Electromagnetism Derived From Geometry

General relativity teaches that gravity is a manifestation of geometry. Not everyone knows that electromagnetism and the other fundamental forces (strong, weak) are similarly geometric.

Historically this dates back to Weyl and Kaluza-Klein, a century ago. But those theories were flawed, so a lot of physicists think that the geometry did not work.

Here is a new video that explains it well: Electromagnetism Derived From Geometry!.

In short, you add a circle to each point of spacetime, connect the circles infinitesimally to nearby circles, and then the electric and magnetic fields become the curvature.

The video tries to relate this idea to string theory, but that is speculation that did not pan out. The idea is completely essential to the Standard Model of physics, and our best explanation of the fundamental forces.

Carroll interviews the Famous Geography Professor

The latest Sean M. Carroll interview is Jared Diamond. Recent tweet about his famous book:

“Guns, Germs & Steel” was one of only 3 books in my entire life that I couldn’t finish. It’s that bad. Here’s the synopsis:

In the opening chapter he clearly states That he believes the 5’ tall Stone Age Pygmies of Papua New Guinea are more intelligent than Europeans. His rationale? He hung out with them and felt like it because they knew all the types of plants, and also their kids didn’t have TVs (I’m not kidding).

He also observed that unlike Europeans, they were constantly hacking each other to death with crude instruments. Which leads him to believe that they evolved to be smarter, because you need intelligence to survive permanent tribal warfare. Unlike cooperative farming. I really wish I was kidding about this.

He concludes therefore that any and all modern differences in technology and wealth are the result strictly of environmental factors. He spends the next 400 pages desperately cooking up insanely convoluted theories about why living in a food scarce frozen wasteland actually gives people far more free time to invent things than eating an inexhaustible supply of bananas on a tropical island would.

The book is full of contrived theories about ancient people where he has no evidence. In some cases, people have no written records, yet he somehow pretends to know everything about them.

He tells several stories about the 20th century. Stories that can easily be checked with Google. And they were gross distortions. If he cannot get 20th century facts right, how likely is it that he got facts from millennia ago?

I thought the book would be interesting because of its many awards, and because the question of explaining European success of the last millennium is an important one. But he says it was all luck, and tests do not back up his more specific theories.

Here is a more revealing interview of Diamond, this week. It all seems like garbage to me, but listen or read for yourself.

Project to Formalize All Math

About a century, Mathematics was put on firm foundations. Logically it was formalized into ZFC set theory. All theorems could, in principle, be logically derived from the axioms.

Textbook math was also made rigorous by a series of books by Bourbaki.

Now the dream of logicism is being fully realized. Jared Duker Lichtman writes:

The MAP: Mathematics Autoformalization Project

We are poised to translate all known math into formal code.

This is the math-equivalent of the Human Genome Project, or AlphaFold in modern times.

On September 4th, Anthropic shocked the math world by formalizing Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Soon the great body of math theorems will be formalized into computer-checkable proofs. No longer will there be any doubts about whether referees have adequately checked the proofs.

The proof-checking software has had some glitches, but they will soon be ironed out. Possibly some currently-accepted theorems will have to be rejected.

In the recently announced AI proof of a complex structure on the 6-sphere S⁶, the argument used a construction that a previously published paper supposedly proved was impossible. The AI found a flaw in that paper.

The math community has an amazingly good record of only publishing theorems that are true. It is way better than 99%. Soon it will be 100%. This is a level of precision unmatched in human history.

Not that this is the end of math. There is still plenty for humans to do. Humans need to make the works comprehensible, and to set directions for new research.

Now there are rumors of a Millennium Prize problem being solved, namely a counterexample to Navier-Stokes. A fluid flow that becomes singular in finite time. See this video. Apparently OpenAI, Anthropic, and some human mathematicians are competing for the credit, and the $1 million payoff.

If an AI LLM solved Navier-Stokes, this would be the biggest Math accomplishment yet. If the proof was mostly stolen from humans, the significance will be harder to assess.

Terry Tao, an expert on both Navier-Stokes and AI LLMs, discusses the progress. He says that finding a full counter-example looks feasible in the near future.

Update: Here is the OpenAI announcement. It complains that an NYU professor and an Anthropic employee did not agree to a joint announcement.

The journal Nature announces:

For the first time, a truly major open problem in mathematics has been solved by computer, according to OpenAI, which says it has cracked one of the ‘Millennium Problems’ related to the motion of fluids.

The artificial-intelligence (AI) company in San Francisco, California, announced on 8 September that it has generated a solution to the most commonly used physical model of fluids — the Navier-Stokes equations — showing that they can break down. Whether or not this could happen was one of the seven ‘Millennium Problems’ asked by the Clay Mathematics Institute at the turn of the twenty-first century. Solutions come with a prize of US$1 million....

They then decided to focus their resources on the Navier-Stokes problem on 1 September, after hearing rumours that two mathematicians, Levent Alpöge of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Tristan Buckmaster of New York University, had solved some version of the fluid-motion puzzle using Anthropic AI’s models.

On 7 September, Alpöge and Buckmaster released a paper in which they say they had found a solution for the fluid equations that also achieved infinite speed, but in the simplified case in which the fluid has no viscosity.

So the AI LLM did not really solve this problem. It finished a work-in-progress by some human mathematicians.

AI LLMs have solved some major problems, but it is not so clear who deserves the credit in this case. It will be interesting to see who gets the $1 million.

Update: OpenAI says it is not claiming the million. It might have spent $50 million in computer time on it.

The counterexample is to Navier-Stokes with a forcing term. It is still not known whether the straight Navier-Stokes equation (with no forcing term) always has a solution.

Update: I should add that Professor Terry Tao is very pro-AI, and rarely gives any negative opinions. So it is significant that he criticized OpenAI's role in this matter.

Update: Rumors on big progress toward two other math millennium prize problems, Hodge and Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer.

The case against Galileo

Galileo is considered one of the great heroes of modern science. Supposedly he discovered the acceleration of gravity, the telescope, the moons of Jupiter, the relativity of motion, and heliocentrism.

Most of all, he is praised for standing up to the Pope in Rome.

Supposedly also, he discovered the experimental method. Before him, everyone blindly accepted what was written, if it came from Aristotle or the Bible. He was the first to have the courage to challenge them, and put ideas to an empirical test.

He is also sometimes credited with mathematizing science. He would deduce physical principles from pure thought, logic, math, and thought experiments. This belief is in tension with the belief that he was a great empiricist.

Wikipedia says:

Galileo has been called the father of observational astronomy,[9] modern-era classical physics,[10] the scientific method,[11] and modern science.[12]

Yes, Galileo really gets this gushing praise from historians and philosophers. It is all absurd.

I just discovered this 2020 podcast:

Galileo is the most overrated figure in the history of science. That is the thesis of Season 1 of my podcast, which consists of the following 18 episodes. ...

Galileo is praised for his work on falling bodies, but his arguments were dishonest and his trifling discoveries were not new. ...

Galileo committed scores of errors in his physics. These are bad in themselves and also undermine Galileo’s claim to credit for the things he did get right.

