Horgan defends SciAm Politicization

I mentioned that the SciAm Editor is Fired, and former SciAm writer seems to be the only one defending her.

He maligns evolutionist Jerry Coyne, who argues back. See also Jesse Singal.

I post this so that you can see that it is a real dispute. The SciAm editor would surely say that scientists should be aware of the dangers of Trump fascism or transphobia or some other political issue. I wish the magazine would stick to science. Others can debate the pros and cons of Trump.

If SciAm were to address political issues, then it should at least provide some balanced coverage. But no, it forbids any articles expressing contrary views. Sorry, that is not a scientific view.

SciAm Editor is Fired

Jerry Coyne reports:

The facts are that Helmuth had a total social-media meltdown the night of the election (see her tweets here), for which she later apologized (see tweet here).  People called for her to be fired given the tenor of what she wrote, but I’ve never done that. We don’t know if she resigned or was fired, and it really makes no difference.

Her tweets revealed her to be a crazy leftist Trump-hater, but I would not have fired her for that. I do not believe in canceling people for emotional outbursts of silly opinions.

She should have been fired for turning Scientific American into a radical woke propaganda magazine that put ideology ahead of science. Trump just announced appointing RFKjr to HHS yesterday afternoon, and SciAm already has an article attacking him!

Update: More info at Unherd:

Four years ago, it made a presidential endorsement in support of Joe Biden for the first time in its 175-year history. ...

Helmuth’s tenure also saw the publication of articles that blurred the lines between scientific research and activism. A 2021 article, “From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter”, addressed what makes various social justice movements successful. “Social movements have likely existed for as long as oppressive human societies have, but only in the past few centuries has their praxis […] developed into a craft, to be learned and honed,” the article read. Several articles argued in favour of abortions, with one headline claiming: “Third-Trimester Abortions Are Moral and Necessary Health Care.”

The outlet published numerous articles promoting transgender medical interventions. It also published articles advocating against age restrictions for these procedures. One such article claimed that “a decade of research shows such treatment reduces depression, suicidality and other devastating consequences of trans preteens and teens being forced to undergo puberty in the sex they were assigned at birth”, a proposition that has come under international scrutiny in recent years.

Tech's Longest-Running Hoax

An investor channel reports: Quantum Computing: Tech's Longest-Running Hoax

you may need 14:12 hundreds or even thousands of physical 14:14 cubits in each logical Cubit the point 14:17 is if you want to make a quantum 14:18 computer capable of doing anything 14:20 useful you will need a lot of cubits 14:22 current estimates say that you would 14:23 need 20 million cubits to break RSA 14:25 encryption if you want to cure cancer or 14:28 solve global climate change you would 14:29 need orders of magnitude more than this 14:32 today the largest quantum computers have 14:34 about 1,000 cubits so we multiple orders 14:37 of magnitude away from achieving 14:38 anything useful the Bulls say that 14:40 Quantum technology has already been 14:42 proven if the industry continues making 14:44 advances they'll eventually be able to 14:46 do something useful however there are 14:48 well-respected academics who think that 14:50 a useful quantum computer is not 14:51 possible even in theory the most notable 14:54 of these Skeptics are the Israeli math 14:56 professor Gil kalai and the Russian 14:58 physics professor male jackinov they 15:01 both argue that Quantum bits are 15:02 inherently unstable as the number of 15:04 cubits increases the number of quantum 15:06 States increases exponentially this 15:08 level of complexity makes a sufficiently 15:10 large quantum computer impossible to 15:12 control even in theory to be clear Dr 15:15 Kai and Dr dakov are in the minority the 15:18 majority of researchers in the field 15:20 argue that a quantum computer will one 15:21 day be possible there's a strong 15:24 incentive for academics to be optimistic 15:26 many academics have dedicated Decades of 15:28 their lives to study Quantum Computing 15:30 if you come out and say this was all a 15:32 waste of time that wouldn't exactly be 15:34 good for your funding or career 15:36 prospects

The video is accurate. Quantum computing companies have already gone public and then bankrupt.

