Consciousness and Physics

Sam Harris has a big following, mainly promoting Atheism, Eastern religious meditation, Trump-hating politics, and lack of free will. It turns out that his wife is more preoccupied with consciousness than he is, and announced an audio documentary on it. You can hear free interviews on it here and here.

Her main point is that if consciousness is fundamental, then that would be a paradigm shift.

She expects physicists to be experts on what is fundamental, so she interviews a bunch of them for the documentary, including Brian Greene and Sean M. Carroll.

These guys are odd choices, because they do not believe in free will, and one cannot have very much consciousness without free will. To me, the ability to make decisions is at the core of my consciousness.

Here is Greene's view:

Brian Greene, a prominent theoretical physicist known for his work on string theory, does not believe in free will in the traditional sense. He argues that the universe operates under deterministic physical laws, leaving no room for human agency to override them. In his book Until the End of Time (2020), Greene asserts that everything—thoughts, actions, choices—is the result of particles and fields obeying quantum-mechanical and classical rules. During a 2020 Harvard Science Center lecture, he said, “We are made of these exquisitely ordered, wonderfully choreographed particles of nature governed fully by the physical laws, no free will whatsoever.” He sees free will as an illusion, a sensation we experience, but not a reality grounded in physics. In a 2014 blog post (Atheism and the City), he’s quoted saying, “The sensation [of free will] is real, but the choice seems illusory. Laws of physics determine the future.” For Greene, our decisions are just outcomes of particle interactions, not independent acts of will.

Carroll is even more extreme in that he fully accepts many-worlds theory, so no decisions are made. Just world-splittings.

Sam Harris is more extreme than that. While Greene and Carroll accept an illusion of free will, Sam Harris denies that, and claims that he has no feeling of free will.

Do not take the Harris's too seriously. While they claim to rely on Physics, nothing they say depends on any physics. Instead it is largely based on their experiences taking psychodelic drugs.

A new paper carefully explains the error in thinking that modern science requires denying free will:

Reframing the Free Will Debate: The Universe is Not Deterministic
Henry D. Potter, George F.R. Ellis, Kevin J. Mitchell

Free will discourse is primarily centred around the thesis of determinism. Much of the literature takes determinism as its starting premise, assuming it true for the sake of discussion, and then proceeds to present arguments for why, if determinism is true, free will would be either possible or impossible. This is reflected in the theoretical terrain of the debate, with the primary distinction currently being between compatibilists and incompatibilists and not, as one might expect, between free will realists and skeptics. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we argue that there is no reason to accept such a framing. We show that, on the basis of modern physics, there is no good evidence that physical determinism of any variety provides an accurate description of our universe and lots of evidence against such a view.

They are correct. If you think modern science requires determinism, then you are a couple of centuries out of date.

Of course the determinists, from Einstein to Greene, know all about quantum mechanics and its indeterminacy. But they act as if QM is just classical mechanics with some randomness added in, and say that no one could have agency over randomness, by definition. This misunderstands QM. The above paper addresses this argument, although they refer to forthcoming papers for details. It also address arguments from unitarity, time-reversal, block universe, and causal determinism.

Colleges have Big Jewish Fights

Columbia Mathematical physicist Peter Woit is ranting about campus politics:

I can’t stop myself from thinking about what happened in 1933 in Germany. If you don’t know this history, you really should read about it. The analogies with what’s going on now are remarkable.

He is not referring to the Columbia radicals who want to kill Jews, but the Trump administrations efforts to stop anti-semitism.

Scott Aaronson says:

Peter, your university’s antisemitism task force — formed with no Trump involvement — produced a harrowing report last year filled with specific incidents that added up to a pretty compelling case for Jewish and Israeli students (unless anti-Zionist) to want to steer clear of Columbia. If your position requires condemning all of your colleagues on that task force as liars, fanatics, and snitches, then that seems to me like an excellent way to lose this battle and alienate most of those who would otherwise be your allies. ...

If I’m unhinged and in need of psychiatric help, then so is the entire membership of Columbia’s antisemitism task force, as I’ve done nothing more extreme than try to balance my fear of Trump with my fear of what the task force concluded in its 120-page report.

