Quantum Nonlocality Explained FROM SCRATCH

A month ago, Curt Jaimungal interviewed Tim Maudlin on Can Quantum Mechanics Be Explained FROM SCRATCH?. Now, Part II just dropped, for another 3+ hours.

Maudlin is an expert on this subject, and he discusses in detail the work of von Neumann, Einstein, Bohm, Bell, and others saying that the concepts of locality, classical hidden variables, and quantum mechanics predictions are in conflict. One must be rejected.

What is not so clear is how Maudlin differs from textbook Copenhagen interpretation. Copenhagen says that the classical hidden variables are to be rejected. That is what von Neumann proved, under some assumptions. Then we have locality and predictions of quantum mechanics, with no problem.

Maudlin has some philosphical reasons for subscribing to classical hidden variables, so he ends up rejecting locality.

To me, no one has ever observed spooky action at a distance, so local theories are very much preferred. Bohm's pilot wave theory is crazy, because the theory is nonlocal, but all the observations magically turn out to be local.

Maudlin explains that all the great physicists rejected quantum nonlocality.

Tim: But they never straightforwardly acknowledged the nonlocality. And if you don’t believe that, 1:58:07 go read Bohr’s response to the EPR paper and see whether he straightforwardly says, “Yes, I believe in nonlocality. I believe in spooky action at a distance.” He denies it. ...

So I think Einstein saw correctly that if you accept this spooky action 1:59:25 at a distance, relativity itself is at risk. And he didn’t wanna put, you know, relativity at risk without good reason, and he couldn’t see any reason to accept the spooky action at a distance.

Now, he may not have liked it for other reasons. I mean, we, Newton didn’t like it, right? He says, he says, “No rational person would believe in it.” I mean, there are lots of people who find that just intuitively ugly or unacceptable or whatever. Curt: Mm-hmm.

Tim: And, and, and, and to this day, there are people who don’t wanna accept nonlocality, and they’ll more or less clutch at any straw to try to avoid it, as we’ll see. The psychology of that I can’t quite explain.

I can explain it. The entire scientific enterprise for millennia has been to figure out cause and effect, by tracing events to nearby actions. If that is all wrong, and our lives are controlled by the spooky astrology of far-away stars, then we need to reconsider all the known laws of science.

In fact, no such nonlocality has ever been discovered, and we can continue with what has worked for centuries.

Bell and Maudlin claim that all the great geniuses and textbooks are wrong. They have a belief in what a quantum theory ought to be, and they say that quantum mechanics, as understood by Bohr and von Neumann, does not qualify.

I agree with Newton. No rational person would believe in spooky action at a distance. Unless it is proved, of course.

Professor Dave Rants against Dr. Bee again

Professor Dave has attacked Sabine Hossenfelder again.

Dave Farina has one of the top science Youtube channels, with 4.4 million subscribers. That is enough to make a living. He is not a real professor, but has a large number of expository videos, mostly on elementary science. He also likes to debunk Flat Earthers and others he considers pseudoscientific or religious.

Hossenfelder is closer to being a real professor, and posts lots of videos, mostly on theoretical physics. She also does science news, and likes to cover cutting edge research. She does not do elementary expository videos. She avoids politics, except that she often criticizes research projects she considers unproductive.

So they would seem to have little or nothing to do with each other. But Dave regularly trashes Sabine in the harshest terms. It is strange, as it is unlikely that he even understands most of her videos.

Dave's politics are Woke Leftist and anti-Zionist. He recites Woke lines about race not existing, Whites being evil, LGBTQ talking points, etc. He wants Israel destroyed, and taken over by Arabs. His rants on these topics are filled with obscenities, and lack any scientific reasoning. He subscribes to weird conspiracy theories about Peter Thiel and the Jews. He strongly suspects that Thiel is funding Sabine.

Dave's latest video is 40 minutes of calling Sabine a racist. Odd, and she hardly ever says anything about race or politics.

It was all provoked by the Jason Arday scandal. He was a Cambridge U. professor who got exposed as a charlatan, and committed suicide. Dave explained the issue as some dubious accusations of plagiarism that might have been overlooked if he had been White, but which caused White racists to harass him to death.

No, I do not think the plagiarism is what got him in trouble with his employer. His problems were much deeper. He had lied about almost everything, including his childhood, his life story, his academic credential, his teaching, and his research. His autobiography was being published, and it was all lies. His research was garbage, and he had no ability to do academic work. And yet he was promoted as a great genius.

So what does any of this have to do Sabine? She tweeted a couple of times that one of the whistleblowers should not be fired for exposing Arday. Yes, that's all.