Academics are Depressed about Trump

Peter Woit is depressed about the election, and rants that now we are Living in a Post-truth World

On the American democracy front, the Trump phenomenon embodies post-truth in its purest form, with the full triumph now of a movement devoted to saying whatever will get them to power, with less than no interest in whether any of it is true.

He complains that super-smart physicists promote untenable string theory, or as one comment says:

Indeed, if Physics PhDs can look you in the eye and say that they really believe that wormholes form when you entangle spins simply because Maldacena and Susskind say so, why should you be so surprised that people get taken in by demagogues?

Okay, but Woit also complains that big money was allowed to influence the election, that Fox News was allowed to be different from the other networks, and that Trump won the less educated voters and lost the more educated voters!

This make no sense. The big money outspent Trump maybe 3-to-1, or 5-to-1, in the election.

If the super-high-IQ super-educated physicsts can be wrong about string theory and entangled electron wormholes, then why can't they be wrong about Trump?

The whole idea that the Democrats are on the side of Truth, and Trump is opposed, is absurd. These Trump-haters cannot give any examples.

Kamala Harris knows nothing about science. The closest she gets is dopey babbling like:

So, let me say this: This is an issue that Josi actually highlighted in terms of the importance of this. The Governor and I and we were all doing a tour of the library here and talking about the significance of the passage of time. Right? The significance of the passage of time.

So, when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time in terms of what we need to do to lay these wires, what we need to do to create these jobs. And there is such great significance to the passage of time when we think about a day in the life of our children and what that means to the future of our nation, depending on whether or not they have the resources they need to achieve their God-given talent.

She also said she believes in Astrology!

I don't want to pick on Woit, as he lives in a bubble where no one supports Trump. Most of American elite academia have Trump Derangement Syndrome. They have no grasp of what Trumpism is about, and can only babble platitudes about Truth.

I cannot even figure out what Woit means by "post-truth", as he only gives a few hints. He mentions Newt Gingrich, who was House Speaker for several years in the 1990s. He is mostly known for passing some reforms, after the other party controlled for decades. He mentions Fox News reporting on Clinton Whitewater, but that was an investigation ordered by Clinton's attorney general. Not much came of it. Mentions a Michio Kaku book on parallel universes. Yes, that is all a big fantasy.

Perhaps Woit is alluding to Trump's reputation for exaggeration. Yes, he sometimes exaggerates. He claimed to pull off the greatest comeback in American political history, if not world history. Dubious. Nevertheless, he is a much more authentical character than Kamala Harris. He is what he appears to be. Harria was unable or unwilling to say who she is, and what her agenda is. She convinced people that she is pro-abortion and hates Trump, and nothing else. Those voting for her had very little idea what she stood for.

Harris and Walz also told a great many lies.

I think Woit is from another country, and may have very little understanding of American politics. His criticisms are lazy and stupid. Trump was President for four years, and it was four years of peace and prosperity. Disagree with him if you want, but most of the opposition to him consists of calling him a fascist. His decisive win in the election is from a common and informed view that he was the much better candidate.

Attention for Hossenfelder's Science Channel

NPR reports:

The dark days of the COVID-19 pandemic helped transform Sabine Hossenfelder into an unlikely social media star. ...

Hossenfelder's science channel has also become a ready platform for her somewhat contrarian views on the state of physics. Among them is what she sees as the problem of beauty, the pursuit of simplicity. Specifically, how her colleagues who try to fathom the fundamental underpinnings of the universe are obsessed with it. ...

But as we seek answers in a complex universe, Hossenfelder cautions that the quest for simplicity could be a dead end. ...

Posting videos to the internet, it turns out, generates a more reliable revenue stream to fund her work in quantum gravity.

Her videos have a lot of good info, but quantum gravity is a waste of time.

