Whatever Happened to String Theory?

Gizmodo reports:

Whatever Happened to String Theory?

At the turn of the century, it sounded as if string theory could give us big answers about the universe. Well… has it?

Believe it or not, physicists want to keep it simple. That’s why many scientists, including Albert Einstein, believe physics could eventually converge into a single, overarching paradigm that describes the universe — a theory of everything.

It was always a foolish belief. Especially Einstein's version of it. Anyone looking for a "paradigm" is not doing science.

Enter string theory. Very broadly speaking, string theory is a mathematical framework that replaces point-like particles with one-dimensional “strings” as the fundamental building blocks of matter. It was initially proposed as an explanation for a different phenomenon but quickly caught the attention of physicists working to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity—two extremely successful, equally valid theories that notoriously don’t get along.

Everybody says those theories conflict, but there is no problem as they apply to anything observable.

Then followed two “superstring revolutions,” which saw impressive strides in mapping out the details of how string theory could capture the complexity of our universe. The fervor of string theory naturally leaked over to popular conversations—science enthusiasts of the 1990s and 2000s, I’m looking at you—producing famous documentaries such as PBS’s The Elegant Universe and a trove of popular and academic books.

The word "revolution" is another tipoff that science is not being done.

The article requested comments from experts, and got a variety of opinions.

I say that string theory was trying to solve a problem that did not exist. It was a mathematical exercise with no relation to science.

In twenty years, I look forward to articles on what happened to quantum computing, quantum cryptography, teleportation, and other trendy topics of today.

Quantum Theory was not a Paradigm Shift

A philosopher of science says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copenhagen Wins the Latest Quantum Poll

Quantum mechanics textbooks commonly teach the Copenhagen interpretation. A member of the public would get the impression that Copenhagen in inconsistent or nonsensical, and being abandoned by physicists. That is what the leading popularizers, like Sean M. Carroll and Sabine Hossenfelder tell us.

Nope. A new paper explains:

As we approach the centennial anniversary of modern quantum mechanics this paper revisits the foundational debates through a new poll within the research community. ... our results indicate a persistent preference for the Copenhagen interpretation.

It measures support for Everett/many-worlds at a measly 7%. This is even worse than the de Broglie–Bohm interpretation, which is not even a serious one.

Our findings, therefore, do not lend much support to Tegmark’s initial claim from 1997 that “the prevailing view on the interpretation of quantum mechanics appears to be gradually changing,” as the preferences in interpretations have remained rather stable since then.

Tegmark promotes his own strange version of many-worlds.

Nature magazine has a similar story:

Nature asked researchers what they thought was the best interpretation of quantum phenomena and interactions — that is, their favourite of the various attempts scientists have made to relate the mathematics of the theory to the real world. The largest chunk of responses, 36%, favoured the Copenhagen interpretation — a practical and often-taught approach. But the survey also showed that several, more radical, viewpoints have a healthy following. ...

The Copenhagen interpretation’s philosophical underpinnings have become so normalized as to seem like no interpretation at all, adds Robert Spekkens, who studies quantum foundations at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Many advocates are “just drinking the Kool-Aid of the Copenhagen philosophy without examining it”, he says.

So the physicists actually doing Physics accept the Copenhagen, and barely think of it as an interpretation. The philosophers are unhappy about this.

Also, from PBS Space-time:

Is the multiverse bad science because 15:27 it’s unfalsifiable or an explanatory dead end. ...

So the badness of multiverse science depends very much on your definition of science. If 15:44 you adhere to a strict Popperian view that science is only that which can be falsified—disproved by 15:52 doable experiments—then you could argue that the multiverse is not science. But by the same logic 15:59 you would argue that hypothesizing that galaxies exist beyond the particle horizon is bad science 16:05 because that too can’t be tested.

A more relaxed view would say that science applies logical 16:11 reasoning coupled with a whole suite of tools to collectively find a consistent picture of what 16:16 reality is. If something is potentially a part of reality, then it’s in principle approachable 16:22 by scientific methods. So, if the multiverse might exist then it’s very much in the realm of science.

Nature quotes:

From their vantage point in one world, an observer measuring the particle would see only one outcome, but the wavefunction never really collapses. Instead it branches into many universes, one for each different outcome. “It requires a dramatic readjustment of our intuitions about the world, but to me that’s just what we should expect from a fundamental theory of reality,” says Sean Carroll, a physicist and philosopher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who responded to the survey.

No, it is not what anyone should expect.

Q-Day Predicted for 2025

Reuters reports:

QD5’s executive vice president, Tilo Kunz, told officials from the Defense Information Systems Agency that possibly as soon as 2025, the world would arrive at what has been dubbed “Q-day,” the day when quantum computers make current encryption methods useless. Machines vastly more powerful than today’s fastest supercomputers would be capable of cracking the codes that protect virtually all modern communication, he told the agency, which is tasked with safeguarding the U.S. military’s communications.

In the meantime, Kunz told the panel, a global effort to plunder data is underway so that intercepted messages can be decoded after Q-day in what he described as “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks, according to a recording of the session the agency later made public.

Militaries would see their long-term plans and intelligence gathering exposed to enemies. Businesses could have their intellectual property swiped. People’s health records would be laid bare. ...

Kunz is among a growing chorus sounding this alarm. Many cyber experts believe all the major powers are collecting ahead of Q-day. The United States and China, the world’s leading military powers, are accusing each other of data harvesting on a grand scale.

Okay, I am marking the calendar. 2025 is only a year away.

I think that there is no chance of a Q-Day in my lifetime, but it is nice to have these predictions.

