SciAm goes Political Again; gets Trump Derangement

announces:

In the November election, the U.S. faces two futures. In one, the new president offers the country better prospects, relying on science, solid evidence and the willingness to learn from experience. She pushes policies that boost good jobs nationwide by embracing technology and clean energy. She supports education, public health and reproductive rights. She treats the climate crisis as the emergency it is and seeks to mitigate its catastrophic storms, fires and droughts.

In the other future, the new president endangers public health and safety and rejects evidence, preferring instead nonsensical conspiracy fantasies. ...

Only one of these futures will improve the fate of this country and the world. That is why, for only the second time in our magazine’s 179-year history, the editors of Scientific American are endorsing a candidate for president.

Harris and Walz are probably the most incompetent candidates for President in a long time. Harris avoids questions, and in the recent debate and interviews, she just babbled nonsense instead of answering the questions. When asked the simplest questions about what she plans to do or how she differs from Pres. Biden, she cannot answer.

This is science, so I looked for some example of Harris relying on science, following evidence, or learning from experience. No, there are no examples.

Trump touted his pandemic efforts during his first debate with Harris, but in 2020 he encouraged resistance to basic public health measures, spread misinformation about treatments and suggested injections of bleach could cure the disease. By the end of that year about 350,000 people in the U.S. had died of COVID; the current national total is well over a million.

This is all nonsense. Yes, thousands died under Trump, but more died under Biden-Harris. Trump never suggested injections of bleach. I don't think he even used the word "bleach". He merely commented on a scientific presentation on using disinfectants on surfaces to kill covid. Yes, Trump did downplay the shutdowns that health authorities were recommending, but we now know that the shutdowns did more harm than good.

It is hard to get any firm stand by Harris on any issue, except that she is pro-abortion, and against any restrictions on it.

Trump appointed the conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, removing the constitutional right to a basic health-care procedure. He spreads misinformation about abortion—during the September debate, he said some states support abortion into the ninth month and beyond, calling it “execution after birth.” No state allows this.

Some states do allow abortions in the ninth month, and Trump correctly cited the Virginia governor as favoring it after birth.

The Biden-Harris administration’s 2023 Executive Order on Safe, Secure and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence requires that AI-based products be safe for consumers and national security.

Really? Has that order made AI safe? Of course not. A science magazine should be able to back up what it says.

People can have political disagreements, and many will prefer Harris for various reasons. But a science magazine should stick to science. If it comments on a political race, it should be able to give evidence that a candidate is better for science.

There is no sign Harris understands any science issue. Reporters confronted her on her flip-flops on fracking, and she was unable to explain her views, and may not even know what fracking is.

New Research in Quantum Fault-tolerance

Dr. Quantum Computing has spent the last couple of years working for OpenAI, and returns to announce:

Let me end by sticking my neck out. If hardware progress continues at the rate we’ve seen for the past year or two, then I find it hard to understand why we won’t have useful fault-tolerant QCs within the next decade. (And now to retreat my neck a bit: the “if” clause in that sentence is important and non-removable!)

I think they created one logical qubit that lasts for a millisecond or so. Or something like that, I did not read the details.

I am just passing this prediction along. Seems doubtful to me.

The Invention of Large Language Models

Most people think that LLMs were invented by Google in 2016, or by OpenAI several years later.

AI expert Andrej Karpathy wrote on his blog:

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks

May 21, 2015

The concept of attention is the most interesting recent architectural innovation in neural networks.

He constructs some LLMs, and his results seem pitiful compared to what is done today, but I would say he has a proof of concept.

Google introduced the transformer in Attention Is All You Need, a 2017 paper. As you can see, attention was already a hot idea at the time.

I am not sure who should get credit for inventing LLM. The basic ideas of neural nets go back decades. They got a whole lot smart when gaming GPU chips became fast and widely available, and AI researchers figured out how to use them efficiently.

No Quantum Nonlocal Effects

This is an elementary fact about quantum mechanics.