A less favorable review from Professor Dave:

Sabine Hossenfelder is a very popular science communicator who focuses largely on topics in physics. Although much of her content is effective and without issue, there is an undercurrent of anti-establishment rhetoric that has grown immensely as of late, and it is an enormous problem. Sabine is a not a charlatan like most of my other targets, and this is not a hit piece, but rather commentary on this aspect of her work and how it came to be. If you are a fan of hers, consider this perspective.

Professor Dave is not a professor, and not a physicist. His main complaint is that she has harsh words for those doing Physics research, and he says there is lots of good reseach. But her main gripes are with those doing dead-end research in certain foundational and speculative areas.

She has a new video in response, where she doubles down on her point that the last 50 years have made no progress in foundational issues.

I would say quantum gravity is one of those dead-end areas where all or nearly all research is worthless.

Actually I might argue that foundational Physics has made negative progress, as many have jumped on absurd theories like many-worlds.

Because Professor Dave is not a physicist, I don't think he appeciates how much theoretical Physics has lost its way.

Both of these channels have a lot of worthwhile videos. My main beef with her is that she subscribes to superdeterminism, a concept contrary to the whole scientific enterprise.

Update: Professor Dave has doubled down with another attack video:

I criticized some unprofessional behavior regarding her choice of titles, thumbnails, and generalized deceptive anti-science rhetoric which has clearly been fueling science denial among the public in large numbers. ... All of those people wanted to talk about academia, so let's talk about academia a little bit in this video, while also addressing an unbelievably immature response video from Sabine where she doubled down on all of her bullshit rhetoric and made things much, much worse for herself.

He goes on to say Hossenfelder is a science denier.

This is how we get politicians voted into office 4:40 with fascist leanings. This is how the slide down the slippery slope towards theocracy 4:45 gains momentum. This is how we get people trying to force religion into public schools, and into federal laws. With Trump returning to office, he may follow through with his promise 4:56 to put RFK in charge of the department of health. RFK. An anti-vaxxer who has said that chemicals 5:03 in the environment can turn kids gay and trans and that HIV does not cause AIDS, may soon be 5:10 in charge of the FDA, NIH, USDA, and CDC. Are you listening to me? ...

As a global society we are sliding towards idiocracy, 5:37 and our survival as a species is at stake. Sabine feeds people narratives that are conducive to 5:43 those modes of thought, and in doing so she is pushing them further down the pseudoscience pipeline where they are more likely to be ensnared by actual demagogues and charlatans.

Meanwhile, Dr. Bee is back with My problem with the black hole information loss problem. She has legitimate complaints about unscientific papers about black hole information physics. Prof. Dave wants to blame her for Trump getting elected.

Nature Magazine Endorsed Kamala Harris

As I write this, the election has not been called, but I want to draw attention to the Nature editorial endorsing Kamala Harris.

I don't know why a British science journal needs to get involved in partisan USA politics.

Harris said on 22 October that her administration will not be a continuation of the Biden presidency. She has said she wants to build an “opportunity economy”. Precisely what that means is yet to be defined — a science- and evidence-based approach needs to be at its core.

That record is in stark contrast to what happened during Trump’s presidency, from 2017 to 2021. As president, Trump not only repeatedly ignored research-informed knowledge, but also undermined national and global science and public-health agencies. He has denied climate science, lied about the federal government’s response to hurricane forecasts and asked scientists to investigate whether disinfectants could be used to treat people with COVID-19.

This is too stupid for science editors.

If Harris is unable or unwilling to say what she will do, why are you endorsing her? She appears to be of low intelligence, and to know nothing about science.

The Trump complaints are about how he once wrote on a weather map with a sharpie, and he once commented favorably about a medical report about disinfecting covid.

I do not think Trump said or did anything wrong in either of these cases, but even if he did, they are trivialities.

Trump was President for four years. Did science research suffer? Did he make any anti-science decisions? There is no substantive criticism of Trump, and nothing concrete about what Harris will do.