Another Look at Bohr's Anti-Realist Realism

Christian de Ronde writes in a new paper:

Since its Greek origin, physics has been related to physis, namely, the totality of what is. The realist presupposition that gave birth to physics was the idea that theories provide knowledge about the logos (i.e., order) of reality through the creation of systematic, unified schemes capable to account for the multiplicity immanently found within experience (see for discussion [13, 14]). This was the case for more than two millennia of successful developments from Protagoras and Heraclitus to Plato and Aristotle, and then, up to modern times to Galileo and Newton. But even though modernity — with the creation of classical mechanics — could be regarded as the peak of the Greek theoretical realist program, this period can be also seen as the starting point of the anti-realist re-foundation of science. A process that would culminate in post-modern times, during the 20th century. As Karl Popper would famously describe the situation during the late 1950s:

“Today the view of physical science founded by Osiander, Cardinal Bellarmino, and Bishop Berkeley, has won the battle without another shot being fired. Without any further debate over the philosophical issue, without producing any new argument, the instrumentalist view (as I shall call it) has become an accepted dogma. It may well now be called the ‘official view’ of physical theory since it is accepted by most of our leading theorists of physics (although neither by Einstein nor by Schrödinger). And it has become part of the current teaching of physics.” [43, pp. 99-100]

Physical theories would then become to be regarded as an economy of ‘clicks’ in detectors not necessarily linked to the description of reality.

Osiander is the one who wrote the preface to the 1543 Copernicus book, saying that astronomy models can be useful even the underlying motions are not true. He wrote that book's ideas were "not put forward to convince anyone that they are true, but merely to provide a reliable basis for computation." Bellarmino argued that Galileo had not actually proved the motion of the Earth. By 1950, everyone accepted that motion is relative.

Bohr is the man famous for saying:

There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.

People liked to put words in Bohr's mouth, so he may not have said exactly that.

Apparently the philosophically issues over realism were not settled in 1950, as plenty of physicists and philosophers argue about it today. The word "realism" is a misomer, and the advocates of realism are usually trying to get us to believe in properties that cannot be observed. They are imaginary properties that help make a model work.

Praising the Great Paradigm Shifters

Peter Woit declares:

If one tried to pick a single most talented and influential figure of the past 100 years in each of the fields of pure mathematics and of theoretical physics, I’d argue that you should pick Alexander Grothendieck in pure math and Edward Witten in theoretical physics.

Several comments give some good reasons for disagreeing with this assessment.

Grothendieck is almost completely unknown outside Mathematics, as his work was in the abstract foundations of algebraic geometry. As for Witten:

And he [Ed Witten] rarely came to our floor, fourth floor, but here he was, coming and knocking at my door, and then saying, “Have you heard about the revolution?”…

I said, “What revolution?” He said, “The SO(32) revolution.”

Witten convinced everyone of these string "revolutions". This one was a minor technical result in 1984. There is still no known relation to the physical world.

This "revolution" terminology stems from philosoher T. Kuhn, who based it on a study of the "Copernican revolution", where the Earth does revolutions about the Sun. He said that Copernican theory was not measurably better than Ptolemaic (Earth-centered), but was great anyway because it became accepted.

The lesson here is that if you call something a revolution and persuade your colleagues, you can be a great genius without showing any measurable advantages.

Woit credits Witten largely because he was-influential in conning everyone into studying string theory, a big dead end. Dirac, Feynman, Weinberg, and all the other theoretical physicists just advanced the state of the art, and did what others might have done later. Maybe no one would have bothered with string theory, if it were not for a few leaders like Witten.

Maybe a Monkey Threw the Paradigm-Shifting Ashtray

I mentioned how a famous documentary film maker wrote a book trashing the famous paradigm shift professor.

The professor is now dead, and his archivist published a defense. The filmmaker got the professor's brand of cigarettes wrong. And maybe a monkey threw the ashtray, not the professor. And reports that the professor had multiple monkeys in his office were exaggerated.

I post this to help complete the record.

The real problem with Professor Paradigm Shift is not his ashtray, or even his philosophy, but how his famous book convinced much of academia that science is just a system of following faddish beliefs, with no theory being objectively better than any other.

R.I.P. Steven Weinberg

Many fine obituaries of Steven Weinberg are appearing.

His Nobel Prive was for the weak interaction, but he shared it with two others who came up with the same equations at the same time. His paper had essentially no citations, until others developed gauge theory more fully. So while the theory is important to the standard model, I am not so sure his 1967 paper was important.

Weinberg wrote this in the preface to his 1972 general relativity book:

There was another, more personal reason for my writing this book. In learning general relativity, and then in teaching it to classes at Berkeley and MIT, I became dissatisfied with what seemed to be the usual approach to the subject. I found that in most textbooks geometric ideas were given a starring role, so that a student who asked why the gravitational field is represented by a metric tensor, or why freely falling particles move on geodesics, or why the field equations are generally covariant would come away with an impression that this had something to do with the fact that spacetime is a Riemannian manifold.

Of course, this was Einstein's point of view, and his preeminent genius necessarily shapes our understanding of the theory he created. However, I believe that the geometrical approach has driven a wedge between general relativity and the theory of elementary particles. As long as it could be hoped, as Einstein did hope, that matter would eventually be understood in geometrical terms, it made sense to give Riemannian geometry a primary role in describing the theory of gravitation. But now the passage of time has taught us not to expect that the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions can be understood in geometrical terms, and that too great an emphasis on geometry can only obscure the deep connections between gravitation and the rest of physics.

This opinion is so bizarre that it is hard to believe it came from such a smart man.

All general relativity scholars give geometric ideas a starring role. But that was not Einstein's view. Einstein explicitly rejected the geometry.

This rejection was puzzling for both Einstein and Weinberg, as parts of general relativity have only geometric explanations, and their books do give those explanations. They did not succeed in purging the geometry.

It was also bizarre for his to deny that geometry was important for the other forces. This was five years after his Nobel prizewinning paper, and the work was credited with giving a geometrical unification of electromagnetism and weak forces. If he did not do that, what did he do? Was he repudiating his work? Did he not understand that gauge theories were geometric?

I am not trying to criticize him here. I am just pointing out some puzzling aspects of his beliefs.

He was also a hardcore atheist and scientific reductionist. He opposed religion, and considered Islam much worse that Christianity. He opposed paradigm shifters and other modern philosophy. He was a typical academic leftist, but had not bought into the current racial wokeness fanaticism.

