Relativitism Corrupted Humanities and Social Sciences

This blog focuses on the hard sciences and objective reality, mainly Physics. I expect physicists to be hard-headed scientists, and I am disappointed when they are not.

Outside the hard sciences, the academic world is a wasteland. They are concerned with relativitism, not relativity.

A bunch of experts were asked to write a report on the decline of humanities and social sciences. Objectivity has been abandoned. Political considerations have overwhelmed serious work.

Here is a summary by a biology professor. One example:

In 2023, the AAA canceled an accepted panel at its annual conference, titled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology.” The AAA said at the time that the panel would have harmed members’ “safety and dignity,” and that its premise contradicted “settled science.” The Vanderbilt report cited this incident to argue that when politically charged questions “are treated as settled by the scholarly community, the result is an illegitimate suppression of dissent.”

Greene on the Most Mind-Boggling Result

Brian Greene answers questions:

And I'd say the most mind-boggling result of quantum 1:44:38 mechanics is the result of John Bell, John Stewart Bell, ...

But he was not willing to accept quantum entanglement at face value. He wanted to know if a version of quantum mechanics might be constructed that would be that would be local that wouldn't have these spooky non-local influences.

and he was trying to realize a dream really of Albert Einstein who thought that might be possible to come up with a new theory that embraces the same predictions as quantum mechanics but doesn't have this weird spooky action and he worked very hard thought he was coming very close to formulating that theory but every time he got to the near to the end it fell apart.

so finally he said to himself maybe this is a fool's errand maybe it's impossible to have a theory that agrees with the predictions of quantum mechanics and yet somehow excises spooky action non-local influences and he proved that that is the case a beautiful theorem John Bell proved a theorem which then because of the experimental data being such as to confirm the version that I just described that any quantum mechanically uh viable theory that agrees with the predictions of the standard approach is necessarily non-local. And so that to me is the most stunning implication. We necessarily live in a nonlocal universe. Yeah.

In fact, as a small teaser, I'll mention I'm actually writing a new book on quantum mechanics.

It is going to be a horrible book.

Quantum mechanics does not have any spooky non-local influences. Bell only proved that it differs from a type of local classical theories. It left open the possibility that a spooky classical theory might agree with QM, but that is not what Einstein was looking for.

Greene is famous for promoting string theory and multiverse theories. He now admits that these are speculative and unproven. Next he is going to promote quantum spookiness.

Meanwhile, Dr. Bee is writing a similar book and ventures into spookiness in her latest video on You probably misunderstand the double slit experiment. She is mostly correct, but goes off the rails when she says it proves either superdeterminism or spookiness:

4:37 But if the particle went through the other slit, you never interacted with it. You didn't touch the particle. It just knew you were trying to. The only way that you can avoid this faster than light update is that the particle knows whether you'll measure it before you've made the decision whether to measure it or not. This is what's called super determinism. And this is what's so weird about the double slit.

The error is that she keeps talking about particles, as if each has a definite position and momentum even when not observed. They do not. They are really waves, and waves always make interference patterns when going throught a double-slit, or even a single slit. There is no need to invoke spookiness or superdeterminism.

She refers to another quantum oddity. If you fire an electron at a double slit, it is really a wave that goes through both slits. If you put detectors on the slits, you only find one electron. If you observe the electron in one slit, you can be sure that the other detector will not see it. Conversely, if a detector says no electron went through one slit, then the other detector will see it in the other slit.

She describes this as very strange:

You make a measurement at one slit and the wave function on the other slit 4:22 changes immediately. And note that this is the case even if the particle does not trigger the detector. If it doesn't go into the detector, you know it must have gone through the other slit. But if the particle went through the other slit, you never interacted with it. You didn't touch the particle. It just knew you were trying to.

It is not so odd. Suppose I put my car key in my pocket, and I forget which of my two pockets. I can reach into one pocket, find it empty, and immediately deduce that my key is in the other pocket. I am finding my key, without interacting with it. It is not spooky or superdeterministic. The key did not know that I was looking for it.