Dr. Bee explains:

Most importantly, if you do something to one of the pair of entangled particles, 4:46 that does nothing to the other. Say you turn the spin of the particle on the right upside-down 4:53 even though you don’t know what it is. Then the spin of the other particle doesn’t change at all. 4:59 No, it doesn’t. You wouldn’t believe how often I see even physicists get this wrong. I just 5:05 the other day heard a talk from someone who works on quantum computing for heaven’s sake 5:10 who said that if you manipulate one of a pair of entangled particles then that will non-locally 5:16 affect the other. It will not. It’s just that if you make a measurement on one of the particles, 5:23 then that will tell you something about the other. Because they’re correlated. ...

The person who 5:50 makes a measurement on one end can’t tell that a measurement was even done on the other end. 5:56 So: Entanglement is real, we know that. Whether spooky action is real is still a matter of debate, 6:04 but you can’t send information faster than light with either.

She is correct. No one has ever found any nonlocal quantum effects. Just correlations.

It should not be complicated. The same happens classically.

What she says about "spooky action" is a little confusing, so here is her explanation.

2:36 Strange or not, Bohr said that when we measure a particle, 2:40 this superposition “collapses” and suddenly the particle is in only one place. It’s this collapse 2:47 that Einstein referred to as spooky action. Because it would indeed be faster than light. 2:53 The moment you find the particle in one place, you instantaneously know it can’t be elsewhere. 3:00 Einstein disagreed with Bohr. Einstein thought that quantum particles are really only in one 3:06 place and that the sudden update of the wave-function just means that you 3:10 have learned the particle isn’t elsewhere. And his main argument, here it comes, was that by 3:17 claiming the collapse is a physical process, Bohr was introducing a “spooky action at a distance”. 3:26 Even if this spooky action existed though, it couldn’t transfer information. Just because you 3:32 find out what’s going on elsewhere doesn’t mean you sent information there.

When you find a classical particle, you immediately know it cannot be elsewhere. If that is spooky, then classical mechanics is spooky. Regardless, no information or anything else goes faster than light.

Usually she branches into a plug for superdeterminism. Mercifully, she did not this time.

Five Ways to Think About Quantum Supremacy

Aventine reports:

When Google announced that it had achieved quantum supremacy in 2019, the headlines were thrilling.

The world of quantum computing had taken a remarkable step. Google, with its Sycamore quantum processor, had performed a calculation in 200 seconds that, the company claimed in the journal Nature, would take a supercomputer 10,000 years.

This feat, named quantum supremacy by John Preskill, a theoretical physicist, back in 2012, promised to usher in a new world of computing performance. ...

Only it didn’t play out the way Google hoped or expected. ...

And then, earlier this summer, researchers from Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in China completed the same task in just 14.22 seconds, driving a final stake through the heart of the Google quantum supremacy claim.

It’s not the only warning sign for the industry. Venture capital investment in the sector has fallen off a cliff, from $2.2 billion globally in 2022 to about $1.2 billion in 2023.

It then reports the opinions of five experts, but none of them say that quantum supremacy has been achieved. The closest is Scott Aaronson who says:

Quantum supremacy can be achieved and then unachieved later. It’s a little bit of a moving target in that sense. But all expect that we’ll eventually get to a place where quantum computers are just routinely doing things that classical computers cannot replicate within thousands of years or millions of years, and at that point there’s no more arguing about it.

Achieved and then unachieved? This is a bit like a mathematician saying something was proved, and then disproved. If it was later disproved, then it was never really proved.

Gil Kalai argues that quantum supremacy is impossible, and explains further here.

ChatGPT is better at English than Tigrinya

From a recent Nature magazine podcast:

0:00 chat GPT has a language problem so my language is called T it's spoken in in 0:07 Ethiopia and also in a Syria ...

how we design 3:38 this technology how it could be used and the impacts it could have in this podcast we are going to 3:45 explore the relationship between llms and languages and ask what must be done 3:50 to ensure that AIs work for 3:56 everyone. I think everybody in the community agrees that we need to democratize AI there should not be 4:02 disproportionate benefit in one language versus the other, right? so we want Fair 4:08 access you know and we want to empower communities in different 4:13 [Music] 4:24 languages

I never heard of this language, so I google it:

Tigrinya is a Semitic language spoken in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia and central Eritrea1.