Okay, that's all fine with me, but he also rejected positivism, and in his later years, endorsed many-worlds quantum theory. Again, these opinions are bizarre, coming from him. Lubos Motl also found them strange:

Years ago, I was only gradually noticing weird comments about quantum mechanics that Weinberg sometimes made.... At any rate, I consider Weinberg to be a 100% anti-quantum zealot ... It's sad.

He was of Jewish descent, but against Judaism the religion. He was extremely pro-Israel, and an extreme idolizer of Einstein. He studies the history of science enough to know what Einstein did and did not do, but excessively praised him anyway.

Professor famous for denying objective truth

SciAm blogger John Horgan writes :

I'll start with Kuhn. He is the philosopher of science who argued, in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that science can never achieve absolute, objective truth. Reality is unknowable, forever hidden behind the veil of our assumptions, preconceptions and definitions, or “paradigms.” At least that’s what I thought Kuhn argued, but his writings were so murky that I couldn’t be sure. ...

This was typical of how Kuhn spoke. As if to demonstrate his own views on how language obfuscates, he endlessly qualified his own statements. He seemed incapable of saying something in an unambiguous way. But what he was saying was that, even when it came to a question as seemingly straightforward — and vitally important! -- as whether HIV causes AIDS, we cannot say what the “truth” is. We can’t escape interpretation, subjectivity, cultural context, and hence we can never say whether a given claim is objectively right or wrong.

I call this perspective extreme postmodernism. ...

If anything, right-wing postmodernism became even more virulent after Obama’s election in 2008, ... 60 million Americans were infected by swine flu, 274,000 were hospitalized and 12,469 died, according to the CDC.

What can be done about the problem of right-wing postmodernism? I honestly don’t know.

The 2009 flu pandemic was declared an emergency by President Obama and the UN WHO. It will be interesting to compare it to the current Wuhan virus disease, aka COVID-19. This one is causing considerably more panic, and will probably kill a lot more people.

I am pretty sure that the large majority of the Kuhnian paradigm shifters are leftists, not right-wingers. Horgan wants to blame Pres. Trump, but I very much doubt that Trump would even recognize paradigm shifter thinking.

Good luck with the health precautions. I have no special wisdom on the subject.

For a current example of leftist denial of objective truth, see this Angela Saini essay in Nature magazine.

One of the world’s leading universities — University College London (UCL) — has completed an inquiry into its support for the discredited pseudoscience of eugenics. Funds linked to Francis Galton, a racist who believed it was possible to improve the British population through selective breeding, and who founded the Eugenics Records Office at UCL in 1904, continue to line the university’s coffers to the value of more than £800,000 (US$1 million).

The inquiry’s report, released on 28 February, recommended renaming lecture theatres and buildings bearing Galton’s name and that of another prominent geneticist. Although this is welcome, it does not acknowledge just how much yesterday’s mistakes survive in modern science.

She denies that there is any objective way to determine whether Galton's ideas are true or not, but wants to ostracize him for political reasons.

At a philosophy festival last September, I spoke about non-European cultures and their contributions to science and mathematics. One scientist remarked that he had no need to know about what had been done in ‘bongo bongo’ land.

So why would he need to know that?

She is obviously an anti-White-male leftist who denies objectivity so she can promote her own political agenda, such as making everyone learn about science done by Indian women, or some such foolishness.

She is also criticized here.

Academic groupthink on paradigm shifts

Novelist Eugene Linden writes in a NY Times op-ed:

How Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong ...

The word “upended” does not do justice to the revolution in climate science wrought by the discovery of sudden climate change. The realization that the global climate can swing between warm and cold periods in a matter of decades or even less came as a profound shock to scientists who thought those shifts took hundreds if not thousands of years. ...

In 2002, the National Academies acknowledged the reality of rapid climate change in a report, “Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises,” which described the new consensus as a “paradigm shift.” This was a reversal of its 1975 report.

I wonder if he even realizes what these terms means. A scientific revolution or paradigm shift was famously described by Thomas Kuhn as a change in thinking that is incommensurable with previous theories. That is, there is no data to say whether the new thinking is any better or worse than the old. Kuhn described scientists jumping to the new paradigm like a big fad, and not really based on any scientific analysis.

Of course it is all Donald Trump's fault:

computer modeling in 2016 indicated that its disintegration in concert with other melting could raise sea levels up to six feet by 2100, about twice the increase described as a possible worst-case scenario just three years earlier.

Computer models change that much in 3 years? That says more about the instability of the models than anything else.

If the Trump administration has its way, even the revised worst-case scenarios may turn out to be too rosy. ... But the Trump administration has made its posture toward climate change abundantly clear: Bring it on!

Trump is one of the most pro-science presidents we have ever had. Even tho he is widely hated in academia, we hardly ever hear any criticisms of how he has funded scientific work.

Trump has also over-funded quantum computing, and yet Scott Aaronson posts a rant against him. Everyone is entitled to his opinion, of course, but it seems clear to me that academia is dominated by a groupthink mentality that makes their opinions on climate or presidential politics useless.

Newton would accept modern physics

A reader sends me this Nautilus interview from last year:

Kuhn’s popular because of his phrase, “the paradigm shift.” The idea, roughly, is that Einstein came along and displaced Newton. He superseded the old view about the universe and now Newtonians couldn’t talk with Einstein’s people because they had two fundamentally different versions of reality.

And this is nonsense because of course scientists talk to each other all the time. We are endlessly changing the nature of science without losing our ability to communicate with each other about it. It’s inconceivable to me that Newton and Einstein, if they had the opportunity to get together and carry on a conversation, would have stared at each other in kind of mute incomprehension. ...

So Kuhn’s idea, correct me if I’m wrong, is that to some degree we’re always trapped inside of our own biases, our own theories. We can’t see beyond the paradigm. And this stays on until a new paradigm comes along and then our view becomes outdated.

If Isaac Newton could somehow be brought from the past and educated in XX century physics, he would certainly reject Kuhnian ideas that the newer physics was revolutionary or incommensurable.