Woit replies

The university has to somehow manage this, it’s a difficult problem. It’s being made a hundred times more difficult by people like Scott Aaronson who have no idea what’s going on here, but are so intent on joining the fight to destroy the other side that they will enthusiastically collaborate with the Fascists we’re trying to resist.

So Woit and Aaronson question the sanity of each other. Aaronson is a Jew married to an Israeli, and Woit is a gentile from Eastern Europe.

The core of the problem is that Columbia and Harvard have become havens for left-wing crazies:

Last year, Harvard earned the worst score ever recorded in FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings: Zero. This year, the elite Ivy makes a repeat poor performance — and finds fresh company at the bottom, with NYU and Columbia joining the unenviable list of “abysmal” schools for free speech.

With scores ranging from zero to 100, NYU plummeted nearly 30 points this year, and Columbia fared even worse, becoming the second school after Harvard to ever receive a zero. And Columbia, like Harvard, actually received a negative score that we rounded up to zero. The only reason Columbia was spared from receiving the title of this year’s Worst College for Free Speech is that Harvard’s actual score was even worse, a full 21 points lower.

So Columbia and Harvard do not allow free speech for right-wingers, but they do allow faculty and students to side with the Oct. 7 Gaza/Hamas attack on Israel and with generally attacking Jews.

Another part of the problem is that federal spending is out of control, and Trump administration efforts to hold grant recipients accountable has brought howls of protest from universities.

Update: Dr. Bee comments on Woit, Aaronson, and others. She notes that many support what Trump is doing.

Facing Reality is an Ugly Scar

To see how foolish the many-worlds theory (MWI) is, just read what the advocates say.

Lev Vaidman just posted The many-worlds view of quantum mechanics:

My explanation has two very different parts.

i) The ontology, stuff that exists, including laws constraining possible states of stuff and dynamical laws of time evolution of stuff.

ii) The prescription of correspondence of the state of stuff with our experiences which we inquire through our sensory organs, sometimes equipped with instruments like telescopes, microscopes, sonars, etc.

The ontology is all the parallel universes. But relating the theory to our experiences in part (ii) is impossible without probability, and that is rejected, so he settles for a theory that does not relate to our experiences.

In conclusion, physics explains all phenomena we observe on Earth extremely well. Collapse of a quantum state at measurement is an ugly scar on a beautiful quantum mechanics. The only role of the collapse is to avoid parallel worlds which anyway are not supposed to be seen according to the theory. Without collapse we have to accept MWI. Apart from the disappointment in understanding that I am not a unique Lev Vaidman, and that there are multiple copies of me in other worlds, MWI allows me to believe that by and large I understand how the universe works. For me, parallel worlds are not a too high price to pay for understanding Nature.

So he says the collapse is just a way of avoiding the parallel worlds that we never see anyway. I call that facing reality, but he says it is an ugly scar.

He acts as if the collapse is peculiar to quantum mechanics, but it is not. All scientific theories do something similar when a prediction is compared to a measurement. The Bayesians call it adjusting their priors.

So what does he get from having of other worlds that cannot be seen? It allows him to believe that he understands Nature!

The many-worlders complain bitterly about the collapse being part of quantum theory, but it is very much part of many-worlds theory also. Instead of calling it collapse, they call it world-splitting. Instead of collapsing the wavefunction so that it better describes our universe, they say that the wavefunction decomposes into pieces where one piece describes our universe, and other pieces describe unobservable parallel universes.

The MWI does not solve the measurement problem, or explain the collapse/splitting, or do anything useful.

This is not Physics, and not science. It is too stupid for a rebuttal. There is not any substance to the theory. I would not even bother commenting on this nonsense, except that a great many of our leading physicists and physics expositors buy into it.

Broadly speaking, science consists of making observations, formulating theories, making prediction probabilities, and then making measurements to reconcile theory with experiment.

Many-worlds theory says to skip the last two steps. It denies that prediction probabilities make any sense, and it says that reconciling with experiment is an ugly scar that just rules out invisible parallel worlds. It is impossible to believe in many-worlds and have a scientific world view. For this reason, I doubt anything from Sean M. Carroll, Max Tegmark, and Leonard Susskind, even though they are all brilliant and explain some things very well.

