The politics of quantum mechanics

Lubos Motl writes:

You know, for years, many people who were discussing this blog were asking: What do axioms of quantum mechanics have to do with Motl's being right-wing? And the answer was "virtually nothing", of course. Those things really were assumed to be uncorrelated and it was largely the case and it surely should be the case. But it is no longer the case. The whole political machinery of raw power – at least one side of it – is now being abused to push physics in a certain direction.You know, for years, many people who were discussing this blog were asking: What do axioms of quantum mechanics have to do with Motl's being right-wing? And the answer was "virtually nothing", of course. Those things really were assumed to be uncorrelated and it was largely the case and it surely should be the case. But it is no longer the case. The whole political machinery of raw power – at least one side of it – is now being abused to push physics in a certain direction.

Maybe Motl is on to something.

Sean M. Carroll has written a preposterous book advocating the many-worlds version of quantum mechanics. It is being widely promoted in the left-wing news media, while right-wing sources either ignore or trash it. Is that a coincidence?

There is something about the left-winger that wants to believe in parallel universes. Carroll also says:

If the universe is infinitely big, and it looks the same everywhere, that guarantees that infinite copies of something exactly like you exist out there. Does that bother me? No.

I think that this is a left-wing fantasy. Do right-wingers about such unobservable egalitarianism? I doubt it.

Carroll promotes his dopey new quantum book

Physicist Sean M. Carroll has a NY Times op-ed today promoting his stupid new book.

“I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics,” observed the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. ...

What’s surprising is that physicists seem to be O.K. with not understanding the most important theory they have.

No, that is ridiculous.

I assume that Feynman meant that it is hard to relate quantum objects to classical objects with a more intuitive understanding. Physicists grappled with the theory in the 1920s, and by 1935 everyone had a good understanding of it.

The reality is exactly backward. Few modern physics departments have researchers working to understand the foundations of quantum theory.

That is because the foundations were well-understood 90 years ago.

In the 1950s the physicist David Bohm, egged on by Einstein, proposed an ingenious way of augmenting traditional quantum theory in order to solve the measurement problem. ... Around the same time, a graduate student named Hugh Everett invented the “many-worlds” theory, another attempt to solve the measurement problem, only to be ridiculed by Bohr’s defenders.

They deserved to be ridiculed, but their theories did nothing towards solving the measurement problem, are philosophically absurd, and have no empirical support.

The current generation of philosophers of physics takes quantum mechanics very seriously, and they have done crucially important work in bringing conceptual clarity to the field.

Who? I do not think that there is any living philosopher who has shed any light on the subject.

It’s hard to make progress when the data just keep confirming the theories we have, rather than pointing toward new ones.

The problem is that, despite the success of our current theories at fitting the data, they can’t be the final answer, because they are internally inconsistent.

This must sound crazy to an outsider. Physicists have perfectly good theories that explain all the data well, and yet Carroll writes books on why the theories are no good.

The theories are just fine. Carroll's philosophical prejudices are what is wrong.

Carroll does not say what would discredit himself -- he is a big believer in many-worlds theory. If he wrote an op-ed explaining exactly what he believes about quantum mechanics, everyone would deduce that he is a crackpot.

Philosopher Tim Maudlin also has a popular new essay on quantum mechanics. He is not so disturbed by the measurement problem, or indeterminism, or Schroedinger's cat, but he is tripped up by causality:

What Bell showed that if A and B are governed by local physics — no spooky-action-at-a-distance — then certain sorts of correlations between the behaviours of the systems cannot be predicted or explained by any local physics.

This is only true if "local physics" means a classical theory of local hidden variables. Bell did show that quantum mechanics can be distinguished from those classical theories, but there is still no action-at-a-distance.

Update: Lumo trashes Carroll's article. Woit traces an extremely misleading claim about a physics journal editorial policy. The journal just said that it is a physics journals, and articles have to have some physics in them. Philosophy articles could be published elsewhere.