Actually, ChatGPT does surprisingly well in this language.

No, nobody agrees that ChatGPT should be equally beneficial in all languages. It is impossible. Most of the worthwhile training materials are in English, and English is well-suited to being the world's language of choice.

I post this as an example of how the leading science publication has gone Woke.

Albert explains Weirdness of Quantum Mechanics

David Z. Albert is one of the leading popularizers of quantum mechanics, and is on this podcast:

David Albert is the Frederick E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, director of the Philosophical Foundations of Physics program at Columbia, and a faculty member of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics. This is David’s eighth appearance on Robinson’s Podcast.

I think he is mostly known for trying to give a philosophical defense of string theory, in the absense of any evidence.

He tries to explain what is weird about QM

24:01 what's often considered striking and unsettling about quantum 24:08 mechanics is that at the beginning of the 20th century people start doing all 24:15 kinds of experiments where unlike in the Newtonian case where we're just taking 24:20 it for granted that yeah there're you know you look at these little dust Moes 24:26 or something like that how they're moving around they themselves presumably consist of billions upon billions of 24:33 these Elementary Point particles which we can't actually see we're sort of taking it for granted that things are 24:38 going to work out in the beginning of the 20th century people fooling around with cathode ray tubes and and stuff 24:46 like that begin to be able to keep track 24:51 of the Motions of individual Elementary particles 24:58 and these particles um um are behaving in ways that are almost 25:08 inconceivably bizarre okay in 25:13 particular people manag to convince themselves by doing lots of experiments 25:19 with these Elementary particles that things like electrons for 25:26 example could be in you you know um it's possible for an electron to be located 25:31 at this point in space and possible for an electron to be located at that point 25:37 in space those are the familiar Newtonian possibilities here or here or 25:42 here or here or here what these experiments at the beginning of the 20th century suggested 25:49 to people and I'm condensing here 30 years or so of wrestling with 25:56 the with the results of these experiments in the beginning of the 20th century there are certain sets of 26:03 experiments so-called interference experiments um double slit experiments 26:10 if you can read about this want to read about this in the literature Neutron interferometry experiments stuff like 26:16 that there's a whole um family of of experiments which 26:23 slowly persuades people that um 26:29 um that apparently there are certain states that 26:34 electrons can be in electrons and neutrons and all elementary particles 26:41 can be in um once again there's a possible state where the electron is at 26:46 Point a there's a possible state where the electron is at point B what people became convinced of is that in addition 26:54 there are possible states of electrons such that the very question is it 27:01 located at Point a or is it located at point B or is it located at neither of 27:07 them fails to make sense okay that um that the question that there are certain 27:15 situations in which the question is the electron in box a or in box b or in 27:22 neither of the boxes is like um is is is is like a 27:32 question of the form um um is the number five Married 27:38 okay or or what is the weight in grams of Catholicism okay or something like 27:45 that um questions that philosophers often refer to as category mistakes okay 27:51 um that there can be situations of a material particle an electron okay where 27:59 asking whether or not it's in box a is somehow like asking what the marital 28:06 status of the number five is or what the weight and grams of Catholicism is okay 28:12 um this strikes people is absolutely bizarre people felt forced to 28:18 conclusions like this because if you tried to tell the story of these 28:23 experiments in a way that used locutions like well at this this point in the story the electron I suppose must have 28:30 been here or at this point in the story the electron must have been there or even if you just insist that at this 28:37 point in the story there must be some place where the electron was because after all it got from here in the 28:43 beginning of the experiment to there at the end of the experiment it must have gone by some particular route either 28:51 through this route or through that route you try to insist on that you try to tell yourself a story about how these 28:59 experiments went okay that's consistent with the results you got you find that 29:05 every particular Claim about which route the electron might have taken somehow collapses into nonsense becomes 29:13 inconsistent with certain of the results of these experiments that you actually did okay so an idea grows 29:21 up um um that it appears to be a feature 29:28 of the way these fundamental particles behave that for every pair of states 29:34 that such a particle could be in that is the state of being located at a and the state of being located at B there's also 29:42 another radically unfamiliar but physically possible state which is 29:47 referred to as the superposition of being located at a and being located at b or the quantum 29:54 mechanical superposition of being located at a or being being located at and being located at B which is which 30:03 which we can we can argue from our experiments is not a case of being 30:08 located at a and not a case of being located at B and not a case of being 30:14 located at both A and B as you often find in the popular literature when they 30:19 try to talk about superposition and that's very bad too and that would reduce the mysteriousness of this way 30:27 below what it actually is what these experiments suggest is that it is wrong 30:33 to say under those circumstances that the electron is located at a and that it's wrong to say that it's located at B 30:40 and that it's wrong to say that it's both at A and B and that it's also wrong 30:45 to say that it is neither at a nor is it at B okay if you think there must always be a 30:53 fact of the matter about where the electron is that exhausts the line iCal 30:58 possibilities okay um um and so people felt 31:04 forced um to acknowledge that what these experiments seem to be screaming at us 31:12 okay is that for any two states that an electron could be in A and B there are 31:18 other physically possible States in in in you know which can't be rightly 31:25 characterized by saying that they're at a can't be rightly characterized by saying it's a b can't be rightly 31:31 characterized by saying it's a both and can't be rightly characterized by saying it's a neither okay and rather you seem 31:41 to be confronted with a situation in which um asking whether the 31:47 electron is at A or B is like asking about the marital status of the number five okay it's just a 31:55 nonsensical question good um