Update: According to Tegmark, the term "ugly scar" is from Gottfried in 1989.

Using a Quantum Computer for Random Numbers

Prof. Scott Aaronson brags:

today JP Morgan Chase announced that, together with Quantinuum and DoE labs, they’ve experimentally demonstrated the protocol I proposed in 2018, and further developed in a STOC’2023 paper with Shih-Han Hung, for using current quantum supremacy experiments to generate certifiable random bits for use in cryptographic applications. See here for our paper in Nature—the JPMC team was gracious enough to include me and Shih-Han as coauthors.

Bloomberg reports:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. has generated and certified so-called truly random numbers using a quantum computer, in a world-first that the bank hopes will have applications for security and trading.

Researchers created the sequence using a quantum computer built by Honeywell’s Quantinuum, according to a paper published in the scientific journal Nature on Wednesday. JPMorgan researchers, alongside Argonne and Oak Ridge national laboratories and the University of Texas at Austin, then became the first to prove mathematically that they had produced “genuine randomness.”

Most so-called random number generators, which are important for encrypting sensitive data, aren’t actually random. They’re pre-determined sequences. Computers run on a set of programmed mathematical operations that will always return the same answer, raising the risk that hackers with access to increasingly sophisticated computing power could crack encryption codes.

Computers are not really deterministic. They have a CPU with a built-in hardware random number generator. Those numbers are as genuinely random as anything else. The advantage of Aaronson's method is that the numbers are certifiably random.

Aaronson admits that the method is not really practical, and it is hard to imagine a use for it. If you want to generate a private cryptographic key, there are much easier ways. Eg, you could record a video of yourself and hash it. You could use the CPU generator. You could use the generator that comes with password and bitcoin apps.

There are also public random number generators, such as here and here. It is a little tricky for multiple parties to agree on a fair lottery, but there are many ways that are a whole lot easier than using a quantum computer.

One way is to agree on a lottery for a particular day is to agree to has (with sha256, say) of the NY Times front page that day, or the stock market trades, or the baseball scores. A drawback is that if a lot of money were at stake, maybe someone would bribe a NY Times editor to drop a story or a baseball player to throw a game in order to influence the hash. Such attacks would be extremely improbable.

The Rise of Stochasticity in Physics

New paper:

The rise of stochasticity in physics
Hans A. Weidenmüller

In the last 175 years, the physical understanding of nature has seen a revolutionary change. Until about 1850, Newton's theory and the mechanical world view derived from it provided the dominant view of the physical world, later supplemented by Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field. That approach was entirely deterministic and free of probabilistic concepts. In contrast to that conceptual edifice, today many fields of physics are governed by probabilistic concepts. ...

The success of the theory led physicists to adopt what became known as the mechanical world view. According to that view, all physical processes can be understood on the basis of Newton’s equations. The theory is completely deterministic. There is no room whatsoever for probabilistic concepts which play a role only in the analysis of statistical and systematic errors. Such errors were considered epistemic and, therefore, did not challenge the validity of the mechanical world view. (A notable exception is the discovery of the dwarf planet Ceres in 1801. After its discovery, the planet was lost and could be retraced only with the help of Gauss’ statistical least-squares method).

That is a pretty big exception. The Newtonian mechanics seems deterministic, but in practice it is not. Like Gauss, you have to make imperfect observations, do some statistical estimations, and make a probabilistic prediction.

The whole field of AI used to be mostly deterministic, but now they follow the same stochastic pattern. They run on deterministic computers, and use lots of deterministic formulas, but the big AI models make very heave use of statistical estimates and probabilistic predictions.

I no longer agree with saying that classical mechanics is deterministic. All of science is inherently stochastic.

Historically, probability was developed after calculus. I thought that calculus would have been the conceptually more difficult subject.

Advocates of many-worlds theory reject probability. The theory does not make some worlds more likely than others, as some assume. I think that the followers must have some fundamental misunderstanding of what probability in math and science is all about.

Today, use of probability and statistics is pervasive in all of science. Every prediction is made with some probability, and every test is analyzed with statistics. So I do not think that there is any such thing as deterministic science. Classical physics is not, and neither is biology, chemistry, medicine, or anything else.