Galileo dismissed the notion that the moon influences the tides as “childish” and “occult.” Instead he argued that tides are a kind of sloshing due to the motion of the earth. This very poor theory is inconsistent with several of his own scientific principles.

Two thousand years before Galileo, Greek astronomers argued that the heavenly bodies revolve around the sun. Their reasoning involved sophisticated mathematics and sound physical considerations.

Galileo is credited with defeating Ptolemaic earth-centered astronomy, but most mathematical astronomers had already abandoned this theory long before Galileo.

The podcast thoroughly debunks the idea that Galileo was a great scientist. He got a lot of stuff wrong.

In particular, his main argument for heliocentrism was that the motion of the Earth caused the ocean tides. His theory was that there was one high tide per day. In fact there are two high tides per day, and it had been known for centuries that the Moon caused the tides. Also the Sun, if it is aligned.

Couldn't he just walk down to the beach and see for himself? Actually that is not so simple, as the Mediterranean is mostly an enclosed sea, and the tides are small and confusing.

Galileo is credited with an assortment of other things, and it is nearly all bogus. He did describe the moons of Jupiter, but only one day ahead of a German. He supposedly discovered Newton's first law of motion, that an object goes with constant velocity, in the absence of forces. But he only believed this for horizontal motion.

He used inclined planes to measure the acceleration of gravity, but his answer was off by a factor of two.

Listening to this podcast makes me wonder why Galileo was revered so much. Do people think his existence disproves Catholicism? I am not sure.

The craziest thing is not the overcrediting of Galileo, but the way the historians and philosophers argue that no one before Galileo tested ideas empirically, no one tried to observe the world, and no one tried to mathematize nature. Actually, these things had been done for millennia. The ancients created Astronomy models, built ships and pyramids, invented Geometry, and a lot of other great things. Of course they used observation, math, theory, and science.

The story reminds me about how lots of people credit Christopher Columbus for discovering the Earth being round. That is stupid on two levels. First, the roundness of the Earth was well-known to scholars for two millennia. Second, the claim does not even make any sense, as Columbus did not go around the Earth, but merely sailed to some islands and back.

Likewise, scholars have been doing science and mathematizing nature for millennia. And Galileo was not even a very good scientist, compared to his contemporaries. The work by Tycho and Kepler was 100x better than anything Galileo did. It was vastly superior in its empiricism and its mathematization, the two things that cause historians to idolize Galileo.

Hofstadter’s Gödel Escher Bach Fooled Us

Scott Aaronson writes:

A central thesis that many readers, including me, took from Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel Escher Bach when young was that the secret of intelligence (and therefore, of AI) was going to have a lot to do with self-referentiality and “strange loops.” ...

Now, in 2026, we’ve succeeded at building AIs that outperform most humans at most intellectual tasks that are well-defined enough to judge. And at no point in the tech stack of those AIs — neither in the transformer neural nets, nor in the GPU clusters they run on, nor in the training process, nor anywhere else — did anyone need to build in anything about self-reference. ...

But the idea that you’d need explicit self-referentiality before you could get convincing and world-changing conversational intelligence? Let it be buried in a Westminster Abbey or Arlington National Cemetery for the most important wrong ideas in human history — geocentrism, Aristotle’s teleological physics, aether, phlogiston, Freud’s psychology, Marx’s prediction of a workers’ uprising followed by a classless utopia, etc. But buried it needs to be.

He could make a similar comment about fractals. Textbooks give examples using self-reference, and then say that the weather is also an example. But self-reference is not used to model the weather.

There is a distinction between the mathematical tool used for proof/pedagogy and the actual mechanisms that generate the phenomena in the real world.

Diagonalization can be used to construct irrational or transcendental numbers, but most transcendental numbers are not obtained or studied this way.

(I tried to post this comment on his blog.)

Quantum Nonlocality Explained FROM SCRATCH

A month ago, Curt Jaimungal interviewed Tim Maudlin on Can Quantum Mechanics Be Explained FROM SCRATCH?. Now, Part II just dropped, for another 3+ hours.

Maudlin is an expert on this subject, and he discusses in detail the work of von Neumann, Einstein, Bohm, Bell, and others saying that the concepts of locality, classical hidden variables, and quantum mechanics predictions are in conflict. One must be rejected.

What is not so clear is how Maudlin differs from textbook Copenhagen interpretation. Copenhagen says that the classical hidden variables are to be rejected. That is what von Neumann proved, under some assumptions. Then we have locality and predictions of quantum mechanics, with no problem.

Maudlin has some philosphical reasons for subscribing to classical hidden variables, so he ends up rejecting locality.

To me, no one has ever observed spooky action at a distance, so local theories are very much preferred. Bohm's pilot wave theory is crazy, because the theory is nonlocal, but all the observations magically turn out to be local.

Maudlin explains that all the great physicists rejected quantum nonlocality.

Tim: But they never straightforwardly acknowledged the nonlocality. And if you don’t believe that, 1:58:07 go read Bohr’s response to the EPR paper and see whether he straightforwardly says, “Yes, I believe in nonlocality. I believe in spooky action at a distance.” He denies it. ...

So I think Einstein saw correctly that if you accept this spooky action 1:59:25 at a distance, relativity itself is at risk. And he didn’t wanna put, you know, relativity at risk without good reason, and he couldn’t see any reason to accept the spooky action at a distance.

Now, he may not have liked it for other reasons. I mean, we, Newton didn’t like it, right? He says, he says, “No rational person would believe in it.” I mean, there are lots of people who find that just intuitively ugly or unacceptable or whatever. Curt: Mm-hmm.

Tim: And, and, and, and to this day, there are people who don’t wanna accept nonlocality, and they’ll more or less clutch at any straw to try to avoid it, as we’ll see. The psychology of that I can’t quite explain.

I can explain it. The entire scientific enterprise for millennia has been to figure out cause and effect, by tracing events to nearby actions. If that is all wrong, and our lives are controlled by the spooky astrology of far-away stars, then we need to reconsider all the known laws of science.

In fact, no such nonlocality has ever been discovered, and we can continue with what has worked for centuries.

Bell and Maudlin claim that all the great geniuses and textbooks are wrong. They have a belief in what a quantum theory ought to be, and they say that quantum mechanics, as understood by Bohr and von Neumann, does not qualify.

I agree with Newton. No rational person would believe in spooky action at a distance. Unless it is proved, of course.

Professor Dave Rants against Dr. Bee again

Professor Dave has attacked Sabine Hossenfelder again.

Dave Farina has one of the top science Youtube channels, with 4.4 million subscribers. That is enough to make a living. He is not a real professor, but has a large number of expository videos, mostly on elementary science. He also likes to debunk Flat Earthers and others he considers pseudoscientific or religious.

Hossenfelder is closer to being a real professor, and posts lots of videos, mostly on theoretical physics. She also does science news, and likes to cover cutting edge research. She does not do elementary expository videos. She avoids politics, except that she often criticizes research projects she considers unproductive.