It is peculiar to QM that measurements give eigenvalues. The theory says that the (unmeasured) electron goes partially through each slit. It could even tunnel through a barrier. But you never observe half an electron or an electron being in two places at once. Those are the real quantum mysteries. But the spookiness and superdeterminism are just nonsense.

Update: Greene has posted a long interview of Sean M. Carroll.

New Paper Calls Quantum Computing a Big Failure

Dr. Quantum Supremacy responds to a new paper:

A week ago, a philosopher named Amit Hagar put out a preprint entitled The NISQ Trap: Eight Years of Demonstrations the Hardware was Built to Lose. Here’s the abstract:

With a single clear exception, every NISQ-era flagship demonstration of ‘quantum advantage’ has, within eighteen months of its announcement, been classically reproduced, shown to rest on classically tractable structure, or closed by a simulability theorem.

Nevertheless, the basic thesis — that quantum supremacy in the NISQ (Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum computing) era has been a failure, or even an example of pathological science — seems surprisingly widely shared, along with the opposite thesis that quantum computing already gives oodles of useful advantages for optimization and finance. ...

You’re right that, if you just look at the commercial value right now versus money spent to date, quantum computing looks like a colossal waste — as did classical computing before it scaled, as did nuclear power and heavier-than-air flight and every other nontrivial new technology.

Nobody invested a nickel in those other technologies, until someone had a proof of concept. Quantum computing is different in that it has attracted many billions of investment dollars, without a proof of concept, or a business plan on how it would ever make money.

This response is very weak. Go ahead and read it and decide for yourself. Someone publishes a paper saying the whole field has been a failure for 20 years, he admits that the view is widely shared, but says new technologies take time.

And of course he falls back on the argument that quantum computers have not been proved impossible:

Yes, the “real” goal remains, as it’s been since the 1990s, to build a scalable fault-tolerant quantum computer — and I’m glad that Hagar (unlike, say, Gil Kalai) never suggests that we’ve learned anything to rule that goal out. In the meantime, an intermediate goal would be to use NISQ devices to do physics and chemistry simulations that are commercially useful, or that help solve important scientific problems. The point of quantum supremacy experiments, you might say, is that by demonstrating the reality of quantum speedup about as clearly as it can be demonstrated with current hardware, they let us cleanly turn our attention to those more ambitious goals.

Hagar does not even talk about whether quantum computers are possible. His point is that they are empirical failures.

Update: Aaronson says:

For me, though, the real game always has been to learn the truth or falsehood of the Extended Church-Turing Thesis: that is, can all of nature be simulated on a standard Turing machine with polynomial overhead, or is quantum mechanics a counterexample to this? And from that standpoint, it seems obvious to me that the burden of proof lies with those who think the Extended Church-Turing Thesis still holds in a quantum-mechanical universe. Why does it hold? What astonishing new principle causes it to hold, despite the exponentially many canceling terms that generically arise in a path integral?

I get enraged when (some) QC skeptics seem not even to notice these profound questions, and content themselves to poke holes in this or that specific quantum fault-tolerance proposal and then call it a day. That seems to me to reflect a staggering incuriosity about the way the world actually is.

I am probably one of those enraging him. I agree that the big question is whether quantum computers can outdo Turing machines. Since he is a leading expert and he regards this as still an open question, then I accept that it is unsettled.

I disagree about the burden of proof. I say that a new technology should show that it works. He says the burden of proof is to show that it does not work.

The profound question is to understand why it does not work. I am somewhat incurious about this, because I am not sure any explanation will be fully satisfactory. Do we understand why F=ma, or how gravity workds, or why nothing goes faster than light, or why perpetual motion machines are impossible? Yes, I know the textbooks have explanations, but they do not stop people from theorizing about them, so apparently the explanations are not totally convincing.

