published them, then Habicht would be the most likely witness. This Habicht paper could have credited Einstein with having some of the ideas before 1905. It does not. It is only known that Einstein told Habicht he was preparing a paper that “provides a new conception of time and space,” in May 1905.

Giacomini wrote other papers on relativity history, discussed here and here. The first paper was just updated.

Distinguishing Newton's First and Second Laws

Isaac Newton's three laws of motion are: (1) if F = 0 then a = 0; (2) F = ma; (3) actions have reactions.

The first law is a trivial consequence of the second. Why did Newton bother to state it as a separate law?

A new paper answers the question:

On the independence problem of Newton's first law Ido Yavetz, Ehud Aharoni Newton's laws of motion pose an apparent problem, sometimes referred to as "the independence problem": the first law seems to be a simple consequence of the second law, raising the question of why it was included as a separate law. Numerous answers to this question have been proposed in the literature. The main contribution of this paper is a novel answer which we call "the formal explanation." Unlike previous accounts it relies on mathematical formalism and argues that the definitions of Euclidean geometry necessitate the inclusion of the first law. We provide evidence in support of this claim. A second contribution is a comprehensive review of previously suggested explanations, which so far have often been treated in a fragmented manner, and a discussion of the plausibility of the various answers.

It turns out that many people have addressed this, and this paper has a new explanation.

Roughly, mathematicians did not always treat zero as a number. There are many examples in Euclid's Elements where an argument gets restated for the zero and nonzero cases, when a modern textbook would unify them. This paper shows that Newton's usage is consistent with Euclid's.

Newton did not have vectors either, so he had to state the directional components of F = ma separately. One version of his second law was:

”A change in motion is proportional to the motive force impressed and takes place along the straight line in which that force is impressed.”

This is similar to Euclid, as he only wrote about nonzero quantities being proportional.

Randomness Cannot be Proved

There are scientists who believe in strict determinism, and say it is necessary to a scientific view. Albert Einstein was such a believer. In particular, they do not believe in free will.

I have criticized this as wrong, and I also point out the opposite view is also wrong.

Roman Schnabel writes in a new paper:

Experiments testing Bell inequalities [12, 13, 15] have proven that there are physical events that occur without a causal reason, i.e., that are truly random. The proof does not make any assumptions, in particular, the proof does not use QT but only pure mathematics and reproducible experimental observation. Regardless of the validity of QT, random numbers can be certified as truly random using an experiment to test Bell’s inequality [27]. It is remarkable that a truly random process can be proven as such. The only assumption made here was the reasonable but, in principle, unprovable one that there is no entity that has predetermined every single microscopic event in the universe in advance [28].

Others also say this -- that randomness has been proved, except for the silly possibility of superdeterminism.

The whole idea is absurd. No experiment or theorem could possibly prove true randomness. At best they could only prove that something is not predictable with the data and methods available.

Since QT is complete, as proven by Bell’s tests, radioactive decay is a truly random process. There is no causal reason, no cause that leads to decay before or after the half-life. If you start observing a single atom at any point in time, there is a genuine, equally weighted quantum mechanical randomness as to whether the atom decays before the half-life expires or only afterwards. ... Radioactive alpha decay occurs in a truly random manner, i.e., without cause, which is referred to as ‘spontaneous’ in quantum physics.

Yes, radioactivity seems about as random as anything could be. K-40 has a half-life of about a billion years. Decay statistics are predictable. But no one can predict when a particular potassium atom will decay.

Maybe the problem is that we do not the physics and technology to measure the K-40 state well enough. If we knew exactly how those quarks were bouncing around the nucleus a billion years ago, maybe we could predict when one will bust out.

I know that seems absurdly impractical, but the Bell argument says something else. It seems to say that some things are unpredictable if we assume a local hidden variable theory. Maybe that K-40 nucleus has a state that can predict the decay without using classical variables. Bell's theorem does not say anything about what can be done in a non-classical theory.

The paper has also been criticized:

The paper repeatedly suggests that Bell-test violations show that quantum theory is complete, that hidden variables cannot exist “in general,” and that some events happen without causal reason and are therefore truly random. We think these claims go too far. Bell’s theorem rules out local hidden-variable models only under a definite set of assumptions, including locality or factorizability, measurement independence, and an ordinary Kolmogorov probabilistic framework in which the relevant joint probabilities and expectation values are defined. It therefore does not, by itself, settle every broader question about causality, ontology, or completeness.

PBS TV just dropped a video on atomic clocks, and Sean M. Carroll makes his usual dopey appearance:

[0:00] [Narrator] Albert Einstein famously said that he didn't believe God plays dice with the universe. ...

[Carroll] [0:42] The basic idea of quantum mechanics, the thing that we really struggle with to get our heads around even as professional physicists, is that unlike any other version of physics, quantum mechanics separates what happens in a system when we're not observing it from what we see when we measure it. ...

[1:50] That opens up a whole world of questions. You know, what happens to the observational outcomes that are not observed? What picks out which outcome is going to happen? This is still what we're thinking about today.