So they would seem to have little or nothing to do with each other. But Dave regularly trashes Sabine in the harshest terms. It is strange, as it is unlikely that he even understands most of her videos.

Dave's politics are Woke Leftist and anti-Zionist. He recites Woke lines about race not existing, Whites being evil, LGBTQ talking points, etc. He wants Israel destroyed, and taken over by Arabs. His rants on these topics are filled with obscenities, and lack any scientific reasoning. He subscribes to weird conspiracy theories about Peter Thiel and the Jews. He strongly suspects that Thiel is funding Sabine.

Dave's latest video is 40 minutes of calling Sabine a racist. Odd, and she hardly ever says anything about race or politics.

It was all provoked by the Jason Arday scandal. He was a Cambridge U. professor who got exposed as a charlatan, and committed suicide. Dave explained the issue as some dubious accusations of plagiarism that might have been overlooked if he had been White, but which caused White racists to harass him to death.

No, I do not think the plagiarism is what got him in trouble with his employer. His problems were much deeper. He had lied about almost everything, including his childhood, his life story, his academic credential, his teaching, and his research. His autobiography was being published, and it was all lies. His research was garbage, and he had no ability to do academic work. And yet he was promoted as a great genius.

So what does any of this have to do Sabine? She tweeted a couple of times that one of the whistleblowers should not be fired for exposing Arday. Yes, that's all.

Dave is a culture warrior where he stands with the right-minded people who believe is Science, Atheism, and Wokism. He sides with whatever is published in respectable science journals, and he hates Sabine for throwing cold water on some big science projects. He loves whatever science government and universities are doing, and hates whatever Elon Musk and other billionaires do.

I have sometimes criticed Sabine myself, on this blog. But Dave is just an ideological and dishonest jerk. There is no way he can really believe what he says about race, Arday, and the whistleblower. He is like the woke activists who say that a transgender woman is just as much a woman as any other woman, or that a man can get pregnant. It is not science. It is an extreme ideological stance in order to support certain progressive objectives.

Palmer says Irrational Numbers Not Real

New tweet:

Quantum mechanics works perfectly in experiments, but Oxford physicist Tim Palmer argues it rests on a mathematical fiction: irrational numbers like √2 have no basis in physical reality.

Strip them out, and quantum's strangest mysteries disappear.

Palmer's theory makes a testable prediction: quantum computers will fail beyond 400 qubits, hitting a fundamental limit set by the discrete structure of nature itself.

The coming quantum computing race will determine whether our most successful physical theory contains a basic mistake.

Paywalled article. No, I do not think he is correct. I am just posting because I think it is amusing.

Possible AI Proof of Complex S6 Manifold

A new Claude AI LLM assisted paper claims to find a complex manifold structure on the six-dimensional sphere, S⁶. There are videos here and here.

The opposite result was claimed in 2016, but the argument was faulty.

If verified, this will probably be the biggest AI math accomplishment to date. So far, the biggest success are the Jacobian conjecture counterexample, and the Erdox unit distance problem.

Notes on Minkowski's Geometric Relativity

Einstein scholar Tilman Sauer writes a new paper:

Minkowski's Geometric Explanation of Lorentz Contraction

Hermann Minkowski's original explanation of relativistic length contraction using a space-time diagram and conic section geometry of a standard hyperbola is reconstructed on the basis of unpublished manuscript notes dated to the spring of 1908. The manuscript notes likely reflect Minkowski's preparation of a lecture to physics and mathematics teachers. They reveal Minkowski as an educator as well as a promoter of a mathematization of the physical sciences. I also comment on his interpretation of Einstein's work and on the use of language in his popularization of mathematics.

He did not find anything particularly interesting in the notes.

It is not clear that Einstein's work had much influence on Minkowski, if any.

He mentions Einstein’s work on the relativity principle as a continuation of Lorentz’s work. ...

He did not identify the principle of relativity and the principle of the constancy of the speed of light as the two defining principles for the special theory of relativity. Instead, he singled out Lorentz’s contraction hypothesis as a fundamental postulate, and the existence of a limiting velocity as an axiom. ...

He then stated his impression that Einstein had not yet achieved “full understanding of the facts” (“volle Einsicht der gegebenen Tatsachen”).

Minkowski mentions crediting Einstein for this:

Lorentz himself told me in a conversation in Rome that Einstein’s merit is to have recognized that the time of one electron is just as good as that of the other, i.e. to have recognized the equivalence of t and t′.

That may be Einstein's merit, but Lorentz surely understood that in 1895, because he used it to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment. And Poincare believed that Lorentz understood it, because it was part of the recommendation for Lorentz to get the 1902 Nobel Prize.

The whole point of the Lorentz 1895 theory was that Maxwell's equations held in the moving frame, for the transformed coordinates. For that to work, the transformed time has to be genuine time in the moving frame. Perhaps Lorentz was missing some conceptual details, but he had to believe that what he called "local time" was the locally observed time.

Discussion of Poincare is strangely absent. Minkowski wrote two papers on relativity, citing Poincare prominently in the first but not the second. Some of Minkowski work, such as the 4d spacetime, indefinite metric, and Lorentz covariance, appear to be straight out of Poincare. Minkowski died shortly afterwards, so we got no more explanation.

Sauer is loyal to Einstein, as evidenced by:

Minkowski knew about and cited Einstein’s famous paper from 1905 on the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies (3), which introduced the special theory of relativity.

It is pretty clear that Minkowski would not have said that Einstein introduced the theory. If anyone, it was Lorentz, Poincare, and Minkowski.

Update: I happened to see a 2013 Sauer paper:

As is well-known,12 Einstein’s attempts to obtain an assistantship any- where failed flatly despite various letters of application. To make matters more difficult, Einstein and his fellow student Mileva Mari´c had fallen in love and, unfortunately, Mari´c had become pregnant in the spring of 1901, an unplanned circumstance that surely contributed to her failing the final examinations again at her second attempt in summer 1901. ...

Since Einstein now had a tenured job, he was able to marry Mileva Mari´c in January 1903.

This is such a strange way of describing the situation. The daughter Lieserl is believed to have been abandoned. He could have married and taken responsibility for the child, even without a tenured job.

The 1969 Book that Killed AI Research

The neural nets at the core of AI were invented in 1943, and popularized in 1957-60 as the Perceptron. It had the basic idea that was later developed into today's AI LLMs.

But not everyone recognized it. Prominent MIT professors wrote a 1969 book, Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry, trashing the concept.

Reports by the New York Times and statements by Rosenblatt claimed that neural nets would soon be able to see images, beat humans at chess, and reproduce. ...

This book is the center of a long-standing controversy in the study of artificial intelligence. It is claimed that pessimistic predictions made by the authors were responsible for a change in the direction of research in AI, concentrating efforts on so-called "symbolic" systems, a line of research that petered out and contributed to the so-called AI winter of the 1980s, when AI's promise was not realized.

The book claimed to prove that perceptrons were hopelessly limited, as they could not even approximate a simple xor function.

The authors doubled down in 1988 updated edition, saying "little of significance [has] changed since 1969". At the time there was a revival of interest in neural nets, but the authors said they would fail to scale up.