No, this is not weird. The same thing happens in classical mechanics. If you put a ball in a box and shake it up, you do not know where it is. When you open the box, you find it in one position, and not others.

Why is it surprising that electrons behave this way, when classical balls do also?

He goes on to strongly attack Bohr for saying that it does not make sense to talk about the exact location of an election in a box, until you open the box and look at it. Then he praises various alternatives, such as hidden variables and many-worlds.

Bohr was right, and Albert is wrong. The electron is not a particle. If you ask for the exact location of the election, you are basing the question on the faulty premise that the electron is a particle, and it has no answer because it is a meaningless question. As Albert complains, the Physics community accepted Bohr's philosophy about a century ago.

Albert is one of many QM expositors who argue that the textbooks do not make sense so there must be something better. They are just wrong. The textbooks present a perfectly good theory, and all the alternatives have horrible defects.

Sabine Hossenfelder is another one. She just posted a podcast on Can Quantum Physics Explain Consciousness After All? Her answer is No, of course, as she ends up saying Bell's Theorem requires superdeterminism.

She is a free will denier, but see the new paper Decision theory presupposes free will. You have to reject a lot of good science, if you reject free will.

Peebles on Philosophy of Physics

Astrophysicist P. J. E. Peebles writes:

I argue that research in physics operates under an implicit community philosophy, and I offer a definition I think physicists would accept, by and large. I compare this definition to what philosophers, sociologists, and historians of science, with physicists, say we are doing.

He argues that there is an unspoken phylosophy of Physics that most physicists agree with, and they do not necessarily agree with what philosophers say.

Recall Weinberg’s remark that “no one has been able to think of any way to change quantum mechanics in any way that would preserve its successes without leading to logical absurdities.”

I agree with that. People complain about quantum mechanics a lot, but all their alternatives are absurd.

Einstein offered the elegant thought that (in the English translation by Sonja Bargmann 1954)

The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction.

I wrote a whole book on how Einstein ruined Physics with this sort of thinking.

People think that Einstein's greatest accomplishment was discovering relativity in 1905 from universal laws. My book shows that relativity was actually developed by others who worked directly from experimental results.

The above essay is a good summary of mainstream physicist thinking.