This is just more evidence about how the science establishment has lost its way.

Update: Nature endorsed Harris in July, and again just before the election, and now it panics about Trump's win.

Scientists around the world expressed disappointment and alarm as Republican Donald Trump won the final votes needed to secure the US presidency in the early hours of 6 November. On account of Trump’s anti-science rhetoric and actions during his previous term in office, many are now bracing for four years of attacks on scientists, both in and outside the government.

“In my long life of 82 years ... there has hardly been a day when I felt more sad,” says Fraser Stoddart, a Nobel laureate who left the United States last year and is now a member of the chemistry department at the University of Hong Kong. “I’ve witnessed something that I feel is extremely bad, not just for the United States, but for all of us in the world.” ...

Worries pouring in this morning align with those expressed by the majority of readers who responded last month to a survey conducted by Nature. More than 2,000 people answered the poll, with 86% saying that they favoured Harris, owing to concerns including climate change, public health and the state of US democracy. Some even said they would consider changing where they live or study if Trump won. ...

Of those who responded to Nature’s reader survey, 6% expressed a preference for Trump — usually citing concerns about security issues and the economy.

Wow, people who do not even live in the USA are complaining that we elected a President who believes in America First.

Meanwhile, they do not mention that Harris is a moron who knows nothing about science, and who believes in Astrology.

Aaronson reaches full Trump Derangement

Dr. Quantum Supremacy, Scott Aaronson previously announced he is Never-Trump From Here to Eternity, and now writes Letter to a Jewish voter in Pennsylvania.

In short, he has full Trump Derangement Syndrome. He endorses Kamala Harris, but has nothing good to say about her, except that she is not Trump. He is Jewish, and he acknowledges that his Orthodox and Israeli friends much prefer Trump. He also cites a couple of other Jews who are paranoid Trump-haters.

I am not going to try to answer it, because it is the ravings of a madman. Trump was President for four years, and it was a period of peace and prosperity, except for covid. Aaronson has no quibble with that, but is obvious triggered by Trump's personality.

He sounds like a paranoid schizophrenic. He is so crazy as to question his judgment on anything else.

He complains that he found these comments on X-Twitter:

“Shut the fuck up, Zio, and stop murdering babies.”

“Two-state solution? I have a different proposal: that all you land-thieves pack your bags and go back to Poland.”

“you Jews have been hated and expelled from all the world’s countries for thousands of years, yet you never consider that the common factor is you.”

“Your own Talmud commands you to kill goyim children, so that’s why you’re doing it.”

“Even while you maintain apartheid in Palestine, you cynically import millions of third-world savages to White countries, in order to destroy them.”

None of this is from Trump or Republicans. Since the Gaza War started on Oct. 7, 2023, a faction of the USA Left and Democrats have become anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. Aaronson is obviously unhappy about this, and firmly sides with Israel in the war, but it is completely crazy to see this as a reason to vote against Trump.

One can have political disagreements about taxes, or Ukraine aid, or abortion, or 100 other issues. That is not what is happening here. He probably agrees with Trump on a lot of those issues.

Aaronson also believes in many-worlds theory, where all possibilities happen in parallel universes. He said Google had achieved quantum supremacy by generating random numbers. Now he worries that AI will destroy mankind.

Smart people can believe in crazy stuff.

Is Light Composed of Photons?

A popular channel tries to answer What is a Photon?

The simple answer is that light is composed of photons. A photon is a ball of light. A wise guy commenter gives the more sophisticated answer:

The special relativistic wave equation that accurately describes electrons is the Dirac equation. The Dirac Lagrangian density for electrons has got a local U(1) symmetry because of local causality and local charge conservation (Noether's theorem). U(1) symmetry, because we only ever observe the absolute value squared of the wave function.

This can be modeled in gauge theory as an S^1 fiber bundle (or a U(1) Lie-algebra valued principal g-bundle) over a flat Minkowski spacetime base. Wave functions for the electron field are then sections in this fiber bundle.