That Extended Church-Turing Thesis was widely accepted for 50 years, including by very smart physicists who understood quantum mechanics. If quantum supremacy were possible, I would think that someone would have demonstrated it by now.

Update: Gil Kalai Says:

I also tend to agree with Amit’s conclusion that the quantum supremacy claims are either false or inconclusive. ...

For more than two decades, Scott has argued that the burden of proof lies on the shoulders of the skeptics. I suggest that we split the burden of proof as follows:

The burden of showing that the engineering obstacles to high-quality quantum error correction and quantum fault tolerance are not far beyond reach lies with the proponents of quantum computing. They still have a long way to go before providing convincing evidence that these goals are feasible and can be achieved in the foreseeable future.

Foundations of General Relativity

The foundational principles of general relativity are said to be the equivalence principle, and general covariance. This new video disagrees.

Here is how I see it. The equivalence principle could also said to be foundational to Newtonian classical gravity, and it is only associated with general relativity for historical reasons.

General covariance is a mathematical principle, and it is not clear that any mathematical principle, by itself, has any physical consequences. As Einstein is quoted:

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

The laws of math do have consequences, but they require interpretation.

We normally say that Euclidean geometry has physical consequences, but that is only because of some assumptions about how idealized points, lines, planes, etc. correspond to physical entities.

Historically, covariance under Lorentz transformation was crucial to the presentations of relativity given by Poincare in 1905 and Minkowski in 1907. Einstein had a weaker version that was more similar to what Lorentz published in 1895.

Einstein was unconvinced, and wrote a paper denouncing the concept in 1913. Eventually, Grossmann, Levi-Civita, Ricci, and Hilbert convinced him to accept it.

The main ideas behind relativistic covariance had already been published by Poincare and Minkowski, but they were dead by the time Einstein worked on general relativity

I believe that general covariance is a crucially important concept. It is a way of saying that the laws do not depend on coordinates. That different frames can be used to the same effect. These ideas go right to the core of why the theory is called relativity. And historically, covariance was a large part of why relativity was accepted. By 1908 it was widely accepted, even though Einstein did not.

Aaronson Starts a Venture Investing Fund

Dr. Quantum Supremacy is tired of watching his friends and associates get rich with half-baked ideas about bitcoin, quantum computing, and AI, so he is joing the gold rush. He announces:

So then, screw it! In partnership with my brother David Aaronson, who’s long done investing professionally, and on David’s guidance and encouragement, I’m hereby embarking on a new policy. ...

So far, David and I are investing in:

• Oratomic (the new neutral-atom quantum computing startup out of Pasadena started by Dolev Bluvstein, John Preskill, and Hsin-Yuan Huang among others, which I previously blogged about here). See here for their Series A announcement this week. ...

So let me educate you then. I played a central role in introducing the whole program of sampling-based quantum supremacy back in 2009-2012. That what was allowed first Google, then Quantinuum and others, to do such dramatic demonstrations starting in 2019. Almost anyone in quantum computing will tell you that that was essential to various QC startups being able to go public recently at ~$15B valuations.

Now, what’s true is that I didn’t succeed at capturing essentially any of the value that I helped create this way. What’s true is that all the billions of dollars went to other people, who optimized for getting equity early on, rather than to me or my students, who optimized for learning the truth about quantum speedups and writing the key papers that other people then managed to profit from.

This is another sign we are in a bubble.

Oratomic says that it will not try to demonstrate quantum supremacy. It will go straight for a commercial quantum computer.

The Tycho Solar System, Revisited

I always thought Tycho Brahe was the greatest pure astronomer, so I was surprised to find this new paper trashing him:

The Tychonic system, an implausible theory
Gabriele Vanin

Several scholars have accorded the Tychonic System a prominent place, considering it a credible alternative to the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. In recent years, there have even been some enthusiastic contributions in support of Brahe, which have sought to show how his solutions were the most suitable for providing scientifics support to the new observations that were accumulating between the late 16th century and the mid-17th century.