I think that Newton would conclude:

1. Newtonian physics is still considered valid on scales far beyond any he proposed or contemplated.

2. Relativity solves the problem of how gravity is transmitted at finite speed. (Poincare solved this in 1905 based on Lorentz's ideas; Einstein had nothing to do with it.)

3. The only planetary orbit requiring a post-Newtonian correction requires centuries of observations to get a very slight effect.

The modern philosophical ideas about scientific revolutions are complete nonsense. Physics has advanced a lot since Newton, but not so much that Newton would think that he had been proved wrong, or that he would find the new physics unrecognizable.

Philosophy is now Feminist

Philosopher of pseudoscience Massimo Pigliucci wrote an essay with his opinions on the string wars. He quotes some physicists who put down current philosophers, and then goes into a rant in defense of philosophical thinking.

Those physicists were putting down philosophers, not philosophy.

He then complains that physicists talk about Popper instead of subsequent work on paradigm shifts.

Maybe that is because the work on paradigm shifts is just too stupid to discuss.

Finally he thinks that physicists should quit philosophizing about string theory, and join the fight against homeopaths and psychics.

I could get that criticism also -- why do I attack bogus physics when there are so many more bogus things to attack?

Sorry, I have no knowledge or interest in homeopaths and psychics.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a useful resource. It has articles by philosophers, as opposed to Wikipedia, which allows editing by anyone.

If you want to see how philosophy has degenerated, see this comment:

SEP articles devoted to feminism and feminist philosophy:

Feminist Philosophy

Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues
Feminist Perspectives on Rape
Latin American Feminism
Feminist Perspectives on Objectification
Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science
Feminist Moral Psychology
Feminist Bioethics
Feminist Philosophy of Law
*Feminist Perspectives on Science
Identity Politics
Feminist Perspectives on Sex Markets
Feminist Perspectives on the Body
Feminist Ethics
Feminist Perspectives on Disability
Feminist Philosophy of Religion
Feminist Philosophy of Language
Feminist Perspectives on the Self
Feminist Social Epistemology
*Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender
Feminist Metaphysics
Feminist Environmental Philosophy
Feminist Philosophy of Biology
Feminist Aesthetics
Feminist Perspectives on Class and Work
Feminist History of Philosophy
Feminist Perspectives on Globalization
Feminist Perspectives on Power
Feminist Political Philosophy
*The History of Feminism: Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet
Intersections Between Analytic and Continental Feminism
Intersections Between Pragmatist and Continental Feminism
Psychoanalytic Feminism
Continental Feminism
Pragmatist Feminism
Analytic Feminism
Liberal Feminism

There are a total of thirty-seven articles devoted to feminism and feminist issues in the SEP. I have omitted from the above list (complete) articles devoted to a number of significant feminist philosophers and thinkers.

The field is still mostly male, as opposed to some social sciences that are overrun with women.

There is no agreement in these articles on what term feminism means, nor is there any anti-feminism view described.

Horgan on the evil of paradigms

John Horgan writes in his SciAm blog:

In 1972 Thomas Kuhn hurled an ashtray at Errol Morris. Already renowned for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published a decade earlier, Kuhn was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Morris was his graduate student in history and philosophy of science.

During a meeting in Kuhn’s office, Morris questioned Kuhn’s views on paradigms, the webs of conscious and unconscious assumptions that underpin, say, Aristotle’s, Newton’s or Einstein’s physics. You cannot say one paradigm is truer than another, according to Kuhn, because there is no objective standard by which to judge them. Paradigms are incomparable, or “incommensurable.”

If that were true, Morris asked, wouldn’t history of science be impossible? Wouldn’t the past be inaccessible -- except, Morris added, for “someone who imagines himself to be God?” Kuhn realized his student had just insulted him. He muttered, “He’s trying to kill me. He’s trying to kill me.” Then he threw the ashtray at Morris and threw him out of the program.

Morris went on to become an acclaimed maker of documentaries. He won an Academy Award for The Fog of War, his portrait of “war criminal” — Morris’s term — Robert McNamara. His documentary The Thin Blue Line helped overturn the conviction of a man on death row for murder. ...

I agree, to an extent, with Morris’s take on Kuhn. I spent hours talking to Kuhn in 1992, when he was at MIT, and he struck me as almost comically self-contradicting. He tied himself in knots trying to explain precisely what he meant when he talked about the impossibility of true communication. He really did seem to doubt whether reality exists independently of our flawed, fluid conceptions of it.

Kuhn is dead now, and his followers are worse than he ever was. We should blame the living scholars who substitute paradigms for reality.

Morris proposes that postmodernism is an attractive ideology for right-wing authoritarians. To support this claim, he notes the scorn for truth evinced by Hitler and the current U.S. President, for whom power trumps truth. Morris suggests that “belief in a real world, in truth and in reference, does seem to speak to the left; the denial of the real world, of truth and reference, to the right.”

That’s simply wrong.

Horgan is right, and the reality deniers are almost all on the political left. The leftists are the ones who always want to ban facts and views from Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Twitter. Free speech is primarily championed by right-wingers.

The paradigm shifters are one major faction of reality deniers, and the other big faction is the quantum Bell-heads who argue that certain experiments have disproved realism. For example, see this recent paper.

Stephen Boughn writes Against "Reality" in Physics:

The concept of "reality" is often raised in the context of philosophical foundations of physics or interpretations of quantum mechanics. When this term is so raised, it is a warning to me that I am about to be led down a rabbit hole. Such diversions usually lead nowhere unless you consider endless discussions of Schrodinger's cat, wave function collapse, quantum non-locality, and parallel universes to be useful. A prime example is the famous Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen paper wherein they concluded that the quantum wave function cannot provide a complete description of physical reality. In this essay I suggest that, in physics discourse, the term "reality" should be avoided at all costs.

It has become commonplace to define "reality" as meaning a certain type of hidden variables theory. When the stupid hidden variables theory fails, they say that reality does not exist.