We now know that those neural nets of the 1940s, 50s, and 80s do scale up, and perform spectacularly well. The bold predictions of the perceptron inventor must have been seen as wildly optimistic at the time, but they turned out to be correct.

I post this as an example of how smart people can be wrong about what is possible, and how brilliant research could be sidetracked.

Rosenblatt made a hardware computer perceptron in 1960, and that is now in the Smithsonian Museum. What no one knew until about 2012 was that video game chips would be the key to scaling up neural nets. [date corrected]

Here is a recent video that tries to relate these old ideas about neural nets to current research.

Schrödinger was an Indeterminist

Conventional wisdom is that classical physics is determinist, while quantum physics is not.

New paper:

Was Schrödinger ever a determinist?
Flavio Del Santo, Nicolas Gisin

Erwin Schrödinger is often portrayed as a reactionary who resisted the indeterminism introduced by quantum mechanics, but on closer inspection his views on determinism prove to be more complex and more radical.

Schrödinger argued, correctly in my opinion, that neither classical nor quantum physics is deterministic.

(i) The first argument challenges the mathematical idealization of determinacy in the initial conditions. ...

(ii) The second argument for indeterminism concerns discontinuity and irreversibility. ...

(iii) In his final argument, Schrödinger links quantum indeterminacy to the abandonment of the concept of trajectory and to the essential role of discontinuity. Remarkably, he can be seen here as anticipating the notion of “information” in physics (he does not use the term “information”, which was formalized only in 1948 by C. Shannon), suggesting that nature may be understood as a discrete sequence of yes–no answers, representable as strings of 0s and 1s.

None of this should be surprising or controversial, except for the notoriety of those with contrary views.

Einstein was a determinist.

The many-worlds advocates, like Sean M. Carroll, are determinists.

Sabine Hossenfelder is a superdeterminist.

The Bohm pilot wave theorists, like Tim Maudlin, are determinists.

It is philosophically possible to be a determinist, just like the rest of the existential crisis iceberg is possible, but silly. If you believe in free will, or in scientific and experimental choices, then determinism is wrong.

Here is a new comment with a typical modern scoff about free will, rejecting any suggestion that it could be possible:

OMG

“It is our free will that enables it to be so.”

1) your brain is nothing more than a collection of atoms

2) the atoms in your brain are no different from the ones in any other clump, and they just move around in the only way that’s compatible with the state of all the other atoms in the universe and the laws of physics.

3) No matter the details of the physics, there is only cause and effect, with some amount of randomness (assuming it’s even a thing), and there’s absolutely no room for your ego to magically unshackle itself from this simple ground truth.

4) the concepts of freedom and will you’re invoking stem from the notion of counterfactuals – because alternative versions of cause and effect chains are conjured in our mind (like an AI hallucination), and you believe those could have happened, therefore, at every moment, we must have the ability to pick among those possible future paths arbitrarily, before even knowing what those possibilities are, or could have been. As if, when imagining the counterfactuals after the fact, you’re able to signal the past version of yourself to alter its “choice”, and this would repeat in a loop until it stabilizes. But even in this far fetched theory of retroactive influence, everything that happens is still a chain of inescapable causes and effects, going in a time loop. And the stable version is left with no freedom of will whatsoever.

The earlier commenter replied:

I simply don’t agree. If you can explain what causes an electron spin measurement to be either up or down, and thereby abolish superposition, then maybe I am mistaken. Otherwise I can base my decisions on the outcome of the measurement and not possible for any entity to predict my resulting actions a priori. The cause of my actions is the measurement result that is random with no discernible cause. The cause and effect chain starts only after measurement and not before.

I agree my brain is made from atoms but don’t agree it is just atoms as I look at collections of atoms that form my environment. My two dogs are collections of atoms but I realize one of them is not even bright enough to collapse the wave function. 🙂

How would one prove unequivocally there is no free will. Maybe if there were some digital simulation of me that perfectly predicted my actions then I would have to accept my sense of free will is illusory.. The future is perfectly predictable.

My point is that I can take steps to render a simulation inaccurate by consciously taking actions dependent on some measurement that cannot be known before the fact.

In lieu of a perfect simulation of me I will continue to believe that I have free will and that my future isn’t fully determined in a mechanistic way. If you have some predictive model of me we can conduct the experiment now to see if in fact I am perfectly predictable. I am ready and eager to participate. If you don’t then the claim that there is no free will is an unsupported belief while my belief I do have free will is supported by the failed experiment.

Free will is mostly a philosophical issue, but a few things can be said.

Everyone, except possibly for schizophrenics and stubborn philosophers, experiences free will and lives his life accordingly.

The above argument that science precludes free will is entirely fallacious.

Rejecting free will leads to nihilism and dispair.

Making a freely willed decision is somewhat like measuring an electron spin. For all the successes of quantum mechanics, we do not have a good theory for how such a measurement is determined. At best we can give probabilities. Some have even suggested that human consciousness is involved, it is so mysterious.

I am not saying that I have a physical explanation for how free will works. I do not. But it is also not the case that anyone has a deterministic explanation for how quantum measurements work.

The Bogus Dunning-Kruger Effect

Dr. Bee has a new video questioning the Dunning–Kruger effect. She gives papers on the subject 10/10 on the BS meter.

The dumber you are, the more certain you are that you aren't. That's the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it's been used to explain everything from bad politicians to the state of social media. Now psychologists have gone back to the biggest dataset we have and come out with the opposite conclusion. But there's a reason both sides can look at the same dots and see the opposite thing.

I agree with her. Somehow this obscure has entered public consciousness, and people commonly cite confidence as evidence of incompetence, according to this effect.

The whole subject appears to be an inside joke. Anyone citing the Dunning-Kruger effect is likely an idiot.

I have criticized the effect as bogus here, here, and here. The published effect is really just a misunderstanding of regression to the mean.

No Born Rule in Many Worlds Theory

There are dozens of papers on trying to reconcile the Born rule with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. At first this seem bizarre. The Born rule is the main empirical prediction of QM, and any interpretation would have to obey it. How else could it be an interpretation?

The position I have repeatedly taken on this blog is that many-worlds is not an interpretation, and is wholly incompatible with the concept of probability, whether expressed by the Born rule or anything else.

Now a new paper agrees with me, and says it well:

Against Many Worlds
Emily Adlam, Jacob A. Barandes

Any viable interpretation of quantum theory needs to account for the Born rule, from which the theory gets its probabilistic empirical predictions. In this paper, we give an overview of possible approaches to this problem in the context of the Many Worlds interpretation. We argue that, for structural reasons, none of them can possibly succeed. More precisely, we argue that the Many Worlds interpretation must obtain the Born rule by proceeding either axiomatically, deductively, or inductively, and that all three of these approaches run into general, fundamental obstructions.

I previously posted a video explanation by Barandes.

You cannot just postulate probabilities for the many-worlds branches of the wave function. It is essential to many-worlds that the branches emerge as a result of decoherence. The branches cannot be assumed to have probabilities, and in fact no one has been able to make sense out of some branches being more likely than others.