Tycho had a model where the Sun went around the Earth, and Mercury and Venus went around the Sun.

At a time when Copernicus had already published his hypothesis, it could not but be considered a step backwards, a return to the past, a naive and useless compromise. That is, as an ad hoc theory (the kind that sci- entists gladly do without if they can, and, in this case, they could) contrived on purpose to have the best of both worlds, i.e. the immobility of the Earth and the concentric motion of the planets around the Sun, as a geometrically and physically poorly founded expedient. After Copernicus finally have the courage to declare that in the homocentric spheres, in epicycles and deferents lies hidden the orbit of the Earth, does Brahe return to the starting point, swapping the orbit of the Earth with that of the Sun again? It would be a bit as if, in the aftermath of the publication of the On the Origin of Species, someone had said that yes, evolution was acceptable, but that the evolution of man had occurred on a parallel track, not descending from the first common life-form, but from another one, completely different, and had developed quite independently.

This is ridiculous. There were good arguments for and against the motion of the Earth.

The paper later complains that Kepler's third law, discovered in 1619, could be applied to Saturns moons, discovered in 1656-84, and that would seem to falsify the Tychonic system. Tycho died in 1601.

I have seen others trash Tycho for being too stupid to accept Copernicanism. I wonder about what their idea of science is.

Tycho had the best pre-telescope astronomy observations of anyone. By far. The stars had been tracked for thousands of years, but Tycho's data was so good that it made all preceding data worthless.

A geocentric model is not necessarily wrong. Motion is relative. We say the Earth goes around the Sun, not because it is a fact, but because dynamic models make more sense in a center-of-mass frame. It makes more sense to say the smaller object is orbiting the larger object.

Tycho was creating a more accurate model of the solar system. He did not know about gravity. But without him, it is hard to see how Kepler and Newton could have accomplished what they did.

To me, science is all about collecting data, and constructing explanatory and predictive models. Tycho did this, possibly more brilliantly that any other astronomer in history. And yet people want to trash him as unscientific.

A scientific theory can be extremely good, even if the interpretation is not quite right. For example, Murray Gell-Mann is famous for his theory of quarks, but originally he did not even believe in quarks. As the quarks cannot be isolated, it is a philosophical issue whether they are real or not. Now everyone says they are real, but Gell-Mann was not really wrong to treat them as theoretical constructs.

IBM Plans to Scale Up Quantum Computing

The WSJ reports:

International Business Machines has spent a decade building, testing and improving in the once-theoretical realm of quantum computing at its glass-paneled laboratory complex in upstate New York.

This year, the company is laying the groundwork to turn that technology into a fully-fledged, scalable business from an expensive science project.

IBM said last month it plans to form a new independent subsidiary called Anderon, a foundry to produce the silicon wafers needed to make quantum-computing processors. The venture is seeded by a $1 billion investment from the Trump administration and another $1 billion of IBM’s own cash.

Anderon will give the company a new line of business in selling wafers to other quantum-computing companies. It will also provide a steady stream of wafers to continue developing its own quantum technology, positioning IBM to capture part of what the Boston Consulting Group projects will be a $90 billion to $170 billion market for quantum-computing providers by 2040.

The venture will begin with an expansion of the company’s in-house facility in Albany, N.Y., which makes wafers for IBM’s internal research. “Now we have to scale it,” IBM Director of Research Jay Gambetta said in an interview.

The company also plans to spend an additional $9 billion over five years to advance the final stages of its quest to build a quantum-mechanics-powered computer capable and reliable enough for widespread use, a goal known as fault tolerance. That computer, named Starling, is being targeted for 2029.

With Anderon, IBM is thinking beyond Starling, or even a more powerful quantum computer planned for 2033.

I don't see how IBM can be scaling up, when they do not have a working technology, and do not have applications for the scale up.

Dr. Bee has a new video trashing the prospects for quantum computing, and in particular, IBM for quietly shifting goals. It is still committed, but cannot achieve its previous goals.