To make precise the comparison of geometric data between different spacetime points (gauge covariant derivative), we introduce a connection on this fiber bundle; the electromagnetic vector potential, A_mu (just like the Christoffel symbols/Levi—Civita connection of the tangent bundle in general relativity). Basis vectors/phase can change from place to place either bc. we are using some strange coordinate system (like polar coordinates fx.) or bc. our manifold/bundle is curved (to be precise, the connection is curved). So this connection might have a holonomy/curvature (responsible for geometric Berry phase), just like how spacetime can be curved. In this case, the curvature is caused by the 4-current, just like how spacetime curvature is caused by the stress-energy-momentum tensor. We can take the exterior derivative of this Ehresmann connection 1-form (A_mu), which yields a curvature 2-form, called the electromagnetic/Faraday tensor (or the Riemann curvature tensor in the case of general relativity).

This new field, (A_mu) the vector potential has got its own dynamics. If we derive the equations of motion with the help of the Euler—Lagrange equation, we get back the Lorentz force and Maxwell's equations in the 'classical' case. We can also apply canonical quantization and make the 'A' field values into operators. At low energies, this A field behaves like a quantum harmonic oscillator at each point of spacetime; its energy levels are going to be quantized. The number of quanta in a given frequency mode is what we call the number of photons in that mode (pure numer state/Fock state).

Very good, but it is accurate to say light is composed of photons?

I think not. Light is an electromagnetic wave, and small measurements are quantized. A photon is a measured quanta of light.

You might say, this is like saying a falling tree in the forest does not make a noise if no one listens. Likewise light is not made of photons unless measured.

The difference is that our best theories of trees and sounds say that the tree makes a sound whether anyone listens or not. Our best theories of light do not discretize light until a measurement.

You could say: No, that's wrong, QED uses Feynman diagrams of unobserved particles, including photons.

That is a point, but thinking of light as particles leads to faulty conclusions. QED is really a field theory.

Sean M. Carroll does Woo Podcast

From a Jun 2024 podcast interview:

Ellen came out with a new book at the end of last year called The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health, which is about the physiological, the health benefits of mindfulness. And it’s very interesting, she has a lot of studies, right? This is very data-based, and some of the results of these studies are kind of amazing. ... You can think of it as kind of like the placebo effect. You take some pill that really isn’t anything at all and your mind coaxes your body into getting better.

The comments are mostly negative, and a statistician responds:

I don’t think the data are there. To be precise, some relevant data exist, but, from the published papers, I don’t see these data providing good evidence for many of the claims being made.

More generally, statements such as “This is very data-based” and “the data are there” are nothing but empty hype if you can’t point to the actual data and their relation to the (justly) controversial scientific claims. Otherwise, you’re just bullshitting. You could just as well interview someone about the Loch Ness Monster or whatever and say “This is very data-based” over and over and hope your listeners don’t go and check.

I would not be too hard on Carroll, as this is out of his expertise. I just post this as a public service, in case you think that you are getting hard science from the podcast. Carroll must know that the podcast is nonsense, as comments to him explain it.

I do criticize him for many-worlds, as that is in his expertise, and there is no data to support that either.

Einstein's Happiest Moment: The Equivalence Principle

From a new paper on Einstein's Happiest Moment: The Equivalence Principle:

Einstein’s happiest thought was his leap from the observation that a falling person feels no gravity to the realization that gravity might be equivalent to acceleration. It affects all bodies in the same way because it is a property of spacetime — its curvature — not a force propagating through spacetime (like electromagnetic or nuclear forces). When expressed in a way that is manifestly independent of the choice of coordinates, this idea became General Relativity. But the ground for what is now known as the “equivalence principle” was laid long before Einstein, affording a fascinating example of the growth of a scientific idea through the continuous interplay between theory and experiment. ...

The earliest hints of something like equivalence came from Aristotle. ...

The EP can be said to have originated with Newton, as did experiments to test it.