In summary, in the last 175 years physicists have been led or been forced to ascribe an ever increasing role to probability in the description of nature. I have listed four causes for that development: Loschmidt’s number supporting Maxwell’s theory, irreversibility leading to Boltzmann’s approach, Bequerel’s discovery, spectral lines and black-body radiation leading to quantum theory, and Poincare’s discovery of classical chaos. Random-matrix theory is different. It was not imposed on physicists by an experimental or theoretical discovery but was introduced to compensate for the incomplete knowledge of the Hamiltonian.

He is right about those trends, but probability would have become essential in all of science even without those four trends.

Investing in 150 Proof-of-concept Projects

More quantum computer hype in the business news:

A Practical Quantum Computer Is Coming! But When?

CNBC 3.85M subscribers

Google, IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and Intel are all working on quantum technology, as are numerous startups. At its annual GTC developer conference this week Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, announced the company was opening a quantum research lab in Boston. Governments around the world have also pledged over $50 billion to develop the technology. Quantum computers hold huge potential, with experts saying that they could transform entire sectors including material science, pharmaceutical research and financial services. But despite massive advancements in the field in recent years, right now, these quantum computers aren’t able to solve big real-world problems. CNBC's Kate Rooney visits California-based startup, PsiQuantum and spoke to experts about the major challenges this tech still faces as engineers work to transition quantum computers from lab experimentation to commercial viability.

As the video explains, many billions are being invested, in a huge fear of getting left behind. Much of it is going into "proof of concept" projects.

15:54 Public interest in quantum technology is growing. 15:57 The number of quantum computing proof of concept 16:00 enterprise projects surged by 50% between 2022 and 16:04 2024, to over 150 active projects. 16:08 Consulting firm Booz Allen, Airbus Ventures and Bosch 16:12 Ventures have all invested in quantum computers. 16:14 Meanwhile, Shadbolt says Illinois is investing $500 16:17 million to construct a quantum computing campus in 16:21 Chicago, of which Psi quantum will be the anchor 16:24 tenant. Psi quantum has also received $620 million from 16:29 the Australian and Queensland governments to 16:31 build a utility -scale quantum computer in 16:34 Brisbane, which the company says will be operational by 16:37 the end of 2027. 16:39 Experts say, investing now is a smart move. 16:43 When quantum computers reach quantum advantage, 16:46 which is effectively the period in which quantum 16:48 computers outperform classical computers at 16:52 important real world problems, 16:54 it will be much, much harder to get your 16:56 hands on a quantum computer unless you're developing 16:59 partnerships with the major providers right now.

Some people are going to see this, and think that quantum computing must really be a hot technology, to have so much investment, and even a panic to invest more.

I think the opposite. With generous funding to a lot of super-smart physicists of 150 proof-of-concept projects, and none proving that the concept is viable, I think that it is probably impossible.

The Nvidia CEO got some heat for saying quantum computing is many years away:

He also expressed surprise that his comments were able to move markets, and joked he didn’t know that certain quantum computing companies were publicly traded.

“How could a quantum computer company be public?” Huang said.

Forty years ago, a company had to be profitable to go public. Later, companies could go public with a large market share and user base, and no profits. Now a company can go public with no product, no customers, and not even a proof of concept.

Meanwhile, the England crypto spooks have published a roadmap for protecting communications from quantum computers:

In our 2023 white paper, the NCSC outlined the need to prepare for migration to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) due to the threat to cryptography posed by future developments in quantum computing.

The guidance defines three phases for migration.

The first of those involves carrying out a full discovery exercise to understand your estate, and identify services that are dependent on cryptography that will need to be upgraded to PQC. This then enables you to build an initial migration plan, identifying priority services for migration. 2028 is the target date for completing all of this.

The second phase is carrying out the highest priority migration activities that you have identified, and refining your plan as the PQC ecosystem develops so that you have a thorough roadmap for completing migration. You should aim to complete this phase in 2031.

The third phase is to complete migration to PQC of all your systems, services and products, with 2035 as your target.

That does not mean that they think SSL/TLS encryption will be broken in 2035. They like to preserve secrets for 50 years, so maybe they are worried about attacks in 2085.