He would argue that what happens is that the observational outcomes that are not observed slip off into a parallel universe.

I do not see how Carroll's struggles with QM relate to atomic clocks, the subject of the video. Yes, atomic clocks depend on the quantum mechanics of atoms having discrete energy levels, but Carroll's philosophy rants are not relevant.

Update: Carroll also has a new podcast on Free Will and Levels of Reality. Both Carroll and his guest are determinists who believe that free will is an illusion. Philosophers call this compatibilism.

Aaronson's Latest Lecture on Quantum Computers

Dr. Quantum Supremacy has posted a new lecture:

Title: The TRUTH About Quantum Computing
Date: 2026-05-13 @5:00PM

Abstract: Yes, scalable quantum computing should actually work! Sooner than many expect, which will create a huge headache when it breaks the encryption currently used to protect the Internet. But no, we don't think quantum computing can do most of what the popular articles promise in AI and optimization and so forth. Come to this talk to learn about why!

Somehow he has gotten to be the academic authority on whether quantum supremacy has been achieved, so I always check his latest opinion. He seems to be getting more confident, but it is still just a prediction. He says it may or may not be achieved. And that not to trust your RSA keys.

And another one:

Title: Scott Aaronson - Theoretical Computer Science and AI Alignment
Date: 2026-05-14 @1:00PM

Abstract: I'll survey some areas where I think theoretical computer science, math, and statistics can potentially contribute to the urgent quest to align powerful AI with humane values. These areas include: the watermarking of AI outputs, mechanistic interpretability (including Paul Christiano's "No-Coincidence Principle," and succinct digests of the training process to aid interpretability), and theoretical guarantees for out-of-distribution generalization.

Also on the subject, Dr. Bee dropped a new one today that starts:

In Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the time an object experiences depends on its acceleration. But time in quantum physics works more intuitively – it’s a universal parameter experienced by every object in the same way. In a new paper, physicists say they want to use a special type of clock to test that difference. Let’s take a look.

0:00 Quantum physics says that objects can be in two places at the same time. A group of physicists now says that they can also be at two times at the same time, ...

No, quantum physics does not say that objects can be in two places at the same time. It does not say that cats can be alive and dead at the same time.

Quantum computers are often explained this way, but QM really just estimates probabilities for different place. Once you observe the object, it is in just one place. Her statement is like saying: probability theory says that a tossed coin can be heads and tails at the same time.

Aaronson is an AI enthusiast: [11:40] AI is what "I would regard as, you know, maybe the most consequential technology, uh, that humans are ever going to be building."

Update: At the other extreme, Brian Greene released a new interview with an AI skeptic. The guy says that the AI LLMs are just a stupid trick of little value.

Sean M. Carroll Lectures on Many Worlds

NewScientist just posted a marathon series of math lectures, but almost half of it is from a 5-year-old lecture, Sean Carroll: The many worlds of quantum mechanics, that is not even on math. He gave a similar lecture last year, The Many Worlds of Quantum Mechanics | Dr. Sean Carroll.

My disagreements start early. Carroll says:

Why does 7:14 quantum mechanics have this reputation of being so hard? Here's the answer. There's an amazing feature of quantum mechanics that was nowhere to be found in classical mechanics which says that what you observe when you look at a system is not what you see.

What you see and what is really there are two different things. There's a difference between what a thing is when you're looking at it and when you're not looking at it. What you can possibly see is much less than what really exists. This sounds weird. This sounds bizarre. like it's very very different than what we had in classical mechanics.

He is trying to say that reality is the wave function, which is not directly observable.

The word see and observe are synonyms. I do not get his explanation. Even in classical physics, there are things we cannot see. We cannot see the center of the Earth.

You might think that in that 14:03 circumstance, since quantum mechanics is the foundational theory for all of modern physics, you might think that the quest to understand quantum mechanics at a deep level would be recognized as one of the most important things we could possibly do in physics. The people who devoted their lives to these would be academic superstars. You would have different universities trying to steal them away with highpriced packages and salaries and so forth. and it would be the highest prestige occupation you could have in physics.

Sadly, no, that is not what we do. It is the opposite of that. We have adopted a strategy of denial where if you're a physicist and you think hard about answering these questions, you are labeled not a physicist or a physicist who is too old to do important work anymore and you're sent off to retirement.

That is because the important issues were settled in 1930. People like Carroll want to be paid to do research on many-worlds, and real physicists consider it a complete waste of time.

36:37 Another what I think incorrect objection is that this idea cannot be tested. Can it be tested Right? It's important in science that we not just have good ideas, but that we compare these important ideas to data. Right? that we experimentally probe our ideas and people say you've invented all these new worlds. How do you ever test that idea?

The response to that is, I didn't invent any new worlds. I just took quantum mechanics seriously. The entirety of the assumptions that go into the many worlds theory is there are wave functions and they obey the Schroinger equation. That's it. Everything else is a consequence, a prediction and implication of those assumptions.

And are those assumptions testable? Hell yes they are. Of course they are. Whenever we do a quantum mechanical experiment, we're implicitly testing the many worlds interpretation.