Deriving free will from singularities

William Tomos Edwards writes in Quillette to defend free will:

[Biologist Jerry] Coyne dismisses the relevance of quantum phenomena here. While it’s true that there is no conclusive evidence for non-trivial quantum effects in the brain, it is an area of ongoing research with promising avenues, and the observer effect heavily implies a connection. Coyne correctly points out that the fundamental randomness at the quantum level does not grant libertarian free will. Libertarian free will implies that humans produce output from a process that is neither random nor deterministic. What process could fit the bill?

No, they are both wrong. Libertarian free will certainly does imply that human produce output that is not predictable by others, and hence random. That is the definition of randomness.

Quantum randomness is not some other kind of randomness. There is only one kind of randomness.

Then Edwards goes off the rails:

Well, if the human decision-making process recruits one or more irremovable singularities, and achieves fundamentally unpredictable output from those, I would consider that a sufficient approximation to libertarian free will. Furthermore, a singularity could be a good approximation to an “agent.” Singularities do occur in nature, at the center of every black hole, and quite possibly at the beginning of the universe, and quantum phenomena leave plenty of room open for them. ...

The concept of a singularity becomes important once again here because if you can access some kind of instantaneous infinity and your options are fundamentally, non-trivially infinite, then it would seem you have escaped compatibilism and achieved a more profound freedom.

Now he is just trolling us. There are no singularities or infinities in nature. You can think of the center of a black hole that way, but it is not observable, so no one will ever know. There certainly aren't any black holes in your brain.

Coyne replies here, but quantum mechanics is out of his expertise.

Universal grammar and other pseudosciences

Everyone agrees that astrology is pseudoscience, but this new paper takes on some respected academic subjects:

After considering a set of demarcation criteria, four pseudosciences are examined: psychoanalysis, speculative evolutionary psychology, universal grammar, and string theory. It is concluded that these theoretical frameworks do not meet the requirements to be considered genuinely scientific. ...

To discriminate between two different types of activities some kind of criteria or
standards are necessary. It is argued that the following four demarcation criteria are
suitable to distinguish science from pseudoscience:
1. Testability. ...
2. Evidence. ...
3. Reproducibility. ...
4. The 50-year criterion.

By these criteria, string theory fails to be science. It mentions that a couple of philosophers try to defend string theory, but only by inventing some new category. I guess they don't want to call it "pseudoscience" if respectable professors promote it.

Respectable professors also have a long history of supporting Freudian psychoanalysis.

This claim about universal grammar struck me:

Chomksy (1975, p. 4) argues that children learn language easily since they do it without formal instruction or conscious awareness.

Not only is Chomsky well-respected for these opinions, but Steve Pinker and many others have said similar things.

This puzzles me. I taught my kids to talk, and I would not describe it as easy. I had to give them formal instruction, and they seemed to be consciously aware of it.

The process takes about a year. It is a long series of incremental steps. Steps are: teaching the child to understand simple commands, such as "stop", articulating sounds like "hi", responding to sounds, like saying "hi" in response to "hi", learning simple nouns, like saying "ball" while pointing to a ball, developing a vocabulary of 20 nouns or so, learning simple verbs like "go", putting together subject-verb, putting together subject-verb-object, etc.

All of these steps are difficult for a two-year-old, and require a great deal of individual instruction and practice.

Sure, two-year-olds might learn a lot by observing, but you could say the same about other skills. Some are taught to dress themselves, while others learn by mimicking others. No one would say that children learn to dress themselves without instruction.

Steven Pinker was the first to popularize the hypothesis that language is an instinct. In his influential book The Language Instinct, Pinker asserts that “people know how to talk in more or less the sense that spiders know how to spin webs” (Pinker 1995, p. 18). Pinker’s analogy is striking, since it is obviously incorrect. A spider will spin webs even if it remains isolated since birth. On the other hand, a child who has been isolated since birth will not learn language. In other words, while web-spinning does not require previous experience and it is innate, language does require experience and it is learned.