Cantor and the Theology of Infinity

Kateřina Trlifajová wrote a new paper on infinity:

Discussions surrounding the nature of the infinite in mathematics have been under way for two millennia. Mathematicians, philosophers, and the- ologians have all taken part. The basic question has been whether the infinite exists only in potential or whether it exists in actuality. Only at the end of the 19th century a set theory was created that works with the actual infinite. Ini- tially, this theory was rejected by other mathematicians. The creator behind the theory, the German mathematician Georg Cantor, felt all the more the need to challenge the long tradition that only recognised potential infinite.

The issue turns surprisingly theological, with St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Pope on the side of Cantor.

Cantor was convinced that the knowledge of infinite numbers had been revealed to him by God, who guided his steps from pure mathematics to an interest in theol- ogy and philosophy so that he could improved a proper understanding of God and nature.

Cantor's papers from 1883 to 1895 were met with skepticism, but by 1897 Mathematicians were on board with his theory of infinities.

Xkcd just had a cartoon about large numbers, explained here.

Weinberg blamed Religion for Scientific Ignorance

Physicist Steve Weinberg is deceased, and said this in a recently released interview:

7:12 expensive uh we waste enormous amounts 7:14 of money on man space flight which have 7:17 has no uh scientific function 7:21 um I worry about that and maybe a more 7:26 important worry is whether or not um 7:30 the forces of uh religious 7:33 zealotry uh which are 7:36 uh so obvious in the Islamic world but 7:40 not entirely absent in the west uh will 7:44 lead to us turning away from science 7:47 because after all the Scientific 7:49 Revolution uhu of course did occur in 7:53 the uh 16th century and 17th century but 7:58 uh there had been a great period of 8:00 scientific Advance before that in 8:02 helenistic times which then came to an 8:05 end uh it was continued for a while in 8:08 the Arab world it disappeared in the 8:10 Christian world and then after the 13th 8:14 century it really uh did not pick up 8:17 again in any real way until the time of 8:20 Galileo uh we may not 8:23 continue with the great 8:26 um great tradition of science uh for 8:29 reasons which are even deeper and more 8:31 frightening than the lack of funding

Weinberg is putting a lot of blame on Christianity here. He praises ancient Greeks because they were pre-Christian, and Galileo because he had a dispute with the Pope.

Other people do say stuff like this, but I do not agree with it.

This "Scientific Revolution" took place in Christian Europe. The scientists were Christians, and acting under Christian sponsorship. Areas dominated by other religions did not make these scientific advances. Is that just a coincidence? I don't think so.

How Michelson-Morley was Crucial for Relativity

Alejandro Cassini, Leonardo Levinas write a new paper:

How the Michelson and Morley experiment was reinterpreted by special relativity

They note how relativity textbooks describe M-M as being crucial for relativity, and discuss whether this is historically accurate. It includes some interesting history, but omits the most important pieces to the puzzle.

Einstein's 1905 paper does not mention M-M. Later on he admitted that M-M was crucial for special relativity, but denied that he paid any attention to it.

FitzGerald, Lorentz, Poincare, and Minkowski all described relativity as a consequence of M-M. This paper does not even mention Poincare or Minkowski. It discusses Einstein a lot.

A paper on the influence of M-M on relativity should primarily be on those who were influenced, not Einstein.

In the years immediately following the M-M experiment, there was no inclination to conclude that the ether was non-existent, nor that the speed of light was constant even though the light source was in motion relative to the ether. Moreover, no one thought that the principle of relativity - the equivalence of all inertial frames of reference for the description of electromagnetic phenomena- would be confirmed. Nor did anyone think the hypothesis that the speed of light was invariant, that is, the same in any inertial frame of reference, would be confirmed.1 What exactly did this experiment confirm or refute?

Not true. In those years, Lorentz and Poincare did say that the speed of light was constant, and Einstein got that postulate from Lorentz. Poincare did say that the principle of relativity was confirmed, and Einstein got that terminology from him.

Lorentz did think that M-M refuted the aether motion theories.

M-M does not actually refute the aether. Belief in the aether is consistent with relativity. Einstein said so himself. M-M just refuted the idea that the Earth had a measurable motion against the aether.