The issue goes right to the core of what we mean by probability. For this, the paper recites a textbook probability problem for comparison.

A more fundamental obstruction is that merely having multiple things is not enough, by itself, to imply a conception of probability. To see why, consider, for example, a jar containing 43 red marbles among a total of 100 marbles. On the one hand, it would be entirely reasonable to say that the fraction of red marbles was 43%. On the other hand, it would not yet be reasonable to call this fraction a probability, because, at this point in the thought experiment, the probability would not be a probability of anything. It would not make sense to say that there was a 43% probability simpliciter.

Of course, if we were to stipulate that an agent were picking a marble ‘at random’ from the jar, under some suitable notion of ‘at random’ and with the further assumption that the marbles were ‘well-mixed,’ then we would be in a reasonable position to assert that there was a probability of 43% of the agent picking a red marble. But absent such a picking process, or the introduction of some other selection process to serve a similar functional role in the argument, there would be no probability, because, again, there would simply be nothing for the probability to be a probability of.

It is worth dwelling for a moment more on what premises are needed for a ‘picking process’ to legitimate the move from 43% qua fraction to 43% qua probability. Assigning a picking probability of 43% amounts to adopting a ‘principle of indifference’ (Eva 2019) assuming that all the marbles are ‘equally likely’ to be picked. And the philosophical literature on indifference principles makes clear that they are justified and successful only when they reflect relevant features of the process by which an outcome is selected, such as the symmetries of the picking process (van Fraassen 1989, Shackel 2007).

In particular, assigning a probability of 43% makes sense if the agent responsible for picking a marble is doing so by some process that is blind to color, meaning that there is a symmetry with respect to color – hence our invocation of terms like ‘at random’ and ‘well-mixed.’ Obviously if the agent is picking marbles in some way that is biased toward red marbles, then it would not make sense to assign a probability of 43%.

Just as you cannot abstractly assign probabilities to a jar of marbles, you cannot assign them to a wave function either. You have to have some notion of a measurement, and that is what the many-worlds folks refuse to do.

I doubt that any of these arguments are new. Many worlds theory is wholly incompatible with a scientific outlook, and is a crackpot belief.

The only way to understand many-worlds is as a complete rejection making scientific predictions, and a complete rejection of probability. That is, to accept it you have to say that no predictions can be made, and that probability theory does not make sense.

In Sean M. Carroll's recent podcast, he rambles in support of many-worlds theory:

I have heard you describe more unlikely worlds, thinner branches as not mattering as much. I don't know what your ontology of mattering is here, but it brought is it broadly speaking the fact that there are just more of the likely versions and therefore we should care about those more? If so, would you consider this a fundamentally utilitarian approach to mattering?

Well, uh it's not that there are more likely versions. ...

That's that's the entire trickiness of many worlds is that you can't get the counting that you need to get the Born rule right just from counting the numbers of worlds. The worlds don't count equally. They count as much as the amplitude squared. So 99% for this one, 1% for that one.

So I use the word mattering just to be indicative of whatever matters to you. So it might be the probability that you find yourself in such a world. It might be how much energy such a world has. It might be the utilitarian uh utility function that you have for such a world. Whatever you think is assigned to the world mattering goes along with the amplitude squared in many worlds. I think that's a good motto to keep in mind to get you through figuring out how to think about this scenario.

In quantum mechanics, the amplitude squared gives the probability. In many worlds, you cannot count the worlds or get more likely worlds. What you get is that some worlds subjectively matter more than others. You can think of the mattering as being based on probability or energy or utility function.

Really? This is all nonsense. There is nothing scientific about some worlds mattering more than others.

Superdeterminism makes Science Impossible

Superdeterminism has very few adherents, like Sabine Hossenfelder. I would ignore it completely, as too nutty to discuss, except that she has become one of the most prominent expositors of Physics.

Here is a new paper, discussing one of the main problems:

This is one of the longest-standing objections to (naïve) superdeterminist theories, often referred to as the Tobacco Company Syndrome (Hossenfelder and Palmer, 2020). Fundamentally, it is an epistemological concern. In Maudlin’s formulation (2019), the objection draws an analogy with a tobacco industry apologist who first invokes a common cause to deny that smoking produces cancer, and then, when confronted with randomised animal trials, insists that the randomisation procedure itself was somehow biased in favour of placing cancer-prone subjects in the experimental group, a move Maudlin regards as wholly unscientific. It is not difficult to see the risks to scientific practice if this objection were to remain unresolved within superdeterminism. Such a denial of Statistical Independence would imply, for instance, the impossibility of discussing isolated systems or experimental random errors. Moreover, it would pose a significant risk to the empirical coherence of the theory, as defined by Barrett (1996).

That is right, if you believe in superdeterminism then it is impossible to do an experiment to prove that tobacco smoking causes cancer. It is also impossible to do any other experiment, or reach any scientific conclusions.

Many-worlds theory has similar problems. It makes all scientific work impossible.

There is a Frame for Defining Now

From a recent video explaining relativity:

There is no way to draw a single 17:33 consistent line across spacetime that all observers agree separates has happened from hasn't happened yet. The failure parade. Some physicists argued this was a mathematical convenience with no ontological weight. But no experiment has ever found a preferred frame that would let now become absolute again.

Not correct. Such a frame is given by the Cosmic microwave background.

This video is AI generated, so should not be taken too seriously. It is a common error, so I point it out.

Relativitism Corrupted Humanities and Social Sciences

This blog focuses on the hard sciences and objective reality, mainly Physics. I expect physicists to be hard-headed scientists, and I am disappointed when they are not.

Outside the hard sciences, the academic world is a wasteland. They are concerned with relativitism, not relativity.

A bunch of experts were asked to write a report on the decline of humanities and social sciences. Objectivity has been abandoned. Political considerations have overwhelmed serious work.

Here is a summary by a biology professor. One example:

In 2023, the AAA canceled an accepted panel at its annual conference, titled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology.” The AAA said at the time that the panel would have harmed members’ “safety and dignity,” and that its premise contradicted “settled science.” The Vanderbilt report cited this incident to argue that when politically charged questions “are treated as settled by the scholarly community, the result is an illegitimate suppression of dissent.”

Greene on the Most Mind-Boggling Result

Brian Greene answers questions:

And I'd say the most mind-boggling result of quantum 1:44:38 mechanics is the result of John Bell, John Stewart Bell, ...

But he was not willing to accept quantum entanglement at face value. He wanted to know if a version of quantum mechanics might be constructed that would be that would be local that wouldn't have these spooky non-local influences.

and he was trying to realize a dream really of Albert Einstein who thought that might be possible to come up with a new theory that embraces the same predictions as quantum mechanics but doesn't have this weird spooky action and he worked very hard thought he was coming very close to formulating that theory but every time he got to the near to the end it fell apart.

so finally he said to himself maybe this is a fool's errand maybe it's impossible to have a theory that agrees with the predictions of quantum mechanics and yet somehow excises spooky action non-local influences and he proved that that is the case a beautiful theorem John Bell proved a theorem which then because of the experimental data being such as to confirm the version that I just described that any quantum mechanically uh viable theory that agrees with the predictions of the standard approach is necessarily non-local. And so that to me is the most stunning implication. We necessarily live in a nonlocal universe. Yeah.