So why would Einstein's happiest thought be a simple regurgitation of a principle that had been accepted for centuries? Wouldn't he be happier about unifying space and time, explaining Michelson-Morley, or quantizing the photon? The story is bizarre.

I have a theory about this. Einstein was proudest about relativity, but as far as I could determine, there was only one part of the theory that was original to him. He figured out in 1907 and 1911 papers that gravitational potential affected clocks. He did it by using the equivalence principle to relate it to a non-gravity scenario, where special relativity could be used to relate the clocks. I do not think this occurred to anyone else.

All the rest of relativity he stole from others. The gravity effect on clocks was his happiest because he could genuinely claim the credit.

Apple says LLMs cannot Reason

Since the Nobel Swedes have apparently decided that Physics is dead, and all the action is in Artificial Intelligence, maybe I will switch to posting about that.

Apple is desperately trying to catch up to its competitors in AI, so it is badmouthing the successes:

A new paper from Apple's artificial intelligence scientists has found that engines based on large language models, such as those from Meta and OpenAI, still lack basic reasoning skills.

The group has proposed a new benchmark, GSM-Symbolic, to help others measure the reasoning capabilities of various large language models (LLMs). Their initial testing reveals that slight changes in the wording of queries can result in significantly different answers, undermining the reliability of the models.

The group investigated the "fragility" of mathematical reasoning by adding contextual information to their queries that a human could understand, but which should not affect the fundamental mathematics of the solution. This resulted in varying answers, which shouldn't happen.

The paper uses this typical example of an LLM failure:

Oliver picks 44 kiwis on Friday. Then he picks 58 kiwis on Saturday. On Sunday, he picks double the number of kiwis he did on Friday, but five of them were a bit smaller than average. How many kiwis does Oliver have?

The paper complains that the LLMs subtract the 5 kiwis, even though the statement about them being smaller should be irrelevant.

No, this is a misguided criticism. If the LLM were strictly logical, it would refuse to answer the question as too vague and imprecise. The problem does not say how many kiwis Oliver started with, or whether he got any from other sources, or if he ate any. Without that info, no answer can be given.

The LLMs work by embedding the problem into a convex meaning space. However sloppy the problem is, it gets precise coordinates in the embedding space.

Whoever formulated this problem seemed to be saying that the 5 kiwis should not be counted. Why else is it phrased that way? Okay, it is phrased that way to be a trick question.

What would you want an LLM to do? To assign meaning in the most direct way, or try to interpret the problem as a trick question?

Apple seems to want to benchmark LLMs on trick questions. No thanks.

For another view, see Apple DROPS AI BOMBSHELL: LLMS CANNOT Reason. This video argues that Apple proved that the LLMs are worse that what people thinks, and not likely to get fixed soon.

Update: Dr. Bee discusses the Apple paper.

Aaronson Posts his Manifesto

Dr. Quantum Supremacy Scott Aaronson has posts

In nearly twenty years of blogging, I’ve unfortunately felt more and more isolated and embattled. It now feels like anything I post earns severe blowback,

It appears that I am blocked from commenting there. The following was rejected, so I repost it here:

(7) Goldbach is not a good example because if it is independent of the axioms then there is no counterexample in N, and hence true in N. There are other arithmetical statements that are independent and we have no reason to say they are true or false. "how did we even get started talking about math?" By accepting what is provable. Mathematicians do not need to have an opinion, when there is no proof.

(15) "Everett interpretation ... to result from scientifically conservative choices." By this I assume you mean you can use the Schroedinger equation to predict probabilities, but then reject those probabilities and interpret them as world-splittings instead. No, this is not scientifically conservative. It makes the theory untestable, and introduces vast unobservable worlds.

Yes, I do think his math philosophy, and his many-worlds beliefs, are untenable. In particular, it is a nutty extreme view to say that many-worlds is scientifically conservative.