Chomsky and Pinker are two of our most respected intellectuals today.

Googling indicates that Chomsky had one daughter and no grandkids. Pinker has no kids. I am not sure that is relevant, as many others have similarly claimed that children learn language naturally.

Psychology is in crisis

I often criticize the science of Physics here, some some other sciences are doing much worse. Such as:

Psychology is declared to be in crisis. The reliability of thousands of studies have been called into question by failures to replicate their results. ...

The replication crisis, if nothing else, has shown that productivity is not intrinsically valuable. Much of what psychology has produced has been shown, empirically, to be a waste of time, effort, and money. As Gibson put it: our gains are puny, our science ill-founded.

This is pretty harsh, but it doesn't even mention how many leaders in the field have turned out to be fraud, or how some sub-fields are extremely politicized, or how much damage they do to people in psychotherapies.

Einstein did not get relativity from Hume

An Aeon essay starts:

In 1915, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the philosopher and physicist Moritz Schlick, who had recently composed an article on the theory of relativity. Einstein praised it: ‘From the philosophical perspective, nothing nearly as clear seems to have been written on the topic.’ Then he went on to express his intellectual debt to ‘Hume, whose Treatise of Human Nature I had studied avidly and with admiration shortly before discovering the theory of relativity. It is very possible that without these philosophical studies I would not have arrived at the solution.’

More than 30 years later, his opinion hadn’t changed, as he recounted in a letter to his friend, the engineer Michele Besso: ‘In so far as I can be aware, the immediate influence of D Hume on me was greater. I read him with Konrad Habicht and Solovine in Bern.’ We know that Einstein studied Hume’s Treatise (1738-40) in a reading circle with the mathematician Conrad Habicht and the philosophy student Maurice Solovine around 1902-03. This was in the process of devising the special theory of relativity, which Einstein eventually published in 1905. It is not clear, however, what it was in Hume’s philosophy that Einstein found useful to his physics.

It is amazing that anyone takes Einstein's egomania seriously.

Einstein got relativity from Lorentz and Poincare, and spent his whole life lying about it. Saying that he got his ideas from some philosopher is just a way of denying credit to Lorentz and Poincare.

Worrying about testing the simulation hypothesis

Philosophy professor Preston Greene argues in the NY Times:

ut what if computers one day were to become so powerful, and these simulations so sophisticated, that each simulated “person” in the computer code were as complicated an individual as you or me, to such a degree that these people believed they were actually alive? And what if this has already happened?

In 2003, the philosopher Nick Bostrom made an ingenious argument that we might be living in a computer simulation created by a more advanced civilization. He argued that if you believe that our civilization will one day run many sophisticated simulations concerning its ancestors, then you should believe that we’re probably in an ancestor simulation right now. ...

In recent years, scientists have become interested in testing the theory. ...

o far, none of these experiments has been conducted, and I hope they never will be. Indeed, I am writing to warn that conducting these experiments could be a catastrophically bad idea — one that could cause the annihilation of our universe. ...

if our universe has been created by an advanced civilization for research purposes, then it is reasonable to assume that it is crucial to the researchers that we don’t find out that we’re in a simulation. If we were to prove that we live inside a simulation, this could cause our creators to terminate the simulation — to destroy our world. ...

As far as I am aware, no physicist proposing simulation experiments has considered the potential hazards of this work.

Isn't it great that we have philosophers to worry about stuff like this?

Extending this reasoning further, we should shut down the LHC particle collider, and all the quantum computer research. These are exceptionally difficult (ie, computationally intensive) to simulate. If we overwhelm the demands on the simulator, then the system could crash or get shut down.

We probably should not look for extraterrestrials either.

A psychiatrist wonders about our simulator overlords reading NY Times stories worrying about simulation.

I think these guys are serious, but I can't be sure. It is not any wackier than Many-Worlds.