Quanta magazine reports that quantum algorithms have been disappointing:

This contest almost always ends as a virtual tie: When researchers think they’ve devised a quantum algorithm that works faster or better than anything else, classical researchers usually come up with one that equals it. Just last week, a purported quantum speedup, published in the journal Science (opens a new tab), was met with immediate skepticism from two separate groups who showed how to perform similar calculations on classical machines.

Military intelligence will switch to PQC, but I would not be surprised if the private sector never switches.

D-Wave Claims Quantum Supremacy

Quantum computing stock market values are up again, as D-Wave got a paper published in AAAS Science, the top American science journal, claiming quantum supremacy. But SciAm reports:

Loud declarations of various types of quantum advantage aren’t new: Google notably made the first such claim in 2019, and IBM made another in 2023, for example. But these announcements and others were ultimately refuted by outside researchers who used clever classical computing techniques to achieve similar performance. In D-Wave’s case, some of the refutations came even before the Science paper’s publication, as other teams responded to a preliminary report of the work that appeared on the preprint server arXiv.org in March 2024. One preprint study, submitted to arXiv.org on March 7, demonstrated similar calculations using just two hours of processing time on an ordinary laptop. A second preprint study from a different team, submitted on March 11, showed how a calculation that D-Wave’s paper purported would require centuries of supercomputing time could be accomplished in just a few days with far less computational resources.

There is also a lot of skepticism about Microsoft's claim of a topological qubit.

Gil Kalai has not conceded, and has doubled down with his Quantum Computing Skepticism.

Let's review the arguments in favor of quantum supremacy. The most common one is that qubits can be 0 and 1 at the same time, just as Schrodinger's Cat can be alive and dead simultaneously. Operations on qubit are thus able to examine an exponential number of possibilities at the same time, leading to an exponential speedup in computation.

Scott Aaronson says that this is wrong, because it misleadingly predicts an exponential speedup where none is possible. Instead he says the speedup comes from negative probabilities.

The QM probabilities are never negative. That is just his way of making destructive wave interference sound mysterious. When you say a computational speedup comes from wave interference, it is harder to understand.

Aaronson falls back on the argument that it is up to the skeptic to prove that quantum computers are impossible, and that would be very interesting, but no one has done that.

The many-worlds folks say that the speedup comes from computation being done in parallel universes. Most people say that there is no way to observe those parallel universes, but we are supposed to believe that they speed up computations somehow.

Feynman's original argumen was that simulating QM can be exponentially slow, so it can be faster by running a quantum experiment. You can do a chemical reaction faster than you can simulate it from first QM principles. Okay, that is true, but it is a big leap to using QM to factor large integers.

Finally, there is the argument that quantum researchers have made so much progress already. Yes, but maybe it is like slimbing trees to make progress towards going to the Moon. There is progress, but the goals seem as far away as ever. Nobody has a convincing experiment showing that quantum computing is possible.

The Aether is not a Rest Frame

Physicist Sean M. Carroll says, in his latest AMA that quantum field theory has no aether because the whole point of the aether is to have a rest frame for measuring motion:

Marson chady or chatty says 50:03 when I was in high school we were told that the 19th century scientists were looking for a medium which they called 50:08 ether in which light waves would propagate eventually the theory of electromagnetism established that there 50:14 was no such medium yet I can't help but think that the original view was Vindicated by Quantum field Theory isn't 50:20 the electron field of quantum field Theory the equivalent of ether uh no it 50:25 is not the equivalent of E I have answered this question or talked about it in various times but it's been a while so let's address it again um the 50:34 fields of quantum field Theory are just the quantum versions of the fields of classical field Theory so if you think 50:41 that classical electromagnetism which is a classical field Theory uh doesn't need 50:47 ether then you don't you think that Quantum Fields don't need ether either the point is that ether was supposed to 50:53 be like you say A medium in which waves propag at whereas in contrast field 50:59 Theory uh classical or Quantum takes the fields as the fundamental independent 51:05 entities uh the waving electron field or the waving electromagnetic field or the 51:10 waving higs field or whatever none of these are waves in something other than themselves okay so that's the 51:17 ontological difference and there's also a practical difference the whole point of The Ether in 19th century physics was 51:24 to allow for there to be a rest frame with respect to which you can measure your motion uh as opposed to the naive 51:31 reading of Maxwell's equations which say there is no uh Universal rest frame so 19th century physicists went to Great 51:37 Lengths to sort of bend over backwards and figure out how you could reconcile the existence of a rest frame determined 51:44 by The Ether with the fact that you couldn't observe it in any way in Maxwell's equations and that's how they 51:49 invented things like Lorent Transformations even before relativity came on the scene but in Quantum field 51:55 Theory there's no rest frame there's no rest frame everything is perfectly relativistically invariant so the whole 52:01 point of the ether is completely missing in Quantum field Theory so I don't think that's an especially useful way of 52:07 thinking about things