Also on the reality denial front, statisticians urged killing statistical significance:

When was the last time you heard a seminar speaker claim there was ‘no difference’ between two groups because the difference was ‘statistically non-significant’? ...

Our call to retire statistical significance and to use confidence intervals as compatibility intervals is not a panacea. Although it will eliminate many bad practices, it could well introduce new ones. Thus, monitoring the literature for statistical abuses should be an ongoing priority for the scientific community. But eradicating categorization will help to halt overconfident claims, unwarranted declarations of ‘no difference’ and absurd statements about ‘replication failure’ when the results from the original and replication studies are highly compatible. The misuse of statistical significance has done much harm to the scientific community and those who rely on scientific advice. P values, intervals and other statistical measures all have their place, but it’s time for statistical significance to go.

The Nature article had 800 signatories endorsing it, which is a strange way to lobby for a scientific idea.

They are right that P-values are commonly abused, but that is because they are so useful. Replacing them with something else will not be so easy.

Inference mag blamed in leftist attack

I defended Sheldon Glashow's negative review in Inference of a popular quantum mechanics book by Adam Becker.

Most, if not all, popular accounts of quantum mechanics are filled with mystical nonsense about Schroedinger cats, entanglement, non-locality, etc. Instead of just explaining the theory, they do everything to convince you that the theory is incomprehensible. Becker's book was in that category, and Glashow's sensible review throws cold water on the nonsense.

Now Becker as struck back, and posted an article in Undark attempting to trash the online journal Inference as unscientific and aligned with evil Trump supporters. Inference responds, and so does Peter Woit.

I guess I'll read some more of those Inference articles to see if the journal really has a right-wing bias. If so, that would be refreshing, as Scientific American and all the other science journals have a left-wing bias. But I doubt it. In Becker's dispute, Glashow simply defends orthodox quantum mechanics while Becker's book is grossly misleading.

Becker says that Inference offered him a "fine fee" to write a response to the negative book review, and he declined. Most authors are eager to defend themselves against a negative review.

Among other things, Becker attacks Inference for this essay arguing that Copernican astronomy in the 16th century was somewhat more accurate than Ptolemaic astronomy. It appears to be a very good analysis. The gripe is that Tipler also has some unusual theological views that do not appear to be relevant to his essay.

Philosophers of science are always talking about the grounds for accepting or rejecting Copernicanism. And yet they hardly ever address the quantitative accuracy.

It has become typical for left-wingers to (1) cling to weirdo unscientific beliefs; (2) get very upset when an organization publishes views contrary to their ideology; and (3) launch guilt-by-association and character assassinations against those who permit contrary views.

Psychiatrist blogger tries Kuhnian paradigms

Slate Star Codex is a very popular anonymous psychiatrist blog, and he takes a deep dive:

When I hear scientists talk about Thomas Kuhn, he sounds very reasonable. Scientists have theories that guide their work. Sometimes they run into things their theories can’t explain. Then some genius develops a new theory, and scientists are guided by that one. So the cycle repeats, knowledge gained with every step.

When I hear philosophers talk about Thomas Kuhn, he sounds like a madman. There is no such thing as ground-level truth! Only theory! No objective sense-data! Only theory! No basis for accepting or rejecting any theory over any other! Only theory! No scientists! Only theories, wearing lab coats and fake beards, hoping nobody will notice the charade!

I decided to read Kuhn’s The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions in order to understand this better. Having finished, I have come to a conclusion: yup, I can see why this book causes so much confusion. ...

But one of my big complaints about this book is that, for a purported description of How Science Everywhere Is Always Practiced, it really just gives five examples. Ptolemy/Copernicus on astronomy. Alchemy/Dalton on chemistry. Phlogiston/Lavoisier on combustion. Aristotle/Galileo/Newton/Einstein on motion. And ???/Franklin/Coulomb on electricity.

It doesn’t explain any of the examples. If you don’t already know what Coulomb’s contribution to electricity is and what previous ideas he overturned, you’re out of luck. And don’t try looking it up in a book either. Kuhn says that all the books have been written by people so engrossed in the current paradigm that they unconsciously jam past scientists into it, removing all evidence of paradigm shift. This made parts of the book a little beyond my level, since my knowledge of Coulomb begins and ends with “one amp times one second”.

Even saying Kuhn has five examples is giving him too much credit. He usually brings in one of his five per point he’s trying to make, meaning that you never get a really full view of how any of the five examples exactly fit into his system.

And all five examples are from physics. Kuhn says at the beginning that he wished he had time to talk about how his system fits biology, but he doesn’t. He’s unsure whether any of the social sciences are sciences at all, and nothing else even gets mentioned.

Kuhn is popular becaues he allows philosophers, social scientists, and crackpot to deny truth, and to complain that their ideas are just being ignored because they do not fit the paradigm.

SSC is right that Kuhn's points are only about poorly reasoned interpretations of centuries-old physics. Kuhn does not attempt to apply his silly paradigm theory to XX century science at all.

Even tho Kuhn wrote a whole book on quantum mechanics, he could never figure out whether it was a paradigm shift, because the supposed revolution did not match his theory about scientific revolutions.

Kuhn's best example is Ptolemy/Copernicus, but that was 500 years ago, and even that is very misleading.

SSC is right that the scientists who say Kuhn is reasonable will explain by saying something like "knowledge gained with every step." But Kuhn did not really see science that way. Switching from Ptolemy to Copernicus was not an increase in knowledge, he would say, but just a different point of view.

Scientists like to think that they are part of a vast program to establish facts and develop theories that converge on truth. Kuhn firmly rejected that view.

Kuhn has fallen somewhat out of favor among philosophers today, but only because they have moved on to even nuttier ideas of science.

Horgan interviews Maudlin

John Horgan interviews philosopher Tim Maudlin for SciAm. I sometimes trash philosophers, including Maudlin, so I will emphasize where I agree with him.

Filmmaker Errol Morris hates Thomas Kuhn. What’s your take on Kuhn?