In fact, as a small teaser, I'll mention I'm actually writing a new book on quantum mechanics.

It is going to be a horrible book.

Quantum mechanics does not have any spooky non-local influences. Bell only proved that it differs from a type of local classical theories. It left open the possibility that a spooky classical theory might agree with QM, but that is not what Einstein was looking for.

Greene is famous for promoting string theory and multiverse theories. He now admits that these are speculative and unproven. Next he is going to promote quantum spookiness.

Meanwhile, Dr. Bee is writing a similar book and ventures into spookiness in her latest video on You probably misunderstand the double slit experiment. She is mostly correct, but goes off the rails when she says it proves either superdeterminism or spookiness:

4:37 But if the particle went through the other slit, you never interacted with it. You didn't touch the particle. It just knew you were trying to. The only way that you can avoid this faster than light update is that the particle knows whether you'll measure it before you've made the decision whether to measure it or not. This is what's called super determinism. And this is what's so weird about the double slit.

The error is that she keeps talking about particles, as if each has a definite position and momentum even when not observed. They do not. They are really waves, and waves always make interference patterns when going throught a double-slit, or even a single slit. There is no need to invoke spookiness or superdeterminism.

She refers to another quantum oddity. If you fire an electron at a double slit, it is really a wave that goes through both slits. If you put detectors on the slits, you only find one electron. If you observe the electron in one slit, you can be sure that the other detector will not see it. Conversely, if a detector says no electron went through one slit, then the other detector will see it in the other slit.

She describes this as very strange:

You make a measurement at one slit and the wave function on the other slit 4:22 changes immediately. And note that this is the case even if the particle does not trigger the detector. If it doesn't go into the detector, you know it must have gone through the other slit. But if the particle went through the other slit, you never interacted with it. You didn't touch the particle. It just knew you were trying to.

It is not so odd. Suppose I put my car key in my pocket, and I forget which of my two pockets. I can reach into one pocket, find it empty, and immediately deduce that my key is in the other pocket. I am finding my key, without interacting with it. It is not spooky or superdeterministic. The key did not know that I was looking for it.

It is peculiar to QM that measurements give eigenvalues. The theory says that the (unmeasured) electron goes partially through each slit. It could even tunnel through a barrier. But you never observe half an electron or an electron being in two places at once. Those are the real quantum mysteries. But the spookiness and superdeterminism are just nonsense.

Update: Greene has posted a long interview of Sean M. Carroll.

New Paper Calls Quantum Computing a Big Failure

Dr. Quantum Supremacy responds to a new paper:

A week ago, a philosopher named Amit Hagar put out a preprint entitled The NISQ Trap: Eight Years of Demonstrations the Hardware was Built to Lose. Here’s the abstract:

With a single clear exception, every NISQ-era flagship demonstration of ‘quantum advantage’ has, within eighteen months of its announcement, been classically reproduced, shown to rest on classically tractable structure, or closed by a simulability theorem.

Nevertheless, the basic thesis — that quantum supremacy in the NISQ (Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum computing) era has been a failure, or even an example of pathological science — seems surprisingly widely shared, along with the opposite thesis that quantum computing already gives oodles of useful advantages for optimization and finance. ...

You’re right that, if you just look at the commercial value right now versus money spent to date, quantum computing looks like a colossal waste — as did classical computing before it scaled, as did nuclear power and heavier-than-air flight and every other nontrivial new technology.

Nobody invested a nickel in those other technologies, until someone had a proof of concept. Quantum computing is different in that it has attracted many billions of investment dollars, without a proof of concept, or a business plan on how it would ever make money.

This response is very weak. Go ahead and read it and decide for yourself. Someone publishes a paper saying the whole field has been a failure for 20 years, he admits that the view is widely shared, but says new technologies take time.

And of course he falls back on the argument that quantum computers have not been proved impossible:

Yes, the “real” goal remains, as it’s been since the 1990s, to build a scalable fault-tolerant quantum computer — and I’m glad that Hagar (unlike, say, Gil Kalai) never suggests that we’ve learned anything to rule that goal out. In the meantime, an intermediate goal would be to use NISQ devices to do physics and chemistry simulations that are commercially useful, or that help solve important scientific problems. The point of quantum supremacy experiments, you might say, is that by demonstrating the reality of quantum speedup about as clearly as it can be demonstrated with current hardware, they let us cleanly turn our attention to those more ambitious goals.

Hagar does not even talk about whether quantum computers are possible. His point is that they are empirical failures.

Update: Aaronson says:

For me, though, the real game always has been to learn the truth or falsehood of the Extended Church-Turing Thesis: that is, can all of nature be simulated on a standard Turing machine with polynomial overhead, or is quantum mechanics a counterexample to this? And from that standpoint, it seems obvious to me that the burden of proof lies with those who think the Extended Church-Turing Thesis still holds in a quantum-mechanical universe. Why does it hold? What astonishing new principle causes it to hold, despite the exponentially many canceling terms that generically arise in a path integral?

I get enraged when (some) QC skeptics seem not even to notice these profound questions, and content themselves to poke holes in this or that specific quantum fault-tolerance proposal and then call it a day. That seems to me to reflect a staggering incuriosity about the way the world actually is.

I am probably one of those enraging him. I agree that the big question is whether quantum computers can outdo Turing machines. Since he is a leading expert and he regards this as still an open question, then I accept that it is unsettled.

I disagree about the burden of proof. I say that a new technology should show that it works. He says the burden of proof is to show that it does not work.

The profound question is to understand why it does not work. I am somewhat incurious about this, because I am not sure any explanation will be fully satisfactory. Do we understand why F=ma, or how gravity workds, or why nothing goes faster than light, or why perpetual motion machines are impossible? Yes, I know the textbooks have explanations, but they do not stop people from theorizing about them, so apparently the explanations are not totally convincing.

That Extended Church-Turing Thesis was widely accepted for 50 years, including by very smart physicists who understood quantum mechanics. If quantum supremacy were possible, I would think that someone would have demonstrated it by now.

Update: Gil Kalai Says:

I also tend to agree with Amit’s conclusion that the quantum supremacy claims are either false or inconclusive. ...

For more than two decades, Scott has argued that the burden of proof lies on the shoulders of the skeptics. I suggest that we split the burden of proof as follows:

The burden of showing that the engineering obstacles to high-quality quantum error correction and quantum fault tolerance are not far beyond reach lies with the proponents of quantum computing. They still have a long way to go before providing convincing evidence that these goals are feasible and can be achieved in the foreseeable future.

Foundations of General Relativity

The foundational principles of general relativity are said to be the equivalence principle, and general covariance. This new video disagrees.

Here is how I see it. The equivalence principle could also said to be foundational to Newtonian classical gravity, and it is only associated with general relativity for historical reasons.