No, I don't think that anyone thought that was the point of aether. For my sources, see the essays on aether in the Encyclopedia Britannica by Maxwell (9th ed, 1878) and Larmor (11th ed, 1911). See also Einstein's views on the aether. None of these say that the aether gives a rest frame.

Maxwell wrote:

The hypothesis of an aether has been maintained by different speculators for very different reasons. To those who maintained the existence of a plenum as a philosophical principle, nature's abhorrence of a vacuum was a sufficient reason for imagining an all-surrounding aether, even though every other argument should be against it. ...

But besides these high metaphysical necessities for a medium, there were more mundane uses to be fulfilled by aethers. Aethers were invented for the planets to swim in, ...

The only aether which has survived is that which was invented by Huygens to explain the propagation of light. The evidence for the existence of the luminiferous aether has accumulated as additional phenomena of light and other radiations have been discovered; ...

Whatever difficulties we may have in forming a consistent idea of the constitution of the aether, there can be no doubt that the interplanetary and interstellar spaces are not empty, but are occupied by a material substance or body, which is certainly the largest, and probably the most uniform body of which we have any knowledge.

In quantum field theory, the vacuum is not empty, and could be regarded as a medium for the propagation of light, and for electrons and everything else.

The story is often told that Einstein invented relativity in order to disprove the aether, show that there can be no rest frame. This story is false, as Einstein did not invent relativity, and what he said about the aether was essentially the same as what Lorentz wrote ten years earlier. The theory of relativity does not say whether there can be a rest frame.

I wonder why people keep telling this silly story. My guess is that people like to believe that the aether was some sort of superstitious belief of lesser men, and that rejecting it was a great intellectual accomplishment, along with rejecting God, the monarchy, and geocentrism.

Carroll is also asked to speculate about the development of general relativity:

nichel Kramer says if Einstein had 2:00:51 not veloped general relativity when he did how soon would it have been developed well we don't know um I don't 2:00:57 think it would have taken that long like it wouldn't have taken 50 or 100 years we already had all the tools right we 2:01:03 had riemanian geometry we had special relativity it's possible for example 2:01:08 that minkowski or minkovsky to be a little bit more correct would have developed it Herman minkovski of course 2:01:14 um was the first to promote the idea of thinking about relativity in terms of SpaceTime and he was a mathematician he 2:01:21 had actually taught Einstein uh so it was 1907 2 years after Einstein's special relativity papers that minkovsky 2:01:27 first said we should think about it in terms of SpaceTime um Einstein eventually settled on general relativity 2:01:33 in 1915 but minkovski passed away in 1909 so he didn't really get a chance to 2:01:39 follow up on his Insight that we should think about things in terms of SpaceTime maybe he would have come up with it but 2:01:45 you know it's an interesting fact about the progress of physics that the progress of physics on theoretical 2:01:51 physics is usually led by physicists not by mathematicians with overwhelming um 2:01:57 probability not that it's impossible to imagine mathematicians doing it but when we think back to how general relativity 2:02:04 came about and there were you know real mathematical issues there and a lot of important steps were taken by 2:02:11 mathematicians benovsky is one David Hilbert of course is another but still it was a physicist it was Albert 2:02:16 Einstein who actually put it together because that physics insight about 2:02:22 the principle of equivalence and how gravity works and things like that that's the bread and butter of physicists not mathematicians the 2:02:29 question is was there any other physicist who would have thought the same way as Einstein there were certainly physicists who had the same 2:02:36 mathematical chops that Einstein did but the physical Insight that he had was unmatched since Galileo basically uh and 2:02:43 has still been unmatched since so it might have taken a while but the tools were there so I don't think it would have taken too 2:02:49 long

I agree that physicists are better at physical insight than mathematicians, but his examples are distorted.