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions contains some nice observations on the nature of what Kuhn calls “normal science”, which makes it out to have none of the heroic aspects that Popper insisted on. But when Kuhn goes beyond normal science to “revolutionary science” the book is a disaster. It promotes an irrationalist view of scientific revolutions that is both false and pernicious.

Exactly correct. Kuhn's popularity is a large part of why I trash philosophy of science.

Overwhelmingly most philosophers are atheists or agnostics, which I take to be convergence to the truth. Most are compatibilist about free will and believe in it, which I also take to be convergence to the truth. Almost all believe in consciousness and most don’t have a clue how to explain it, which is wisdom.

This is reassuring.

What’s your take on multiverses and strings and the problem of testability?

Some people have been mesmerized by fancy math. It is not interesting physics in my view, and has had a very, very bad effect on the seriousness of theoretical physics as practiced.

Yes.

Does Gödel’s incompleteness theorem have implications beyond mathematics? Is it a worm in the apple of rationality?

No. Absolutely no one should have ever been surprised that mathematical truth cannot be equated with theoremhood in some finite axiomatic system.

Again, I agree. Godel's theorem is fascinating and profound for logic and the foundations of mathematics, but nearly all applications outside math in the popular literature are nonsense.

He lost me with his favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics. I have discussed that elsewhere. He also lost me with this:

What’s your position on the status of ethics? Do any moral rules have the same status as mathematical truths? Do you believe in moral progress?

Yes (with qualification) and yes. Already in Republic (Plato again!) we have an argument — a clear and compelling rational argument — that even the highest political office should be open to women. The argument? List what it takes to be a good leader of the state, then note the conditions that distinguish the sexes. There just is zero overlap between the two lists. That is as compelling as a rational argument can be, and it follows that opening all political offices to women (much less acknowledging in law that women should have as much right to vote as men) is objective moral progress. Similarly for invidious legal restrictions by race. The civil rights movement was strict moral progress. That’s as true as 2 + 2 = 4.

Wow. Because of some logical, almost mathematical argument, known to Plato, someone like Hillary Clinton should be President of the USA?!

Donald Trump has that list of qualities. Fearless. Honest. Loyal. Blunt. Likable. Strength of character. True to his word. Alpha. Not intimidated by his enemies. Maintain hundreds of friendships and political alliances. Forceful. Smart. Competent. Just enough of a narcissist Machiavellian sociopath to be effective. Strong moral compass. Unflinching about sticking up for the people he represents. Vision for a better future. Communicates his ideas well. Owned by no one. Shitlord.

Neither Hillary Clinton nor any other woman has these qualities.

Maudlin is probably a typical academic leftist Trump-hater who voted for Hillary Clinton, so I am sure he disagrees. But I do wonder about his list of what it takes to be a good leader of the state. Is there really such a list where Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton do equally well?

Maybe Maudlin is making a joke here. He would probably be ostracized from his profession if he openly supported Trump.

When the thought-control police are forcing you to take a political stand, sometimes the best way is to give an argument that is so unreasonable that no one could take it seriously. Maybe Maudlin is doing that here, and trolling us. Can he really think that supporting Hillary Clinton is like 2 + 2 = 4?

He says he believes in free will. At least he says he believes Brett Cavanaugh has free will. We don't want any more pre-programmed automatons on the Supreme Court, do we? Did he say Cavanaugh has free will as a sneaky way of supporting him?

I should just agree with his arguments that made sense, and not try to decode his political sarcasm. I don't like to get political on this blog anyway.

Video rant against Jewish Physics

I just found an amusing video from a couple of years ago titled Weev talks about relativity. Weev is a well-known internet troll, and doesn't actually say much about relativity, but has two others talking about relativity.

While they talk, the video shows flashes of Donald Trump, and news footage related to Trump. I guess this was posted during Trump's campaign for the Presidency, and Weev was a Trump supporter.

One rants about "Jewish Physics", while the other is a skeptic. The main guy talks about how physics has gotten away from experiment, and says a lot of it is "academic circle jerk ... like the epicircles of astronomy". He means "epicycles".

He argues that Einstein's special relativity was just untestable philosophical ideas, not physics. He just took the math and theory from Lorentz's papers of 10 years earlier, and added some untestable philosophical re-imagining about there being no place of rest. Weev adds that Einstein did not cite his sources.

The skeptic doubts that there could be a Jewish conspiracy about such matters, and the main guy says that it is not really a conspiracy, and not just Jews. It is more a matter that Jews like philosophical unscientific ideas.

The explanations are a little garbled, but most of it is essentially correct. It is true that Einstein's famous 1905 special relativity theory was mathematically and observationally equivalent to what Lorentz has already published, and what Einstein failed to cite. Historians of science agree to this.

It is also true that saying that there is no rest frame, or no aether, is just untestable philosophy. It does not add anything useful to Lorentz's theory.

You might say that it is testable, because you could prove Einstein wrong by finding a rest frame or aether. In fact, you can define a rest frame in terms of the cosmic background microwave radiation, and an aether in terms of the quantum electrodynamic vacuum, but nobody says this proves Einstein wrong.

You might say that Einstein's 1905 paper was a big advance if it were conceptually superior, or if led to other advances in the field. But that is not true. Einstein's approach was not seen as being much different from Lorentz's at the time. The conceptually superior approach was considered to be the spacetime geometry relativity of Poincare and Minkowski, and subsequent work built on Minkowski's, not Einstein's.

Einstein has sort of a cult following, and most of the followers appear to be non-Jews. So how is this Jewish Physics?

The term "Jewish Physics" is inaccurate and unnecessarily inflammatory, but there can't be any doubt that Einstein is a Jewish saint. He was aggressively promoted and idolized by Jews. I hesitate to call it a religious thing, as Einstein was not very religious and it is the secular Jews who idolize him, not the orthodox Jews.

It is also hard to separate Einstein's science from his ideological beliefs. His deepest beliefs include Zionism, determinism, Jewish pantheism, anti-positivism, and Communism. When he attacks quantum mechanics, he relied on his anti-positivism and determinism. When he promoted his version of relativity over that of Lorentz, he relied on his beliefs, and not any math or empirical science.