Sean M. Carroll says that same thing, and I have criticized him for it. He has explained his views in detail on his podcast, so I am sure he is wrong.

The essence of many-worlds is that it takes a scientific theory that predicts probabilities, denies that probabilities exists, and postulates that all possibilities happen in parallel worlds. It is so crazy that any scientist who advocates it should be disregarded on all scientific issues.

Aaronson tries to make his other positions sound moderate, but some are nutty. Item (1) exhibits Trump Derangement Syndrome. He thinks Trump is a threat to the Enlightenment!

He is entitled to his political views, of course, but nothing he says about Trump makes any sense. Some of his viwes seem more aligned with Trump than Harris, except for his Jewish brainwashing against Trump. I say Jewish because a lot of Jews show the same derangement, even though Trump's policies are likely to be much better for the Jews.

Harris and Walz are the most vacuous candidates I can remember. They have low IQ, have nothing to say about anything, and just babble nonsense when asked questions. Surely anyone smart enough to be a professor can see that they are morons. They just support them out of some sort of leftist tribal loyalty.

The Physics News is no New Physics

Physicists must be annoyed that the Nobel Physics prize was for computer science, with no application to Physics.

Here is a defense:

All this sounds nice for computer science, or for building language translators or self-driving cars, but is it Physics? I’d argue the answer is “yes.” These ideas of network properties, stability, and transitions didn’t spring up de novo, but emerged via classic problems in statistical mechanics, one of the fundamental, core areas of physics. Hopfield’s model was, in fact, a “spin glass” model, originally developed to describe magnetic materials and phase transitions.

They were inspired by biological models of the brain also, but today's neural nets are really designed to do what can be made efficient on consumer gaming chips, and do not have much to do with either physics or biology.

I wonder why these guys even take the calls from Sweden. They insisted on interviewing Hinton in a California hotel room at 2am, and keeping him up all morning. He would still get the money if he had slept in.

It is debatable whether these guys did much that was novel. Ignoring that point, look at all the work that Physicists brag out that did not win. There were surely nominations for cosmic inflation, ER=EPR, dark matter, string theory, quantum gravity, holographic principle, supersymmetry, quantum computing, many-worlds. The Swedes have a pretty good record of resisting fads like these.

Is Physics dead? The last big advanced was the discovery of the Higgs boson about 10 years ago, confirming a theory from 50 years before that. There isn't much new and interesting coming out of Physics anymore. Not Big Physics, anyway. I guess there is still lots of good work being done in material science.

Happy Columbus Day. The discovery of the New World to Europeans in 1492 was one of the most important events in all of human history. I cannot think of any other single event that changed the world so much.

Predicted Nobel for Quantum Computing

Dr. Bee predicts:

Which is why my best bet for this year’s 1:35 Physics Nobel is quantum computing. This is clearly on the bingo card, it’s just a 1:40 matter of time until we check this box. Likely candidates are David Deutsch and Peter Shor.

No, not likely. Not yet, anyway.

Nobel prizes for theoretical advances are only given after experimental confirmation. If someone makes a quantum computer that breaks RSA encryption, then that would be an achievement that the Nobel folks would like to recognize.

IK personally think that they should have given a prize for the Higgs mechanism when it proved so essential to the stunning successes of the Standard Model in the 1970s.

Nope. Nobel does not work that way. Higgs could be confirmed by finding a new particle, and no prize was to be given until that particle is found.

There has been no prize for dark matter, despite dozens of brilliant works describing it. Until someone finds a piece of dark matter in a lab.

3:51 And as my fifth and final guess I have a topic that I think should win 3:56 the Nobel Prize but probably won’t, which is modified Newtonian dynamics. That is because, 4:03 regardless of what you think about the maths, it’s been extremely successful in making predictions. 4:09 It has predicted that the Tully-Fisher relation is valid for all types of galaxies, 4:14 it has predicted the height of the second peak of the CMB, it has predicted that galaxies should 4:20 form as early as the James Webb Telescope has observed. Even if these regularities 4:26 will eventually be explained by something else, modified gravity still predicted them correctly.