Another philosopher, Richard Dawid, has a new paper on the philosophy of string theory:

String theory is a very different kind of conceptual scheme than any earlier physical theory. It is the first serious contender for a universal final theory. It is a theory for which previous expectations regarding the time horizon for completion are entirely inapplicable. It is a theory that generates a high degree of trust among its exponents for reasons that remain, at the present stage, entirely decoupled from empirical confirmation. Conceptually, the theory provides substantially new perspectives ...

Wow, a "universal final theory" that is entirely "decoupled" from experiment, and with no hope of "completion" in the foreseeable future. But it is conceptually interesting!

I am sure Dawid thinks that he is doing string theorists a favor by justifying their work, but he has to admit that the theory has no merit in any sense that anyone has ever recognized before.

Quantum physics is not in crisis

The latest Lumo rant starts:

Critics of quantum mechanics are wrong about everything that is related to foundations of physics and quite often, they please their readers with the following:

Physics has been in a crisis since 1927. ...

You may see that they 1) resemble fanatical religious believers or their postmodern, climate alarmist imitators or the typical propaganda tricksters in totalitarian regimes. They tell you that there is a crisis so you should throw away the last pieces of your brain and behave as a madman – that will surely help. ...

In reality, the years 1925-1927 brought vastly more true, vastly more solid, vastly more elegant, and vastly more accurate foundations to physics, foundations that are perfectly consistent and that produce valid predictions whose relative accuracy may be \(10^{-15}\) (magnetic moment of the electron).

On the new postulates of quantum mechanics, people have built atomic and molecular physics, quantum chemistry, modern optics, lasers, condensed matter physics, superconductors, semiconductors, graphene and lots of new materials, transistors, diodes of many kind, LED and OLED and QLED panels, giant magnetoresistance, ...

He is attacking Sean M. Carroll's book, and other similar modern gripes about quantum mechanics.

I mostly agree with him. Quantum mechanics is the most successful theory we have, and we have professors saying it is in crisis, or it doesn't make sense, or the foundations are wrong, or some such nonsense.

If quantum mechanics does not obey your idea of what a theory should be, then it is time to re-examine your prejudices about what a theory should be. Quantum mechanics has succeeded beyond all expectations in every possible way.

Dr. Bee says:

Now, it seems that black holes can entirely vanish [over trillions of years] by emitting this radiation. Problem is, the radiation itself is entirely random and does not carry any information. So when a black hole is entirely gone and all you have left is the radiation, you do not know what formed the black hole. Such a process is fundamentally irreversible and therefore incompatible with quantum theory. It just does not fit together.

I am baffled how obviously intelligent physicists can say this nonsense. Everything in quantum mechanics is irreversible. I don't even know any reversible quantum experiments.

Quantum computers are supposed to do reversible operations on qubits, but they have never gotten it to work for more than a few microseconds, as far as I know. And Bee is worried that a trillion-year black hole decay might be irreversible? This is craziness.

Thierry Batard argues in a new paper:

In glaring contrast to its indisputable century-old experimental success, the ultimate objects and meaning of quantum physics remain a matter of vigorous debate among physicists and philosophers of science. ...

In the eyes of the Fields medalist René Thom (2016), this makes quantum physics “… far and away the intellectual scandal…” of the twentieth century. ...

quantum physics has “… been accused of being unreasonable and unacceptable, even inconsistent, by world-class physicists (for example, Newman…)” (Rovelli 1996)

How can something work flawlessly and be so unacceptable?

This is a bit like someone going around telling everyone that cell phones cannot possibly work. What are you going to believe -- your own eyes or some philosophical professor?

Carroll writes new book on Many Worlds

Peter Woit asks What’s the difference between Copenhagen and Everett?

What strikes me when thinking about these two supposedly very different points of view on quantum mechanics is that I’m having trouble seeing why they are actually any different at all.

To the extent that they are just interpretations, there is no substantive difference. With disputes about the definitions, this is not so clear.

Here are a couple of the better comments:

They difference is in the part that you don’t want to discuss, which is that Everettians postulate the other worlds are real, while Copenhagenists refuses to say anything about what cannot be observed.