You would think that his membership in Communist front organizations would detract from his popularity, but it does not seem to have had any such effect. It is also well-known that Einstein did not really contribute anything to special relativity, as Whittaker explained it in his 1953 book.

Einstein did have substantial scientific accomplishments, but not nearly enough to be TIME Man of the Century. Idolizing him is largely ideological.

On another topic, some freshman physics courses give a problem on what would happen if everyone in China jumped up and down at the same time. Pure fiction, right? Apparently everyone in Mexico jumped at the same time, and it caused an earthquake!

We dummies should not question the super-smart

Dr. Bee has written a book about failed theories in modern physics, and complains:

“By writing [this book], I waived my hopes of ever getting tenure.” ...

I am not tenured and I do not have a tenure-track position, so not like someone threatened me. I presently have a temporary contract which will run out next year. What I should be doing right now is applying for faculty positions. Now imagine you work at some institution which has a group in my research area. Everyone is happily producing papers in record numbers, but I go around and say this is a waste of money. Would you give me a job? You probably wouldn’t. I probably wouldn’t give me a job either. ...

I have never been an easy fit to academia. I guess I was hoping I’d grow into it, but with time my fit has only become more uneasy. At some point I simply concluded I have had enough of this nonsense. I don’t want to be associated with a community which wastes tax-money because its practitioners think they are morally and intellectually so superior that they cannot possibly be affected by cognitive biases. You only have to read the comments on this blog to witness the origin of the problem, as with commenters who work in the field laughing off the idea that their objectivity can possibly be affected by working in echo-chambers. I can’t even.

I haven't read her book, but it is definitely true that a huge amount of money is pumped into worthless theories, but the leading scholars will not tell the truth about them.

This triggers LuMo into one of his usual rants:

Less than 1,000 people are actually being paid as string theorists or something "really close" in the world now, and even if you realistically assume that the average string theorist is paid more than the average person, the fraction of the mankind's money that goes to string theory is some "one millionth" or so. Or 1/100,000 of the money that goes to porn or any other big industry. Moreover, the funds are allocated by special institutions or donors – they're too technical decisions that the taxpayer simply shouldn't make directly. ...

You don't really need to be a string theorist to understand that string theorists are the cream of the cream of the cream. Most people have met someone who belongs to the cream of the cream, e.g. an astronaut. Well, there's some extra selection related to the theoretical physics-related abilities needed to become a string theorist. ...

If someone has dedicated a few years to these matters and he has failed to learn string theory and to understand that it's the only known promising way to go beyond quantum field theory as of 2018, then I can assure you that his IQ is below 150. ...

If you investigate what smart enough people – who have cared about these matters – honestly think about string theory, you may really measure their intelligence in this way. The more they appreciate string theory, the smarter they are.

Okay, I admit it, my IQ is only 149, and I do not see how string theory offers any promise to move quantum field theory forward. Research in the field peaked in the 1990s, and it has not even made any significant progress in the last 20 years. The theory still has no known relationship to any observable phenomenon. It is just a mathematical idea that did not pan out.

Denying laws of physics in a multiverse

Einstein spent the last 20 years of his life at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, attacking quantum mechanics and pursuing unified field theory. None of that work amounted to anything.

The current director there is physicist and string theorist Robbert Dijkgraaf. He writes a Quanta mag article:

There Are No Laws of Physics. There’s Only the Landscape.

Scientists seek a single description of reality. But modern physics allows for many different descriptions, many equivalent to one another, connected through a vast landscape of mathematical possibility. ...

Did nature have any choice in picking its fundamental laws? Albert Einstein famously believed that, given some general principles, there is essentially a unique way to construct a consistent, functioning universe. In Einstein’s view, if we probed the essence of physics deeply enough, there would be one and only one way in which all the components — matter, radiation, forces, space and time — would fit together to make reality work, just as the gears, springs, dials and wheels of a mechanical clock uniquely combine to keep time.

The current Standard Model of particle physics is indeed a tightly constructed mechanism with only a handful of ingredients. ...

If our world is but one of many, how do we deal with the alternatives? The current point of view can be seen as the polar opposite of Einstein’s dream of a unique cosmos. Modern physicists embrace the vast space of possibilities and try to understand its overarching logic and interconnectedness. From gold diggers they have turned into geographers and geologists, mapping the landscape in detail and studying the forces that have shaped it.

The game changer that led to this switch of perspective has been string theory. At this moment it is the only viable candidate for a theory of nature able to describe all particles and forces, including gravity, while obeying the strict logical rules of quantum mechanics and relativity. The good news is that string theory has no free parameters. It has no dials that can be turned. ...

Why is this all so exciting for physics? First of all, the conclusion that many, if not all, models are part of one huge interconnected space is among the most astonishing results of modern quantum physics. It is a change of perspective worthy of the term “paradigm shift.”

If I did not see the source, I would say that this is the babbling of a crackpot. But this is a top physicist at a top institution publishing in a respected magazine. See also critical comments by Woit.

This is a good example anti-positivist thinking that is the opposite of good science.

Science is all about observing the universe, and developing theories for predicting experiments. Dijkgraaf's approach is to ignore observations, and develop a theory from non-empirical principles.

Some philosophers claim that Einstein discovered relativity with Dijkgraaf-like anti-positivist thinking, but I disprove that in my book and on this blog.

Then Dijkgraaf argues that the exciting part is that theory has no predictive power at all, and is really just a framework for discussing all possible models.

The proponents of many-worlds theory similarly argue that the exciting part of their theory is that all possibilities can happen, and the theory has no predictive power. Their reasoning is different, but the worthlessness of the result is the same.

So why study something that is so transparently worthless? Because it is a paradigm shift, of course, and philosophers assure us that paradigm shifts are not rational.

This article is an even better example of why I wrote a book on How Einstein Ruined Physics. The whole Physics profession has been infected by the most anti-science thinking imaginable.

LuMo's response to defend string theory:

There's no reason to think that the total number of spacetime dimensions is 4, there is nothing wrong mathematically about the numbers 10 and 11, they're in fact preferred by more detailed calculations, and there's nothing unnatural about the compactification to microscopic radii.