Interesting opinion, but those people deny that dark matter is a thing, so I don't think they will win a prize as long as people are looking for dark matter particles.

My fourth bet is a topic that I hope will not win, which is cosmological inflation, 3:15 that’s the idea that the early briefly underwent a phase of 3:19 exponential expansion. Astrophysicists talk about inflation as if it’s settled science, 3:25 but the evidence is sketchier than your friend who always ‘forgets’ his wallet.

It is not settled science, because we do not know what the inflation is. Inflation is not getting a prize.

Alfred Wegener discovered continental drift in 1915, one of the great scientific breakthroughs of all time. He got no prizes or respect, because he could not nail down the mechanism in a way that could be accepted and confirmed by others. Like it or not, that's how it works.

So I say, no prizes for quantum computing, inflation, or dark matter.

Here is a new Bloomberg video: The Race to Harness Quantum Computing's Mind-Bending Power | The Future With Hannah Fry. It says our communications systems will be insecure in 5-7 years. And China may be passing us up. The usual hype.

Update: The Physics prize went to two neural net researchers. Following tradition, they were awoken at 2am this morning.

Dr. Bee reports:

0:00 The 2024 Nobel Prize in physics… did not go to physicists. It went to two computer 0:06 scientists for developing the first neural networks, which became the basis 0:11 of what we now call artificial intelligence. If you still doubt that physics is in crisis, 0:16 the fact that the Nobel Prize in physics goes to computer scientists should make you think. Really, 0:21 I’m just grumpy because all my predictions were wrong. I guess my crystal ball needs 0:26 a software update.

The prize work is decades old, and not the large language models like ChatGPT that have gotten so much excitement. I am tempted to infer that the Nobel committee thought that ChatGPT and other LLMs were the hottest advance in science, so it wanted a prize to recognize that, even if the winners never worked on LLMs.

Merits of the Quantum Positivist Instrumentalist Mindset

New video:

Sean Carroll delves into the baffling and beautiful world of quantum mechanics. ...

Under the Umbrella of classical physics of 10:03 course you know that in the beginning of the 20th century quantum mechanics came along and changed everything now there's 10:10 a puzzle with quantum mechanics quantum mechanics is so profound that even though we've known about it for a 10:16 hundred years professional physicists still don't agree on what quantum 10:21 mechanics actually says and that's very embarrassing. I don't know to me anyway. I 10:26 think that we should know what our best theory of nature actually says but the weird thing is even though we don't 10:33 exactly know what the theory says, we do know what it predicts so it's pushed 20 10:39 and 21st century physicists into this sort of positivist instrumentalist mindset, where they say don't ask me 10:46 what's really going on. I can just tell you what you're going to observe in your experiment and you know what I I hate 10:52 that attitude this is very much not much not my attitude but it is the attitude we're going to take for this talk. I 10:59 wrote a whole another book called something deeply hidden about the philosophical mysteries of quantum mechanics but today we're going to be 11:05 hard-nosed physicists and ask what the Theory actually predicts.

Follow that? Sean M. Carroll says that QM was created as a wonderful theory a century ago. It perfectly predicts experiments. It was created by physicists with a positivist instrumentalist mindset. That is, they focused on the science, and not on the philosophizing.

But Carroll and some other philosophers are unhappy about it, and like weird untestable interpretations. That is all such nonsense, that in teaching QM he has to use that Copenhagen mindset of a century ago.

This is bizarre. It is like a Physics professor saying:

I am going to teach the theory of relativity, as understood by Minkowski, Einstein, and others. It passes all the tests. I am going to teach it even though it does not explain the arrow of time, and I personally think it should. It does not, so the theory is unsatifactory. Since nobody properly explains the arrow of time, I will have to teach it that way.

No, that would be ridiculous. No scientist is going to apologize for a scientific theory not answering some vaguely related metaphysical question.