As is well known, FitzGerald in 1889 and independently Lorentz in 1892 proposed a different interpretation. They argued that the experiment refuted the hypothesis that the length of the arms of the instrument remained unchanged when it was in motion relative to the ether, a tacit assumption of the M-M experiment. They then formulated the hypothesis that the length of rigid bodies that move with respect to the ether is not invariant, but rather contracts in the direction of motion

That's right. They saw the M-M as finding that measuring the speed of light did not depend on the frame of reference, and used that to deduce the Lorentz transformation.

It was similar to what Einstein did in 1905, except that Einstein did not use the M-M, but rather what Lorentz had deduced from Maxwell's equations and M-M -- that the speed of light is constant and appears the same in different frames.

At the time Einstein formulated it, it was the only explanation of the M-M experiment that was compatible with all known phenomena about the propagation of light, such as stellar aberration, Fizeau's experiment, and many others.28

No, that was all done by Lorentz in 1895. Lorentz even got a related Nobel Prize in 1902. Einstein did not attempt to explain M-M at all. You might say that Einstein was trying to give a recapitulation of Lorentz's 1895 theory, without mentioning M-M or other experiments.

The contraction hypothesis is usually considered to be purely ad hoc since it was proposed solely to accommodate the result of the M-M experiment in order to save the quiescent ether hypothesis from refutation. This affirmation is debatable and depends on what is understood by the concept of an ad hoc hypothesis.13

Here, "ad hoc" means deduced from M-M or other experiment. A theory is not ad hoc if it abstracts out principles from the experiment. There are some anti-positivist philosophers who consider ad hoc to be a bad thing.

The M-M really was crucial for relativity. Those who discovered the Lorentz transformations and spacetime all said so.

Posulating the Constant Speed of Light

D V Redžić writes in a new paper:

The historical path to special relativity starts from the second postulate introduced by Einstein in 1905 [10]. Immediately after the publication of reference [10],

No, the historical path starts with Maxwell's 1865 theory, and the motion invariance tests of it by Michelson in the 1880s.

A popular interpretation of the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment was that the speed of light was the same for all observers.

Newton, and all physicists before Einstein (including Voigt, Larmor, Lorentz and Poincar´e [15-18]), took it for granted that there was only one ‘time,’ absolute Newtonian time, for all observers in motion with respect to one another. Einstein was bold enough to venture that each inertial observer has her/his own absolute Einsteinian time.

No. Moving objects had they own "local time" in Lorentz's 1895 relativity theory. Poincare accepted this, and believed that motion affects time. Not sure about Voigt and Larmor, but they gave equantions for time changing; what else could they have thought?

It is amazing that someone could write a commentary on on the historical path of relativity, and act as if it all started and ended with Eeinstein's 1905 paper.

Google Quantum Supremacy is Smashed

NewScientist reports:

Google's claim of quantum supremacy has been completely smashed

Google's Sycamore quantum computer was the first to demonstrate quantum supremacy – solving calculations that would be unfeasible on a classical computer – but now ordinary machines have pulled ahead again

In 2019, Google claimed that its Sycamore quantum computer could perform calculations that would take even the world’s most powerful classical supercomputer 10,000 years to complete – but now it seems that a non-quantum computer crunches the numbers several times faster than Google’s machine, and uses less energy doing so.

Quantum computers have the potential to carry out some kinds of calculations vastly more quickly than classical computers, but are still in their infancy. Google announced in 2019 that Sycamore had achieved “quantum supremacy” – the point at which a quantum computer can…

The rest is paywalled, and I haven't read it, but I don't think I need to. Others have said the Google claim was refuted.

I was skeptical in 2019 for the simple reason that Google did not do something that known to be computationally difficult.. It merely generated some random numbers and then claimed that it would be hard for a classical computer to simulate it.

Then some Chinese researchers showed that it was not so hard to simulate it. Meanwhile the Google team moved on to other problems, rather than defend the integrity of their biggest accomplishment.