General covariance is a mathematical principle, and it is not clear that any mathematical principle, by itself, has any physical consequences. As Einstein is quoted:

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

The laws of math do have consequences, but they require interpretation.

We normally say that Euclidean geometry has physical consequences, but that is only because of some assumptions about how idealized points, lines, planes, etc. correspond to physical entities.

Historically, covariance under Lorentz transformation was crucial to the presentations of relativity given by Poincare in 1905 and Minkowski in 1907. Einstein had a weaker version that was more similar to what Lorentz published in 1895.

Einstein was unconvinced, and wrote a paper denouncing the concept in 1913. Eventually, Grossmann, Levi-Civita, Ricci, and Hilbert convinced him to accept it.

The main ideas behind relativistic covariance had already been published by Poincare and Minkowski, but they were dead by the time Einstein worked on general relativity

I believe that general covariance is a crucially important concept. It is a way of saying that the laws do not depend on coordinates. That different frames can be used to the same effect. These ideas go right to the core of why the theory is called relativity. And historically, covariance was a large part of why relativity was accepted. By 1908 it was widely accepted, even though Einstein did not.

Aaronson Starts a Venture Investing Fund

Dr. Quantum Supremacy is tired of watching his friends and associates get rich with half-baked ideas about bitcoin, quantum computing, and AI, so he is joing the gold rush. He announces:

So then, screw it! In partnership with my brother David Aaronson, who’s long done investing professionally, and on David’s guidance and encouragement, I’m hereby embarking on a new policy. ...

So far, David and I are investing in:

• Oratomic (the new neutral-atom quantum computing startup out of Pasadena started by Dolev Bluvstein, John Preskill, and Hsin-Yuan Huang among others, which I previously blogged about here). See here for their Series A announcement this week. ...

So let me educate you then. I played a central role in introducing the whole program of sampling-based quantum supremacy back in 2009-2012. That what was allowed first Google, then Quantinuum and others, to do such dramatic demonstrations starting in 2019. Almost anyone in quantum computing will tell you that that was essential to various QC startups being able to go public recently at ~$15B valuations.

Now, what’s true is that I didn’t succeed at capturing essentially any of the value that I helped create this way. What’s true is that all the billions of dollars went to other people, who optimized for getting equity early on, rather than to me or my students, who optimized for learning the truth about quantum speedups and writing the key papers that other people then managed to profit from.

This is another sign we are in a bubble.

Oratomic says that it will not try to demonstrate quantum supremacy. It will go straight for a commercial quantum computer.

The Tycho Solar System, Revisited

I always thought Tycho Brahe was the greatest pure astronomer, so I was surprised to find this new paper trashing him:

The Tychonic system, an implausible theory
Gabriele Vanin

Several scholars have accorded the Tychonic System a prominent place, considering it a credible alternative to the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. In recent years, there have even been some enthusiastic contributions in support of Brahe, which have sought to show how his solutions were the most suitable for providing scientifics support to the new observations that were accumulating between the late 16th century and the mid-17th century.

Tycho had a model where the Sun went around the Earth, and Mercury and Venus went around the Sun.

At a time when Copernicus had already published his hypothesis, it could not but be considered a step backwards, a return to the past, a naive and useless compromise. That is, as an ad hoc theory (the kind that sci- entists gladly do without if they can, and, in this case, they could) contrived on purpose to have the best of both worlds, i.e. the immobility of the Earth and the concentric motion of the planets around the Sun, as a geometrically and physically poorly founded expedient. After Copernicus finally have the courage to declare that in the homocentric spheres, in epicycles and deferents lies hidden the orbit of the Earth, does Brahe return to the starting point, swapping the orbit of the Earth with that of the Sun again? It would be a bit as if, in the aftermath of the publication of the On the Origin of Species, someone had said that yes, evolution was acceptable, but that the evolution of man had occurred on a parallel track, not descending from the first common life-form, but from another one, completely different, and had developed quite independently.

This is ridiculous. There were good arguments for and against the motion of the Earth.

The paper later complains that Kepler's third law, discovered in 1619, could be applied to Saturns moons, discovered in 1656-84, and that would seem to falsify the Tychonic system. Tycho died in 1601.

I have seen others trash Tycho for being too stupid to accept Copernicanism. I wonder about what their idea of science is.

Tycho had the best pre-telescope astronomy observations of anyone. By far. The stars had been tracked for thousands of years, but Tycho's data was so good that it made all preceding data worthless.

A geocentric model is not necessarily wrong. Motion is relative. We say the Earth goes around the Sun, not because it is a fact, but because dynamic models make more sense in a center-of-mass frame. It makes more sense to say the smaller object is orbiting the larger object.

Tycho was creating a more accurate model of the solar system. He did not know about gravity. But without him, it is hard to see how Kepler and Newton could have accomplished what they did.

To me, science is all about collecting data, and constructing explanatory and predictive models. Tycho did this, possibly more brilliantly that any other astronomer in history. And yet people want to trash him as unscientific.

A scientific theory can be extremely good, even if the interpretation is not quite right. For example, Murray Gell-Mann is famous for his theory of quarks, but originally he did not even believe in quarks. As the quarks cannot be isolated, it is a philosophical issue whether they are real or not. Now everyone says they are real, but Gell-Mann was not really wrong to treat them as theoretical constructs.

IBM Plans to Scale Up Quantum Computing

The WSJ reports:

International Business Machines has spent a decade building, testing and improving in the once-theoretical realm of quantum computing at its glass-paneled laboratory complex in upstate New York.

This year, the company is laying the groundwork to turn that technology into a fully-fledged, scalable business from an expensive science project.

IBM said last month it plans to form a new independent subsidiary called Anderon, a foundry to produce the silicon wafers needed to make quantum-computing processors. The venture is seeded by a $1 billion investment from the Trump administration and another $1 billion of IBM’s own cash.

Anderon will give the company a new line of business in selling wafers to other quantum-computing companies. It will also provide a steady stream of wafers to continue developing its own quantum technology, positioning IBM to capture part of what the Boston Consulting Group projects will be a $90 billion to $170 billion market for quantum-computing providers by 2040.

The venture will begin with an expansion of the company’s in-house facility in Albany, N.Y., which makes wafers for IBM’s internal research. “Now we have to scale it,” IBM Director of Research Jay Gambetta said in an interview.

The company also plans to spend an additional $9 billion over five years to advance the final stages of its quest to build a quantum-mechanics-powered computer capable and reliable enough for widespread use, a goal known as fault tolerance. That computer, named Starling, is being targeted for 2029.

With Anderon, IBM is thinking beyond Starling, or even a more powerful quantum computer planned for 2033.

I don't see how IBM can be scaling up, when they do not have a working technology, and do not have applications for the scale up.

Dr. Bee has a new video trashing the prospects for quantum computing, and in particular, IBM for quietly shifting goals. It is still committed, but cannot achieve its previous goals.

Sean M. Carroll Pushes Many-worlds Again

New interview:

Quantum Mechanics Still Doesn't Make Sense | Sean Carroll
New Scientist

What really happens in the quantum world?