Dave is a culture warrior where he stands with the right-minded people who believe is Science, Atheism, and Wokism. He sides with whatever is published in respectable science journals, and he hates Sabine for throwing cold water on some big science projects. He loves whatever science government and universities are doing, and hates whatever Elon Musk and other billionaires do.

I have sometimes criticed Sabine myself, on this blog. But Dave is just an ideological and dishonest jerk. There is no way he can really believe what he says about race, Arday, and the whistleblower. He is like the woke activists who say that a transgender woman is just as much a woman as any other woman, or that a man can get pregnant. It is not science. It is an extreme ideological stance in order to support certain progressive objectives.

Palmer says Irrational Numbers Not Real

New tweet:

Quantum mechanics works perfectly in experiments, but Oxford physicist Tim Palmer argues it rests on a mathematical fiction: irrational numbers like √2 have no basis in physical reality.

Strip them out, and quantum's strangest mysteries disappear.

Palmer's theory makes a testable prediction: quantum computers will fail beyond 400 qubits, hitting a fundamental limit set by the discrete structure of nature itself.

The coming quantum computing race will determine whether our most successful physical theory contains a basic mistake.

Paywalled article. No, I do not think he is correct. I am just posting because I think it is amusing.

Possible AI Proof of Complex S6 Manifold

A new Claude AI LLM assisted paper claims to find a complex manifold structure on the six-dimensional sphere, S⁶. There are videos here and here.

The opposite result was claimed in 2016, but the argument was faulty.

If verified, this will probably be the biggest AI math accomplishment to date. So far, the biggest success are the Jacobian conjecture counterexample, and the Erdox unit distance problem.

Notes on Minkowski's Geometric Relativity

Einstein scholar Tilman Sauer writes a new paper:

Minkowski's Geometric Explanation of Lorentz Contraction

Hermann Minkowski's original explanation of relativistic length contraction using a space-time diagram and conic section geometry of a standard hyperbola is reconstructed on the basis of unpublished manuscript notes dated to the spring of 1908. The manuscript notes likely reflect Minkowski's preparation of a lecture to physics and mathematics teachers. They reveal Minkowski as an educator as well as a promoter of a mathematization of the physical sciences. I also comment on his interpretation of Einstein's work and on the use of language in his popularization of mathematics.

He did not find anything particularly interesting in the notes.

It is not clear that Einstein's work had much influence on Minkowski, if any.

He mentions Einstein’s work on the relativity principle as a continuation of Lorentz’s work. ...

He did not identify the principle of relativity and the principle of the constancy of the speed of light as the two defining principles for the special theory of relativity. Instead, he singled out Lorentz’s contraction hypothesis as a fundamental postulate, and the existence of a limiting velocity as an axiom. ...

He then stated his impression that Einstein had not yet achieved “full understanding of the facts” (“volle Einsicht der gegebenen Tatsachen”).

Minkowski mentions crediting Einstein for this:

Lorentz himself told me in a conversation in Rome that Einstein’s merit is to have recognized that the time of one electron is just as good as that of the other, i.e. to have recognized the equivalence of t and t′.

That may be Einstein's merit, but Lorentz surely understood that in 1895, because he used it to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment. And Poincare believed that Lorentz understood it, because it was part of the recommendation for Lorentz to get the 1902 Nobel Prize.

The whole point of the Lorentz 1895 theory was that Maxwell's equations held in the moving frame, for the transformed coordinates. For that to work, the transformed time has to be genuine time in the moving frame. Perhaps Lorentz was missing some conceptual details, but he had to believe that what he called "local time" was the locally observed time.

Discussion of Poincare is strangely absent. Minkowski wrote two papers on relativity, citing Poincare prominently in the first but not the second. Some of Minkowski work, such as the 4d spacetime, indefinite metric, and Lorentz covariance, appear to be straight out of Poincare. Minkowski died shortly afterwards, so we got no more explanation.

Sauer is loyal to Einstein, as evidenced by:

Minkowski knew about and cited Einstein’s famous paper from 1905 on the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies (3), which introduced the special theory of relativity.

It is pretty clear that Minkowski would not have said that Einstein introduced the theory. If anyone, it was Lorentz, Poincare, and Minkowski.

Update: I happened to see a 2013 Sauer paper:

As is well-known,12 Einstein’s attempts to obtain an assistantship any- where failed flatly despite various letters of application. To make matters more difficult, Einstein and his fellow student Mileva Mari´c had fallen in love and, unfortunately, Mari´c had become pregnant in the spring of 1901, an unplanned circumstance that surely contributed to her failing the final examinations again at her second attempt in summer 1901. ...