If you want to falsify the many worlds interpretation, remember that the prediction of many worlds is wave functions don't collapse. They never do. They appear to collapse because of decoherence.

So there is no way to test many-worlds. He says it is logically correct, so everything you see confirms it. That's all.

As he admits, we see wave functions collapses. They would contradict many-worlds, except that he does not believe that they are really collapsing. He calls that a test.

This is all nonsense. I don't know why anyone takes him seriously.

Carroll also has to answer this new survey:

World's largest ever survey of physicists, results & reaction

May 12, 2026
What do physicists really think about the biggest mysteries in the universe?

In this video, leading voices in theoretical physics come together to unpack the results of the Big Mystery Survey—the largest survey ever conducted of professional physicists, prepared in collaboration with the American Physical Society's Physics Magazine." Featuring reactions from experts like Sean Carroll, Niayesh Afshordi and ,Ghazal Geshnizjani we find out what physicists really think about topics such as: What should we think about fine tuning ? What is dark matter? What is dark energy? How should we truly understand the Big Bang?What the right approach to quantum gravity ?

Whether you’re a physics enthusiast or just curious about the universe, this conversation offers a rare glimpse into how experts think about the unknown.

It reports 11% for many-worlds, 6% for Bohm pilot wave. These are the two crackpot interpretations. It is amusing to see how the leading popularizers of theoretical physics have views that are rejected by most physicists.

Carroll also has a lecture in this newly-released video on the physics of time and the history of relativity.

[4:50] All you have to do is entirely jigger your thoughts about what space and time are. And in fact, it wasn't until two years later when Hermann Minkowsky, who was a mathematician who had been one of Einstein's professors, said, "You know, the right way to think about Einstein's theory is to say that space and time aren't separate anymore. To imagine there's one thing called spacetime, and different people, different observers moving in different ways through the universe will divide it up into space and time differently.

There's no objective true fact about when I snap my fingers now what's happening light years away. That's going to depend on who's doing the observing and who is doing the measuring. ...

It can all be explained very beautifully by imagining a single four-dimensional spacetime instead of separate space and time. Einstein himself was not impressed by this move. ...

And when Minkowsky says, "I have some new math that unifies space and time based on Einstein's theories," Einstein himself is like, "I don't need that. That's like extra mathematical nonsense."

Minkowski never referred to "Einstein's theory", but got that 4D spacetime from Poincare. That 1907 Minkowski paper cited Poincare's 1905 paper with the 4D spacetime.

Yes, people like to credit Einstein for spacetime, but that was published by Poincare and Minkowski, and Einstein rejected it.

Carroll wrote a whole book on relativity, so he surely knows the history. It is weird that he gets it so wrong.

Update: The survey has just been posted in a paper.

We present results from the Big Mysteries Survey, a large-scale survey conducted through the American Physical Society's Physics Magazine on foundational and controversial topics in contemporary physics. The survey provides a snapshot of physicists' views on issues in cosmology, black-hole physics, quantum mechanics, quantum gravity, and anthropic coincidences. A central finding is that several positions often described publicly as field-wide ``consensus'' views are, in practice, supported by much narrower majorities or by pluralities rather than majorities.

19% believe string theory is the best hope for quantum gravity. 30% believe that information dropped in a black hole is preserved in Hawking radiation. 24% believe in the dark energy cosmological constant. No consensus on dark matter. 51% believe in cosmological inflation.

The Most Cited Physicist Alive

Brian Keating interviews Juan Maldacena, The Most Cited Physicist Alive.

Juan Maldacena is a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study whose 1997 paper remains the most cited in the history of theoretical physics.

We cover:
-why wormholes and quantum entanglement may be the same thing
-what actually happens to information when you throw something into a black hole
-the reason Hawking radiation accidentally gave cosmologists the equation that explains why the universe has structure
-whether science-fiction wormholes are ruled out by the laws of physics
-the one unsolved problem Juan says matters more than black holes.

The most important problem in quantum gravity is understanding the beginning of the Big Bang — not black holes.

And also the Holographic Principle, AI, complex numbers, etc.

Someone from 50 or 100 years ago would really be disappointed at what a dead-end theoretical physics. He rambles from one absurdity to another, with barely any relation to the real world.

The universe is not locally real

AI has risen Feynman from the dead, and explained Bell's theorem:

The Universe May Not Be Locally Real – Feynman Explains Bell’s Paradox

What if everything you believe about reality is wrong? In this mind-bending 23-minute exploration, Richard Feynman walks you through one of the most unsettling discoveries in the history of science — Bell's Theorem and the Nobel Prize-winning experiments that proved the universe is not locally real. From Einstein's stubborn belief in hidden variables to the groundbreaking work of Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger, this video breaks down quantum entanglement, the EPR paradox, and what it truly means when particles separated by miles somehow "know" what the other is doing — with no signal, no instructions, and no classical explanation.

It concludes:

[20:05] Let me bring it all together. Now we started with a simple idea that the world is locally real that things have definite properties that distant objects can't affect each other instantly. John Bell took this idea and turned it into a testable prediction. He said if local realism is true then the correlations between entangled particles must obey a mathematical limit. experiments culminating in the Nobel Prize winning work of aspect, Clauser, and Zelinger showed that the correlations exceed that limit. Local realism is violated. The universe is not locally real.