In this conversation, physicist Sean Carroll explores some of the deepest mysteries in quantum mechanics: the famous double-slit experiment, wave function collapse, the Many Worlds interpretation, entropy and the arrow of time.

Speaking to New Scientist reporter Jacklin Kwan, Carroll discusses why electrons appear to behave like waves, how observation seems to affect reality and whether the universe constantly branches into countless parallel worlds. Carroll also explains the measurement problem, the challenges of interpreting quantum theory and why physicists still debate what quantum mechanics is actually telling us about the nature of reality.

Carroll is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author whose work focuses on the foundations of physics, quantum mechanics, cosmology and the nature of time.

He gives a brief explanation of why he believes in many-worlds theory, if you want it straight from him.

He lays it out clearly. When you have a situation where several outcomes seem possible, you forget about making a prediction, and just assume that they all happen in parallel universes.

That's it. It does not really have anything to do with quantum mechanics or the Schroedinger equation. It is just a rule for replacing probabilities with unseen worlds.

You do not even get to say that some worlds are more likely than others. You just have to accept that all possibilities happen, and nothing can be predicted.

I'm a believer in the many worlds interpretation of quantum 16:58 mechanics. ... But really it's just a theory that says you want the answer to the reality problem. Wave functions are real. They represent reality precisely and completely. ...

When I observe the electron, I don't observe the wave function. I observe different possibilities. You can interpret that as saying that what the wave function really is is a superposition of all possible measurement outcomes. And what you're seeing when you measure it is you're picking out one of the set of possibilities with different probabilities. Right?

And so what many worlds ends up saying and it's not an assertion again it's it's comes out of the equations but it says that what you send up with is a superposition but not just of the electron the combined system of the electron and the scientist doing the measurement. There's a superposition of the electron was here and you observed it there plus the electron was there and you observed it there plus the electron was there and you observed it there and the many worlds boom they're there.

And so if you accept the picture of wave functions as superpositions of different measurement outcomes it's no work at all to accept them as superpositions of different possible worlds and then everything is just physics.

So you observe electrons, not wave functions. The wave function is just a way of representing all the possible observable outcomes. All that is correct. But then he makes the leap to say that "it's no work at all" to accept the possible outcomes as parallel worlds.

I spell all this out, because most readers here probably think I am attacking a straw man when I say how stupid many-worlds theory is. It really is stupid and nonsensical. Just listen to its most eloquent advocate.

It is no work at all to replace a scientific theory with one that makes no predictions. Just say that actual observables are not real, and that the real entities are the imaginary possibilities that no one ever sees. Just forget about making predictions, and brag about the explanatory power of being able to talk about unobservable parallel universes.

I continue to be amazed that anyone takes this nonsense seriously. It is impossible to reconcile this with a scientific worldview. It is the most anti-science philosophy.

Microsoft Qubits Questioned Again

Microsoft has been trying to build quantum computers with topological qubits, which would have durability advantages if they worked. But SciAm reports:

A top quantum computing expert assails Microsoft’s claims that it has a “topological qubit,” arguing in a new paper that the company has failed to demonstrate the technology.

University of St Andrews physicist Henry Legg argues that the “topological qubit,” a storer of quantum information that could theoretically maintain a higher fidelity than any in existence, might simply be noise.

The commentary was published today in Nature’s “Matters Arising,” the journal’s venue for formal criticism of its published papers. Legg’s response is aimed at Microsoft’s most recent Nature paper, which was published earlier this month—but it is just the latest in a string of criticism aimed at Microsoft’s Quantum division by other researchers in the field.

The company has been forced to retract certain previous peer-reviewed papers. And in the new commentary, Legg argues that their most recent Nature paper may be similarly flawed. In a response also published today by Nature, a member of Microsoft’s Quantum team argues that their measurements do justify the claim that they’ve produced a topological qubit.

The Microsoft paper has about 150 authors. I did not understand it. Maybe Microsoft has done some Nobel Prize quality research, but I doubt it. I wonder how the scientists convince Microsoft management to keep funding it. There is no possibility of a monetary payoff.

I did not know that Nature had a journal for formal criticism of its papers. That seems like a good idea.

Gil Kalai defends his Quantum Skepticism

Dr. Quantum Supremacy has running feuds with several people, including Israeli mathematician Gil Kalai who says in response:

When it comes to quantum computing, I regard the choice made by many colleagues and friends to pursue this direction of research as entirely (3000%) justified, and it has led to beautiful mathematics and science. (I hope that my own choice to pursue the skeptical direction was justified as well, though this is a more difficult call.)

For the record, I expect that scalable quantum computation — and even important milestones toward this goal — are inherently impossible. ...

One very clear and important point of disagreement between Scott and me concerns the following simple factual question:

Is it currently possible to produce (without classical-computing interference) samples of size 500K for depth-14 random circuits with 20 qubits and an XEB fidelity above 0.2? (This is something Google claimed in 2019.)

I tend to think that the answer to this question is negative; Scott strongly believes that this and much more have already been achieved experimentally. Thus these are sharp factual disagreements, and I hope they will be resolved within the next few years.

I do not know who is right about that factual question, but I am included to believe that Google did not really prove it, if Kalai is till unconvinced seven years later.

Aaronson is also wound up about some Middle East war issues. I understand why he is so pro-Israel, but I do not understand why he is so anti-Trump. At any rate, it is out of my expertise.

The Modern Crypto Primitives

The quantum crypto folks are threatening the cryptographic infrastructure that runs the world. I summarize the main functions.

Hash. Any digital message can be transformed to a 32-byte hash. It is believed that no one will ever find two messages with the same hash.

Public key pairs. A 32-byte private key can be converted to a 32-byte public key. No one can invert the operation.

Signature. A private key and a message hash can be signed to a 64-byte signature. The public key can verify the signature. No one can forge the signature without the private key.

Encryption. A 32-byte secret key can encrypt an arbitrary digital message. No one can decrypt without the secret key.

Key agreement. Two public key pairs can be combined to give a 32-byte shared secret, using the private key of one and the public key of the other. Both ways give you the same shared secret. No one can get it from just the public keys.

These functions are quite efficient and underlie the security of nearly everything on the internet today, notably https and ssh. They also underlie Bitcoin. There is broad agreement that they cannot be cracked with conventional Turing computers for the foreseeable future. There are widely available free libraries to do all these things.

Quantum computers threaten the public keys, making it possible to deduce the private key. Google predicts this will happen on what they call Q-Day, maybe as early as 2029. I doubt it will ever happen.

There are post-quantum public key pairs that are resistent to quantum algorithms, but they are much bigger and not as well tested.

Microsoft and Google are hard at work replacing their public key pairs with post-quantum ones. Some high-value targets want to switch now, because of the possibility that transmissions are being recorded now so that the Chinese can decrypt ten years from now. For a typical user ordering an online product, this is not a concern.

This reminds me a little about how IPv6 was designed to replace IPv4 internet protocol in 1998. Most of you reading this are probably still using IPv4. The reasons for change are different, but it shows how the networks are slow to change, if the old system is working just fine.

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.