Good old books inform that the same issue had been fiercely debated around 1926, when Schroedinger/Einstein wanted to describe everything via a deterministic local equation, getting rid of quantum jumps. Heisenberg/Bohr explained that it’s not possible because we see particles as events. Decoherence and all modern stuff allow to understand better but don’t change the key point: we need probabilities. So the Schroedinger equation is just a tool for computing probabilities in configuration space.

Woit goes on to review Sean M. Carroll's new book, which is a 368-page argument for the Many World Theory of quantum behavior.

Woit says Carroll is a good writer and explainer, but the Many Worlds stuff is the babbling of a crackpot. They theory is so silly it is hard to take anyone seriously who pushes Many Worlds.

The Quantum Computing Party may never start

SciAm reports:

The Quantum Computing Party Hasn’t Even Started Yet

But your company may already be too late ...

For example, at IonQ, the company I co-founded to build quantum computer hardware, we used our first-generation machine to simulate a key measure of the energy of a water molecule. Why get excited when ordinary computers can handle the same calculation without breaking a sweat? ...

If you pay even a little attention to technology news, you've undoubtedly heard about the amazing potential of quantum computers, which exploit the unusual physics of the smallest particles in the universe. While many have heard the buzz surrounding quantum computing, most don't understand that you can't actually buy a quantum computer today, and the ones that do exist can't yet do more than your average laptop. ...

It will take a few more years of engineering for us to build capacity in the hundreds of qubits, but I am confident we will, and that those computers will deliver on the amazing potential of quantum technology.

The choice facing technology leaders in many industries is whether to start working today on the quantum software that will use the next generation of computers or whether to wait and watch the breakthroughs be made by more agile competitors.

Or wait to watch all the quantum computer companies fail.

He is right that you cannot buy a quantum computer, and the research models are so primitive as to be useless.

The party may never start.

Quantum Cryptography is still useless

IEEE Spectrum reports:

Quantum Cryptography Needs a Reboot

Quantum technologies—including quantum computing, ultra-sensitive quantum detectors, and quantum random number generators—are at the vanguard of many engineering fields today. Yet one of the earliest quantum applications, which dates back to the 1980s, still appears very far indeed from any kind of widespread, commercial rollout.

Despite decades of research, there’s no viable roadmap for how to scale quantum cryptography to secure real-world data and communications for the masses.

That’s not to say that quantum cryptography lacks commercial applications. ...

From a practical standpoint, then, it doesn’t appear that quantum cryptography will be anything more than a physically elaborate and costly—and, for many applications, largely ignorable—method of securely delivering cryptographic keys anytime soon.

So it does lack commercial applications. The technology does not do anything useful, as I have explained here many times.

“The same technologies that will allow you to do [quantum crypto] will also allow you to build networked quantum computers,” Bassett says. “Or allow you to have modular quantum computers that have different small quantum processors that all talk to each other. The way they talk to each other is through a quantum network, and that uses the same hardware that a quantum cryptography system would use.”

So ironically, the innards of quantum “cryptography” may one day help string smaller quantum computers together to make the kind of large-scale quantum information processor that could defeat… you guessed it… classical cryptography.

So all these folks think that classical cryptography is doomed. Someone will first have to invent a quantum processor, because we can try to network such processors.

$3M prize for dead-end physics idea

Dr. Bee reports:

The Breakthrough Prize is an initiative founded by billionaire Yuri Milner, now funded by a group of rich people which includes, next to Milner himself, Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, and Mark Zuckerberg. The Prize is awarded in three different categories, Mathematics, Fundamental Physics, and Life Sciences. Today, a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics has been awarded to Sergio Ferrara, Dan Freedman, and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen for the invention of supergravity in 1976. The Prize of 3 million US$ will be split among the winners.

What you never heard of this work? That is because it was a dead-end, and never led to anything.

For a couple of years in the 1970s, supersymmetry gravity was an exciting idea, because it was thought that it would make quantum gravity renormalizable. However that turned out to be false, and the theory is worthless.