This means one of two things, or possibly both. Either particles don't have definite properties before they're measured, meaning reality isn't real in the way we thought, or distant particles can somehow affect each other instantly, meaning the universe isn't local in the way we thought. We don't know which. We don't have a complete agreed upon interpretation of quantum mechanics that resolves this.

I think we do have an agreed QM interpretation. It is the first option. Nobody thinks distant particles can somehow affect each other instantly.

The QM textbooks say that under Heisenberg uncertainty, it makes no sense for a particle to have a definite position and momentum at the same time. Particles only get definite values for position and momentum when they are measured, and you cannot measure both at the same time.

So yes, QM says particles don't have definite properties before they're measured. And I think that is what Feynman would have said, and not that this is an unsettled question.

Not everyone agrees with this, as maybe 10% of physicists subscribe to goofy interpretations like Bohm pilot wave or many worlds. But the mainstream textbook QM view is pretty clear on this point.

Hassabis likes a Wacky Book

Demis Hassabis says:

[25:41] well, my favorite book is The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch. So, I think that still holds. I'd hope to answer the questions in that book with with the AGI. That's my post AGI work.

Hassabis is a genius, and certainly one of the world's leading AI researchers. But I am lowering my opinion of him, if this is his favorite book.

At first glance, the book is a celebration of modern science. It is enthusiastic about science, theory, the scientific method, explanations, and testability. It explains what science is all about.

Except that it is really anti-science. For all his talk about the merits to testing theories, he mostly promotes theories that cannot be tested at all. For all his talk about reality, he mainly believes in things that are not real.

His favorite ideas are Popper's falsification, Darwin's evolution, and many-worlds quantum mechanics. He raves about their explanatory power.

These are so bizarre, because many-worlds is just an unscientific belief that cannot be falsified.

Darwin evolution has some explanatory power, but the main principle -- survival of the fittest -- is a tautology. Fitness is defined as what survives.

Deutsch starts the book by attacking Steven Weinberg for saying an instrumentalist remark: "The important thing is to be able to make predictions". Weinberg's point was anti-geometry, not instrumentalism, and he later changed his mind when geometry proved crucial for theoretical physics.

For a more up-to-date description of Deutsch's opinions, see this new interview of him. He says that he now believes in free will, because we have the ability to create novelty.

[1:18:36] By the way, Bryce DeWitt said that he was sure that if Einstein had lived another few years, he would have come to like the Everett interpretation, because it's fully realistic.

I am pretty sure that Einstein would have hated many-worlds. Regardless, it is bizarre to say that many-worlds is "fully realistic". It is the opposite of realistic. Nothing is more unrealistic than postulating an infinity of parallel universes that have no interaction with ours.

Crypto Doom in 2029

Dr. Quantum Supremacy announces:

Will you heed my warnings NOW?

Holy crap … yesterday I was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences! ...

See, some of the most reputable people in quantum hardware and quantum error-correction — people whose judgment I trust more than my own on those topics — are now telling me that a fault-tolerant quantum computer able to break deployed cryptosystems ought to be possible by around 2029. ...

And I’d say that that makes my own moral duty right now ironically simple and clear: namely, to use my unique soapbox, as the writer of The Internet’s Most Trusted Quantum Computing Blog Since 2005^TM, to sound the alarm.

So, here it is: if quantum computers start breaking cryptography a few years from now, don’t you dare come to this blog and tell me that I failed to warn you. This post is your warning. Please start switching to quantum-resistant encryption, and urge your company or organization or blockchain or standards body to do the same.

He co-authored a paper on the threat to Bitcoin.

I say the opposite. There is no need to switch, and there is no chance of a break by 2029. [corrected] But I am not a member of NAS. You have been warned. Check back in four years to see who is right.

Update: I looked at the consensus white paper, to see if it endorses the idea that quantum supremacy is inevitable or has already been proved. It does not:

A few distinguished mathematicians, computer scientists, and physicists, including Gil Kalai, Leonid Levin, Michel Dyakonov, and Gerard ‘t Hooft, have taken the position that quantum computing is impossible in principle—that what seem to others like engineering difficulties will in fact never be surmounted for some inherent reason. This could be true, for example, if quantum mechanics itself were to fail as we tried to scale up QC, or if we were to discover some new principle on top of quantum mechanics, which guarantees the existence of noise that violates the assumptions of the Threshold Theorem and therefore can’t be corrected by FTQC.

It’s important to understand that this was never a mainstream view among experts, at least since the discovery of FTQC in 1996. The mainstream view could be summarized by saying that, if quantum mechanics were to fail, or some new principle were to be discovered that “screens off” or “censors” QC, that would constitute a once-per-century revolution in physics, and would be vastly more surprising and exciting than “mere success” in building a QC that worked as the theory has long predicted. From a physics perspective, QC working as predicted is the conservative option.