Poincare, Minkowski, Grossmann, and Hilbert were all primarily mathematicians, and they were the chief originators of relativity theory, after Lorentz. Poincare published the first relativistic theory of gravity. Poincare and Minkowski both died before general relativity. Einstein's first general relativity version was a joint work with Grossmann, and his second was a joint work with Hilbert. Einstein also worked with mathematicians Levi-Civita and Ricci.

Carroll says that Minkowski's 1907 spacetime was two years after Einstein, but it is doubtful that Einstein's work was any influence at all. Minkowski's spacetime was based on Poincare's spacetime.

String Theory and the Black Hole War

Leonard Susskind gives a two-hour interview.

He is a smart and distinguished physicist, but he has some silly views. He brags about winning the Black Hole War, but he did not. In a recent survey, only 27% agreed with him that information falling into a black hole is preserved in Hawking radiation. Only 11% agreed with many-worlds theory, which he has favored in the past. Not sure if he still does.

The survey had some other curious opinions, such as whether matter falling into a black hole gets crushed into a singularity (29% say yes) and whether the big bang started time with a singularity (only 11% say yes). While you might have heard that the Copenhagen Interpretation is dead, only a minority subscribed to some non-Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The survey was given in Copenhagen, so maybe the home team had an advantage.

Information has no physical definition, and has no good reason to be conserved. Susskind would only say that it is conserved because quantum field theory is unitary. That is the same reason he gives for many-worlds. So wouldn't that mean that information could leak into parallel universes, not to be seen again?

He pushes a lot of other wacky ideas, such as anti-desitter space, black hole event horizon firewalls, string theory landscape, entangled wormholes, etc. It is all nonsense. All of it is theoretically dubious, and impossible to observe. Viewers must get a kooky view of Physics when the leading popularizers say such bizarre and unscientific things.

Boycott Math to Save Greenland

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the only sensible comment:

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

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

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

Scott Aaronson also has Trump derangement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Professor Dave Blasts Dr. Bee Again

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

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

Sabine Hossenfelder Can’t Stop Acting Like a Complete Fraud

Professor Dave Explains
3.64M subscribers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: Dr. Quantum Supremacy piles on

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

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

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

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

He praises this comment:

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

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

Update: He goes on to explain:

The basic problem here is that Bell’s Theorem is a theorem. And it shows that you can’t have a secretly classical theory that

(1) reproduces the prediction of QM for two entangled particles and

(2) is free of “fine-tuning” — i.e., a conspiracy of initial conditions sufficient to force random number generators to produce particular outputs, human brains to make particular choices, etc., in order to cause the entangled particles to be measured in certain bases and not others.

Furthermore, over the decades, the “Bell deniers” (superdeterminists and others) have shown that they’re willing to generate an unlimited amount of verbiage, and even “math,” in an attempt to evade these simple points—thereby wasting unlimited amounts of everyone else’s time, in a sort of intellectual denial-of-service attack.

A response says: "I’ll let you determine the best use of your own time". Ha, ha.

Aaronson is correct, but seems to miss the point. Hossenfelder is not a Bell denier, but arguing for option (2). That is, reality is a secretly classical theory with a fine-tuned conspiracy to fool us into all our experiments being wrong.

Philosopher Promotes Determinism

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

Here is his core argument:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any indeterministic theory could have an underlying deterministic theory.

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

Dr. Bee Pushes Superdeterminism Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microsoft Claims a Topological Qubit

Microsoft brags in a new video:

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

Bloomberg piles on:

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

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

Dr. Quantum Computing notes:

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

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

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

Q6. Is this a big deal?

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

Yes, very interesting, if the claim stands.

Update: Dr. Bee adds her opinion.

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

Many-Worlds Leaves Basic Questions Unresolved

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

Here is a new paper, from China:

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

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

No, it does nothing to solve the measurement problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This paper draws its own goofy conclusions.

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

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

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

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