Without quantum supremacy, the whole field of quantum computing is a sham. No good can come of it.

David Z. Albert Plugs Bohmian Mechanics

New podcast, with a physicist interviewing a philosopher of physics:

Could physics serve as our best guide to metaphysics? What fundamental metaphysics is best motivated by quantum mechanics? And what’s the deal with the age-old feud between philosophers and physicists?

Here to shed light on all these questions and more is none other than David Z. Albert, professor of philosophy and director of the MA program in The Philosophical Foundations of Physics at Columbia University in New York. David is a prominent American philosopher and physicist widely recognized for his contributions to the philosophy of quantum mechanics and the foundations of physics. He has published four popular books and numerous articles on quantum mechanics.

I have some disagreements, but I was especially struck by this comment at the end:

1:19:40 last question, this one comes from my friend Professor Luke Barnes at Western Sydney. Luke. Yeah, he's a great friend of the show. 1:19:47 He's been on multiple times. he has he makes a controversial claim, as if bohmian mechanics have been proposed. First. 1:19:54 No one would have proposed the Copenhagen interpretation. Right. Your thoughts, sir? I think that's absolutely right. 1:19:59 I think, you know, somebody, somebody had discovered about me in mechanics. 1:20:06 And you imagine before then walking into a room and saying, no, I've got a whole new view. 1:20:12 Okay. it's much more elegant. It respects the symmetry between position 1:20:18 space and momentum space, blah, blah, blah. The only little catch is that you have to give up on the idea 1:20:25 that there's a real external world out there. Okay, I think you would have been laughed out of the room, right?

No, this is bizarre. Albert has written a lot about the philosophy of quantum mechanics, but this comment is so foolish that we should disregard everyone he says on the subject.

Bohmian mechanics is weirdly deterministic and nonlocal. While it has its own cult following, it is nearly useless for practical physics. It was invented to make a theoretical point about hidden variables, but not because it is a satisfactor interpretation.

Earlier, Albert said that quantum logics were too confusing, because he doesn't how to reason about it if regular logic is abandoned. I feel similarly about locality. Give it up, and I am not sure what you mean by experiments anymore, because you cannot isolate any physical processes.

Does E=mc^2 Require Relativity?

Physicist Tony Rothman has a new paper arguing that one can get the famous Einstein mass-energy equivalience E = mc² before Einstein's 1905 paper, and without relativity. In particular, it appears in a 1900 Poincare paper.

Many physicists, for instance, are under the impression that ℰ=m⁢c² can be established by employing the four-vector formalism of special relativity. An early draft of Wikipedia’s page on mass-energy equivalence in fact offered exactly such a “derivation.” Four-vectors, however, are defined in order to be consistent with ℰ=m⁢c²; consequently any argument based on them to prove the relationship is circular. ...

A universal, assumption-free proof of ℰ=m⁢c² is no more attainable than a universal proof of conservation of energy or momentum, and the very idea that all physics can be derived from a master Lagrangian without experimental input must be doomed to failure. For that reason, all demonstrations of mass-energy equivalence rely on specific assumptions and approximations. The closest thing that exists to a general proof of ℰ=m⁢c² is the Laue-Klein theorem [16, 17, 18] of 1911 and 1918, which in essence states that if ℰ=m⁢c² holds for a point mass, then it also holds for an extended closed system, under specified boundary conditions. If radiation can escape to infinity, for example, the boundary conditions are evaded.

Einstein was aware of the inadequacies of his 1905 article and attempted to correct them in six further papers, but as Ohanian argues [19], none is free of errors and inconsistencies. Physicists who have actually read the 1905 paper know that the dubious step is the final one, in which Einstein relies on the Newtonian value for the kinetic energy. ...

Can one arrive at ℰ=m⁢c² in a consistent and plausible manner using only Galilean mechanics and “perhaps Maxwellian” electrodynamics?

Okay, but Maxwellian electrodynamics is a fully relativistic theory, if interpreted correctly. The whole theory of special relativity is mostly a recognition of that fact.