So believing in QC is the conservative option, but it might not be possible.

How Hard Determinists Reject Free Will

New video:

Robert Sapolsky, Paul Bloom, and Lucy Allais debate whether free will exists and what this would mean for punishment and morality.

The deny free will, and are strong determinists.

0:33 [Host] So, Robert, um, do do you do you see your position as being driven by a defense of materialism or physicalism? Is that what is motivating you? That there's just no no alternative. you can't give any account of free will and therefore uh because you can't give an account of free will within the uh within the scientific framework uh you think that we have to then deny free will

[Sapolsky] basically I think by now the extent of scientific knowledge is such that it forms this matrix of explanation and that within that matrix um it is a purely materialistic one and every attempt to find free will lurking in there requires some sort of violation of show we know these matrices work. In that regard, I completely agree with Lucy um that trying to make sense of human behavior by going down to bosons is absurd.

I believe that this is just wrong as a matter of our scientific knowledge. There are no such completely deterministic matrices.

If you think I am wrong, tell me when did science prove determinism? Who wrote the paper? Who did the experiment? Who got the Nobel Prize? Why isn't this in textbooks?

Sapolsky just babbles gibberish when asked this question:

Isn't there still the question of well you presumably have made a decision uh at some level to take part in this debate. you you uh wrote a book trying to convince people of uh the idea that we should see free will as an illusion. And you were presumably doing that because you wanted to change their minds. But what was the point if they couldn't change their minds in the first place?

Sapolsky is probably the leading academic opponent of free will, and he is a crackpot.

Keating Sells Out for Quantum Hype

Great progress in quantum computers was announced a couple of weeks ago, and I posted comments by Scott Aaronson and Sabine Hossenfelder. Now another popular physicist channel has weighed in, attacking her:

Quantum Computers Are Useful. You're Using Them Wrong.

Dr Brian Keating
338K subscribers

Sabine Hossenfelder says quantum computers are only useful for breaking codes. She's wrong — and my undergraduates are building the proof. What's happening in my lab right now has nothing to do with cryptography, and everything to do with the future of AI.

I'm a cosmologist at UC San Diego teaching undergraduates to build, program, and eventually launch quantum computers — possibly to the Moon via Artemis!

We cover: why Sabine's code-breaking verdict misses the real story, how free tools like Quantum Rings are closing the education gap Sabine thinks is a hardware problem, why Q-Day just got moved up to 2029, what my students are actually doing with quantum computers in my lab, and why the next generation of quantum physicists won't need a billion-dollar facility to train.

The bottleneck isn't the hardware. It's what we're teaching — and who we're teaching it to.

The whole video seems like a paid infomercial for a startup called Quantum Rings. He even shows a clip of a class teaching:

[7:25] Another thing I think is fun is that we can more intuitively see how I squared equals minus 1.

He argues:

[4:45] What are they actually good for these quantum computers? Sabine said, and I'm paraphrasing, that apart from the codebreaking, nobody has figured out how to turn quantum computing theoretical advantage into a real world. Quantum chemistry, material science, optimization, financial modeling. She says not much there has happened. And again, if you're looking at published breakthroughs, she's not wrong.

And see above, as I said, quantum computers are awesome, unrivaled at simulating how quantum computers work. But Sabine is looking perhaps at the wrong metric. The revolution isn't in the papers. It's in the tooling.

5 years ago, if you wanted to run a quantum circuit, you needed to access IBM's cloud. You'd wait in a huge long queue. You'd get a noisy result on maybe 20 cubits, even if you could figure out how to use it, and you'd spend more time debugging the interface than doing actual physics. Today, I'm going to show you something, a free tool where you can use and learn about quantum computing. It's called Quantum 101. It's by Quantum Rings, a quantum computer circuit simulator that runs on your laptop. Not 20 cubits, hundreds of them. Millions of gate operations, high fidelity on your desktop, on your laptop for free. They replicated Google's quantum supremacy experiment.

So there is no published research that show quantum computers are good for anything, but you can just prove it for yourself on a laptop and a free demo account from a startup?

Oh wow, I thought Keating was more honest than this.

There is a Nobel Prize waiting for the first person to prove quantum supremacy. The idea is comical that you can do it on your laptop but no one has bothered to publish it.

Physicist Angela Collier posts a video on physicists don't know how planes work, largely about some predictions Lord Kelvin made in a 1900 interview. In particular, he said that heavier-than-air-flight would never work. She says we should not have expected him to be wise outside his specialty, and he had no expertise in flight.

Here is another example of an expert predicting outside his expertise:

Live Science spoke with physicist David Gross, who today received the $3 million "Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics". He was part of a trio that won the 2004 physics Nobel prize for research that helped complete the Standard Model of particle physics. But when asked if physics will reach a unified theory of the fundamental forces of nature within 50 years, Gross has a surprising answer. "Currently, I spend part of my time trying to tell people... that the chances of you living 50 [more] years are very small."

Live Science: So what do you suggest as remedies to lower that risk?

Gross: We had something called the Nobel Laureate Assembly for reducing the risk of nuclear war in Chicago last year.