But the main point I wanted to convey is that Dijkgraaf seems to deny the reality in these media altogether. He wrote the text as if no "string wars" have ever taken place. But the string wars did take place more than a decade ago. Dijkgraaf was among those who preferred his convenience and didn't do anything at all to help me and others to defeat the enemy – so the enemy has won the battle for the space in the mainstream media.
...

If you ever want articles written for the popular magazines – including the Quanta Magazine – about modern theoretical physics to be meaningful again, you will first have to restart the string wars and win them. I am afraid that the society has sufficiently deteriorated over those 10+ years of your inaction that a physical elimination of the enemy may be needed.

Got that? It is no use promoting string theory to the general public unless the enemies of string theory are physically eliminated.

Maudlin attacks positivism in book review

Philosopher of Physics Tim Maudlin writes in a book review, which is really just an excuse to write a nice essay on his favorite topics:

Logical positivism is a very attractive view for people who do not want to worry about what they cannot observe. It is ultimately a theory about meaning, about the content of a theory. According to the positivists, a theory says no more than its observable consequences.

Logical positivism has been killed many times over by philosophers. But no matter how many stakes are driven through its heart, it arises unbidden in the minds of scientists. For if the content of a theory goes beyond what you can observe, then you can never, in principle, be sure that any theory is right. And that means there can be interminable arguments about which theory is right that cannot be settled by observation. ...

Einstein was the great anti-positivist. His position is often called realism, but a better name is perhaps common sense. ...

So Einstein and Bohr were polar opposites in their approach to physics. Einstein demanded a clear and comprehensible account of what is going on in the physical world — at all scales — in space and time. Bohr thought that the key to quantum mechanics was the realization that no such thing could be had.

When the Copenhagen interpretation got imported to the pragmatic soil of the United States, Bohr’s incomprehensible nonsense was replaced by the more concise “shut up and calculate.” That is the philosophy that dominates physics to this day.

Maudlin is partial to interpretations of quantum mechanics that try to theorize about things that cannot be observed.

He is right that philosophers have done everything they can to kill logical positivism, but their arguments are unconvincing to many scientists. Einstein's anti-positivism has been a gigantic failure. Nothing good has come out of it.

On the other hand, all the great Physics triumphs of the XX century have been explicitly or implicitly positivist.

Einstein's early work was considered to be implicitly positivist. Many physicists praise him for what appeared to be positivist thinking. But he repudiated positivism in later life, and pursued unified field theories and attacked quantum mechanics.

"Realism" is a poor name for anti-positivism. The observations are what is real. Speculating about what cannot be seen is not.

The quantum (anti-positivist) realist seeks to find some intuitive simplistic mathematical model of the atom, like the Bohr atom of the old quantum theory. That might be nice, but there is good reason to believe that no such thing exists. The electron is not really a particle or a wave or anything else similar to any macroscopic object. The faulty models of the non-standard quantum interpretations have not been helpful.

As the great physicist Murray Gell-Mann said, after conversations with Putnam, “Bohr brainwashed a generation of physicists.” A vivid illustration of Kuhn’s kinship to Bohr in this respect can be drawn from Morris: “What I hated most about Kuhn’s lectures was the combination of obscurantism and dogmatism. On one hand, he was extremely dogmatic. On the other, it was never really clear about what.” It is no stretch to apply this precise description to Bohr, and not much of one to apply it to The Critique of Pure Reason as well.

There is something very strange about accusing a positivist of being obscure and dogmatic. The positivist is just the opposite.

The positivist talks about what is measurable and demonstrable. His conclusions can all be shown by experiments and logic. He remains silent on matters that cannot be empirically or logically decided.

I agree that Kuhn and later philosophers were obscure and dogmatic. Kuhn claimed to have some grand theory about how science works, but none of it makes any sense on closer inspection. He was mainly famous for his "paradigm shift" book, but no one can agree on what a paradigm shift is.

The difference between indicative propositions about the actual world and counterfactual propositions about mere possibilities is illustrated by these two conditionals: if Lee Harvey Oswald did not shoot John F. Kennedy, then someone else did (indicative and true); and if Oswald had not shot Kennedy, then someone else would have (counterfactual and probably false).

I do think that this sort of confusion about counterfactuals is at the root of some of the gripe about quantum mechanics. If you ask questions like "if the photon went thru this slit, then where would it hit the screen?", then it is hard to see why there is a diffraction pattern on the screen.

Kuhn implicitly accepts the descriptive view. The meanings of theoretical terms such as “mass” are determined by the theories in which they are deployed. Mass as used by Newton means something different from mass as employed by Einstein because the theories they are embedded in are different. Therefore Newtonians cannot really communicate with Einsteinians, Ptolemaic astronomers cannot really communicate with Copernican astronomers, and so on. This is why, for Kuhn, scientific revolutions cannot be settled by rational means: the disputants necessarily speak different languages.

The descriptive view was demolished by Kripke and Putnam in a series of lectures and papers in the 1970s.

Yes, that is at the core of what is wrong with Kuhn. Kuhn deduces that science is an irrational process (or "arational", which is the term he prefers). Denying that science is rational is a direct attack on the whole idea that scientists seek truth.

LuMo writes about a tweet:

The Defeat of Reason: Philosopher Tim Maudlin rebuts the influential relativism of Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics and Kuhn's interpretation of science. https://t.co/YLo5oYnCzh
— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) June 3, 2018

Pinker has basically endorsed an embarrassing, supportive review by Tim Maudlin of the painful anti-quantum book by Adam Becker. It's no coincidence that the title of Maudlin's reason describes quantum mechanics (plus, less importantly, Kuhn's views about the evolution of science as a human enterprise) as a "defeat of reason".

Again, it is odd to conflate Bohr's positivism with Kuhn's arational anti-positivism. Arguing that quantum mechanics is somehow a defeat of reason is really wacky. Pinker should stick to his field, which is psychology and language.