Like string theory, it has no connection to any observational science. But even work, it doesn't even make sense as a physical theory.

Update: Lumo writes:

Nature, Prospect Magazine, and Physics World wrote something completely different. The relevant pages of these media have been hijacked by vitriolic, one-dimensional, repetitive, scientifically clueless, deceitful, and self-serving anti-science activists and they tried to sling as much mud on theoretical physics as possible – which seems to be the primary job description of many of these writers and the society seems to enthusiastically fund this harmful parasitism.

Check them yourself. The Nature article says:

A lack of evidence should also not detract from supergravity’s achievements, argues Strominger, because the theory has already been used to solve mysteries about gravity. For instance, general relativity apparently allows particles to have negative masses and energies, in theory.

No, that is a big lie. Supergravity has nothing to do with positive mass. For details, see the comments on Woit's blog. Briefly, Witten published an outline for a proposed spinor proof of the Schoen-Yau positive mass theorem, and the paper ended with a short section starting with "a few speculative remarks will be made about the not altogether clear relation between the previous argument and supergravity." That's all.

Science journals must be politically correct

Indian-born British writer Angela Saini has found the formula, with articles in Scientific American:

The “race realists,” as they call themselves online, join the growing ranks of climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers in insisting that science is under the yoke of some grand master plan designed to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. In their case, a left-wing plot to promote racial equality when, as far as they’re concerned, racial equality is impossible for biological reasons. ...

Populism, ethnic nationalism and neo-Nazism are on the rise worldwide. If we are to prevent the mistakes of the past from happening again, we need to be more vigilant.

And Nature:

Racist ‘science’ must be seen for what it is: a way of rationalizing long-standing prejudices, to prop up a particular vision of society as racists would like it to be. It is about power. ... A world in thrall to far-right politics and ethnic nationalism demands vigilance. We must guard science against abuse and reinforce the essential unity of the human species.

She argues that there is no such thing as human races, and that genetics has nothing to do with the observed differences in athletic performance.

She is from India, which is not really competitive in the sports the rest of the world. So perhaps she does not realize how obvious the biological differences in sports are. But what excuse does Nature and SciAm for publishing her nonsense?

If these journals can lie to us about human races, then they can also lie about climate change and a lot of other subjects.

Newton would accept modern physics

A reader sends me this Nautilus interview from last year:

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

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

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

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

I think that Newton would conclude:

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

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

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

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

Dr. Bee endorses superdeterminism

Sabine Hossenfelder is usually fairly sensible, but now she has gone off the deep end:

A phenomenologist myself, I am agnostic about different interpretations of what is indeed the same math, such as QBism vs Copenhagen or the Many Worlds. ...

I find superdeterminism interesting ...

The stakes are high, for if quantum mechanics is not a fundamental theory, but can be derived from an underlying deterministic theory, this opens the door to new applications. That’s why I remain perplexed that what I think is the obvious route to progress is one most physicists have never even heard of. Maybe it’s just a reality they don’t want to wake up to. ...

Really, think about this for a moment. A superdeterministic theory reproduces quantum mechanics. It therefore makes the same predictions as quantum mechanics. (Or, well, if it doesn't, it's wrong, so forget about it.) Difference is that it makes *more* predictions besides that. (Because it's not probabilistic.)

I don't know how anyone can say that Copenhagen, Many Worlds, and superdeterminism all make the same predictions.

Not only is that false, but Many Worlds and superdeterminism are so absurd that there is nothing scientific about either one. They don't make any predictions. They are amusing philosophical thought experiments, but they have no "same math" as anything with any practical utility. They are like saying that we all live in a simulation, or as a figment of someone's imagination. Not really a scientifically meaningful idea.

I really wonder what Dr. Bee's conception of probability is, that she says these things. There is no way to make sense out of probability, consistent with her statements above. Maybe physics books never teach what probability is. I don't know how anyone can get it this wrong.