His prize was for quark interactions. We have no reason to believe he is wiser about nuclear war than anyone else.

If he were correct, then I would expect him to favor nuking Iran, in order to stop them from developing a bomb. But I do not hear him saying that.

I am not criticizing these people for having opinions on quantum computing. They are physicists, and probably friends with some of the researchers in the field, even if they are not in the field themselves. I just want to hold them to their predictions. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warned of nuclear war for years, and then moved its clock close to midnight just when everyone else thought that the chance of war was reducted. The fact is that nukes have kept keep the peace, so far.

Special Relativity was Announced in 1904

Relavity historians give 1905 for the theory's origin, but it was really 1904.

Hector Giacomini writes in a new paper, also here:

Henri Poincaré’s Saint Louis lecture, delivered on 24 September 1904 at the International Congress of Arts and Science, occupies a distinctive place in the pre-history of twentieth-century theoretical physics. In this text, Poincaré formulated the principle of relativity in explicit and general terms, not as a narrow empirical rule limited to electrodynamics, but as one of the major guiding principles of mathematical physics. The lecture also offered a principle-based conception of theory centered on invariance, least action, and general theoretical coherence.

Poincare and other great scholars made the trip all the way to St. Louis, Missouri, USA, where the World's Fair was being held. For a month, St. Louis was the center of the world.

The text of the lecture was widely published and distributed in 1904, and an English translation was published in a popular philosophical journal in Jan. 1905. The above paper documents the wide distribution.

Poincare's lecture did not have any formulas, but he clearly had the essence of special relativity.

He wrote two kinds of papers. Technical papers with formulas intended for mathematicians, and papers without formulas intended for a wider audience. He was probably the most widely-read intellectual in Europe. Perhaps some did not appreciate him because he did not attempt to explain the formulas to non-mathematicians.

In explicit and programmatic terms, Poincaré formulated the principle of relativity as follows: the laws of physical phenomena must be the same for an observer at rest and for an observer carried along in uniform translational motion. Consequently, no experiment should allow one to determine whether one is in such uniform motion or not. In the lecture this formulation appears within the canonical list of fundamental principles and is treated on the same conceptual level as energy conservation and the principle of least action.

The relativity principle is not introduced merely as an empirical summary of ether-drift experiments. Rather, Poincaré presents it as a structural requirement increasingly supported by the persistent failure of attempts to detect motion relative to the ether. He discusses in particular the negative results of Michelson-type experiments and emphasizes the remarkable stability of electromagnetic theory under uniform motion. The continued empirical confirmation of null results is interpreted as evidence that the invariance of physical laws under uniform translation may reflect a deep structural property of nature. ...

In this respect, Poincaré’s principle of relativity appears as the explicit crystallization of themes already articulated in his writings [11, 12, 13], and made accessible to German-speaking readers through the 1904 translation of La science et l’hypothèse [14]. Poincaré further analyzes the theoretical devices introduced to preserve this invariance. He discusses Lorentz’s notion of “local time”, obtained by synchronizing clocks through light signals ...

Importantly, Poincaré suggests that the situation may ultimately require a new mechanics in which no velocity could exceed that of light and in which inertia would increase with speed. Such remarks indicate that the principle of relativity is not treated as a peripheral correction within classical mechanics, but as a constraint capable of reshaping its conceptual structure.

Lorentz’s 1904 Theory

An important component of the lecture is Poincaré’s discussion of Hendrik Antoon Lorentz’s recent work. In May 1904 Lorentz had published a major paper [6]. In that work Lorentz presented a refined mathematical formulation of the transformations required to preserve the form of Maxwell’s equations in a moving frame.

Poincaré’s lecture demonstrates that by September 1904 he was fully aware of the structure and implications of Lorentz’s construction. He describes the introduction of local time, the contraction hypothesis — according to which bodies moving through the ether undergo a physical contraction in the direction of motion — and the modification of forces and masses required to reconcile theory with experiment.

The paper makes no mention of Einstein, as he did not write anything on relativity until Summer 1905.

Poincare wrote his great relativity paper in 1905, but his 1904 lecture has the essence: the relativity principle, Lorentz transformations, length contraction, Michelson-Morley, clock synchronization, local time, and a new mechanics where nothing goes faster than light.

Previously I argued that the essence of relativity was the 4D spacetime, Lorentz group, non-euclidean geometry, covariant equations, and extending beyond electromagnetism. Poincare had all these in 1905, and Einstein did not understand them until years later.

Einstein sometimes denied that he knew about Lorentz's 1904 paper and Poincare's 1905 paper, although it is documented that he had access to both before submitting his own 1905 paper. I do not know if he was ever asked about Poincare's St. Louis lecture. It is hard to believe he could have missed it, as it was read by anyone with an interest in Mathematical Physics.

Einstein did not reference Lorentz or Poincare in his famous 1905 relativity paper. Even if he really did not know about these papers, he surely knew about them when he wrote survey papers on relativity a couple of years later.

You could also argue that relativity started in 1895, with Lorentz's paper. He had the approximate Lorentz transformations, Michelson-Morley to second order, local time, length contraction, and relation to Maxwell's equations. Lorentz got the 1902 Nobel Prize for his electromagnetic theory. He did not have the higher order theory he found in 1904, the symmetries as a group, and connecting local time to clock synchronization.

Ready to Warn Us about Broken Cryptography

Prof. Scott Aaronson really wants us to believe in quantum computing, and the press regularly asks him to comment on the latest developments, many of which are bogus. So now he posts:

Then one evening, you hear a howl in the distance, and sure enough, on a hill overlooking the town is the clear silhouette of a large wolf. So you point to it — and all the same people laugh and accuse you of “crying wolf.”

Now you know how it’s been for me with cryptographically relevant quantum computing.

No, the wolf not there yet. Some are predicting 2030. I say there is no chance of that.

A comment says:

I see you’re following in the footsteps of Eliezer Yudkowsky, getting so frustrated at people not understanding what you’re saying that you resort to explaining the basic principles of rationality in hope that this will help.

Meanwhile the NY Post reports:

The CIA used a futuristic new tool called “Ghost Murmur” to find and rescue the second American airman who was shot down in southern Iran, The Post has learned.

The secret technology uses long-range quantum magnetometry to find the electromagnetic fingerprint of a human heartbeat and pairs the data with artificial intelligence software to isolate the signature from background noise, two sources close to the breakthrough said.

It was the tool’s first use in the field by the spy agency — and was alluded to Monday afternoon by President Trump and CIA Director John Ratcliffe at a White House briefing.

I do not know anything about it.

Update: Sabine Hossenfelder Quantum Computers Just Got Much More Dangerous. She cites Google predicting Q-day for 2029, when quantum computers break popular cryptosystems.

Google has never realized its quantum predictions. I am glad to see it predicting 2029. That is only 3 years. We shall soon see. I say no chance.

Particles do not Pass Both Slits

The double-slit experiment is often explained as particles going through both slits. Supposedly this quantum mechanics interpretation was made rigorous by R.P. Feynman's path integral formulation, where particles take all possible paths.

This is not really correct, as explained in a new video: Debunking Veritasium: The “All Possible Paths” Myth & What Feynman Really Showed

Curt Jaimungal rigorously debunks the viral myth popularized by Veritasium (that quantum particles literally take “all possible paths” has been proved) and clarifies the true mathematical purpose of Feynman's formalism. Learn why this concept is a computational tool in configuration space rather than a physical map of reality.

People doing quantum computing are always talking about an electron being in two places at once, like the Schroedinger Cat that is alive and dead at the same time. The many-worlds fans especially like to talk this way. It these things do not happen in standard textbook quantum mechanics.

In textbook/Copenhagen QM, does not have a defined position until it is measured. It does not get observed in two places.

Update: A reader points out that the video is almost a year old.

Google to Crack Bitcoin

Yahoo reports:

Google recently issued two warnings in a span of a few days.

First, quantum computers will be able to crack cryptography encrypting cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) by 2029. In fact, hackers might try stealing encrypted financial details right now and wait until 2029 for quantum computers to become powerful enough to decrypt those details.

Google recommended transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) to address the threat.

Second, a quantum system could crack a real-time Bitcoin transaction in about nine minutes. Here is how it could happen.

When a Bitcoin transaction is executed, the public key is revealed for a brief period. A quantum computer powerful enough can use the public key to find out the private key and steal the crypto assets.

It takes approximately 10 minutes for a Bitcoin transaction to confirm; the probability of success is only slightly less than 41%, the paper estimated.

The paper also revealed that it could take fewer than 500,000 qubits — far less than millions of qubits cited earlier — to crack Bitcoin's cryptography. It's a 20-fold reduction in the number of qubits needed to crack the encryption.

If there is a quantum computer, it would have to crack someone's key in that 10-minute window to steal money. The computers would have to be millions of times more efficient than they are now.

If the quantum computers get close, the Bitcoin community could change their protocols to resist the attack. It might be difficult to get everyone to agree to a new protocol. But as long as they did agree, the attack would be easily defended.

Dr. Quantum Supremacy has his take on the new announcements. I am skeptical, as usual.

In particular, the Caltech group estimates that a mere 25,000 physical qubits might suffice for this, where a year ago the best estimates were in the millions.

Here is a new PBS tv video on The Truth About Quantum Computers.

4:47 Microsoft claimed not only had they observed Majoranas, they also figured out how to control them. And they said they'd be able to use them to build reliable qubits that would be able to hold up in ways that other qubits can't. This breakthrough would provide a much faster pathway to quantum computing at a much larger scale than anyone else has been able to achieve. Microsoft was faced with an avalanche of skepticism. And as of filming, the data hasn't firmly established everything they claimed.

But some are optimistic that Microsoft can improve its chip and provide the breakthrough the industry has been waiting for. If they do, the whole world will change fast as we gain the ability to solve all kinds of problems we can't currently fully explore. For example, we might be able to create computer simulations of our world, down to the molecular level. That would open the door for incredible breakthroughs in chemistry and medicine. Or we could develop new battery technology, which could be key for mitigating climate change.

So this "truth" is all speculation.

A River is now a Science Journal Co-author

Centuries ago, scientists might thank God, or cite Christianity for their belief in an orderly world. No science journal would tolerate that today, right?

Actually the leading science journal, Nature, has publish an article praising a river god.

Biology professor Jerry Coyne reports:

Conservationist Anne Poelina has a deep connection to the fresh water that runs through the dry red-rock landscape of the Kimberley region in Western Australia. Poelina identifies as a Nyikina Warrwa woman, and her people are the Traditional Custodians of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River. ...

Poelina explains that “in terms of property rights, the river owns me. So, I have a duty of care and the fiduciary duty to protect this river’s right to life.” ...

In 2020, she started including the Martuwarra River of Life as the first author on her publications. ...

When asked why the river should be listed as first author, she responded: “Because it’s the authority. It’s where I get my authority.”

This is not religious tolerance. This is a Wokeness statement.

China has taken over Science

T. Greer argues China is the future of science:

The scientific publisher Nature makes a similar catalog on a slightly more granular level, looking at specific fields of science. According to Nature’s most recent rankings, 18 of the top 25 most productive research institutes in the physical sciences, 19 of the top 20 in geosciences, and a full 25 out of 25 in chemistry are Chinese. Only in the biosciences do American scientists still have a lead—but even on that list three of the top ten are Chinese.6

The kicker is, none of that was true even just a decade ago.

The QWERTY Keyboard was not Designed to be Slow

I need to watch Youtube with an AI LLM to fact check it.

Physicist Brian Keating posted a cosmology interview, and started making a false analogy about keyboard. My AI advises:

While Brian Keating is an astrophysicist and not a historian of technology, he is repeating a very common popular myth. The claim that the QWERTY layout was designed specifically to "slow down" typists is technically incorrect, though it is based on a grain of truth regarding mechanical limitations.

According to historical research into the origins of the typewriter:

The "Jamming" Problem: In early mechanical typewriters, if a typist hit two keys that were physically close to each other in rapid succession, the "typebars" (the hammers that hit the paper) would collide and jam.

The Real Purpose of QWERTY: The layout was designed to separate frequently used letter pairs (like "TH" or "ST") so their physical hammers were on opposite sides of the machine. This allowed the hammers to fall back into place before the next one rose, actually allowing the user to type faster without the machine seizing up.

The "Slow Down" Misconception: The myth likely arose because the layout is not "ergonomically optimal" for modern electronic keyboards. Since we no longer have mechanical hammers to worry about, the QWERTY layout seems unnecessarily difficult compared to alternatives like the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard.

In the video, Keating uses this as an analogy for "technological lock-in", arguing that even if a system is no longer the most efficient, it becomes so widespread that it is nearly impossible to replace—much like he fears is happening with current AI architectures.

The truth is that the qwerty keyboard is not significantly slower than the Dvorak. It just reduces jamming on a mechanical typewriter.

I am wary when some expert tries to make a point using some ridiculous myth that was debunked decades ago. He could have just googled it, and seen that he was wrong.

In the video, Keating shares another classic bit of "technological lock-in" lore, claiming that modern railroad gauges (the distance between the tracks) can be traced back to the width of a Roman chariot, which was designed to fit two horses' butts.

While it’s a great story for a podcast, historians and engineers generally categorize this as a "spurious correlation"—it's mostly a myth, though it has a tiny thread of logic.

The Fact vs. The Fiction

• The Claim: Roman chariots created ruts in European roads. Wagons were built to fit those ruts so they wouldn't break their wheels. Early tramways used those same wagon dimensions, and English trains followed suit, eventually leading to the Standard Gauge (4 feet 8.5 inches) used in the U.S. and much of Europe.

• The Reality: While the standard gauge is roughly the width of an ancient wagon, the specific measurement of 4' 8.5" was actually popularized by George Stephenson, the "Father of Railways." He chose it because it was the width of the existing pre-steam coal tramways in North England where he worked.

• The "Horse's Butt" Part: There is no evidence that Romans measured horses' rear ends to build chariots. Chariots were built to be wide enough to hold two people and stable enough not to tip over. The fact that two horses fit in front of that width is a matter of practical spacing, not a design blueprint that dictated the Space Shuttle's dimensions (another common layer of this myth).

Why Keating Uses It

Keating’s broader point at isn't necessarily about Roman history; he's using it to explain Path Dependence. He argues that once a standard is set—whether it's QWERTY keyboards, railroad widths, or GPU-based AI architectures—it becomes "locked in" because the cost of changing the entire infrastructure is too high, even if a better way exists.

He is probably also wrong with his predictions about AI architectures. He also compares AI to a cockroach, and I think his point is that our AIs could suffer a technological lock-in at a sub-cockroach lever.

I assume that Keating is more accurate when he talks about cosmology experiments. But he says this:

0:30 If you said there's one galaxy, you're stupid. If you said there's one planet, you're stupid. If you said there's one. So why say there's one universe?

I am sticking to one universe. Maybe I am stupid.