Since Einstein now had a tenured job, he was able to marry Mileva Mari´c in January 1903.

This is such a strange way of describing the situation. The daughter Lieserl is believed to have been abandoned. He could have married and taken responsibility for the child, even without a tenured job.

The 1969 Book that Killed AI Research

The neural nets at the core of AI were invented in 1943, and popularized in 1957-60 as the Perceptron. It had the basic idea that was later developed into today's AI LLMs.

But not everyone recognized it. Prominent MIT professors wrote a 1969 book, Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry, trashing the concept.

Reports by the New York Times and statements by Rosenblatt claimed that neural nets would soon be able to see images, beat humans at chess, and reproduce. ...

This book is the center of a long-standing controversy in the study of artificial intelligence. It is claimed that pessimistic predictions made by the authors were responsible for a change in the direction of research in AI, concentrating efforts on so-called "symbolic" systems, a line of research that petered out and contributed to the so-called AI winter of the 1980s, when AI's promise was not realized.

The book claimed to prove that perceptrons were hopelessly limited, as they could not even approximate a simple xor function.

The authors doubled down in 1988 updated edition, saying "little of significance [has] changed since 1969". At the time there was a revival of interest in neural nets, but the authors said they would fail to scale up.

We now know that those neural nets of the 1940s, 50s, and 80s do scale up, and perform spectacularly well. The bold predictions of the perceptron inventor must have been seen as wildly optimistic at the time, but they turned out to be correct.

I post this as an example of how smart people can be wrong about what is possible, and how brilliant research could be sidetracked.

Rosenblatt made a hardware computer perceptron in 1960, and that is now in the Smithsonian Museum. What no one knew until about 2012 was that video game chips would be the key to scaling up neural nets. [date corrected]

Here is a recent video that tries to relate these old ideas about neural nets to current research.

Schrödinger was an Indeterminist

Conventional wisdom is that classical physics is determinist, while quantum physics is not.

New paper:

Was Schrödinger ever a determinist?
Flavio Del Santo, Nicolas Gisin

Erwin Schrödinger is often portrayed as a reactionary who resisted the indeterminism introduced by quantum mechanics, but on closer inspection his views on determinism prove to be more complex and more radical.

Schrödinger argued, correctly in my opinion, that neither classical nor quantum physics is deterministic.

(i) The first argument challenges the mathematical idealization of determinacy in the initial conditions. ...

(ii) The second argument for indeterminism concerns discontinuity and irreversibility. ...

(iii) In his final argument, Schrödinger links quantum indeterminacy to the abandonment of the concept of trajectory and to the essential role of discontinuity. Remarkably, he can be seen here as anticipating the notion of “information” in physics (he does not use the term “information”, which was formalized only in 1948 by C. Shannon), suggesting that nature may be understood as a discrete sequence of yes–no answers, representable as strings of 0s and 1s.

None of this should be surprising or controversial, except for the notoriety of those with contrary views.

Einstein was a determinist.

The many-worlds advocates, like Sean M. Carroll, are determinists.

Sabine Hossenfelder is a superdeterminist.

The Bohm pilot wave theorists, like Tim Maudlin, are determinists.

It is philosophically possible to be a determinist, just like the rest of the existential crisis iceberg is possible, but silly. If you believe in free will, or in scientific and experimental choices, then determinism is wrong.

Here is a new comment with a typical modern scoff about free will, rejecting any suggestion that it could be possible:

OMG

“It is our free will that enables it to be so.”

1) your brain is nothing more than a collection of atoms

2) the atoms in your brain are no different from the ones in any other clump, and they just move around in the only way that’s compatible with the state of all the other atoms in the universe and the laws of physics.

3) No matter the details of the physics, there is only cause and effect, with some amount of randomness (assuming it’s even a thing), and there’s absolutely no room for your ego to magically unshackle itself from this simple ground truth.

4) the concepts of freedom and will you’re invoking stem from the notion of counterfactuals – because alternative versions of cause and effect chains are conjured in our mind (like an AI hallucination), and you believe those could have happened, therefore, at every moment, we must have the ability to pick among those possible future paths arbitrarily, before even knowing what those possibilities are, or could have been. As if, when imagining the counterfactuals after the fact, you’re able to signal the past version of yourself to alter its “choice”, and this would repeat in a loop until it stabilizes. But even in this far fetched theory of retroactive influence, everything that happens is still a chain of inescapable causes and effects, going in a time loop. And the stable version is left with no freedom of will whatsoever.

The earlier commenter replied:

I simply don’t agree. If you can explain what causes an electron spin measurement to be either up or down, and thereby abolish superposition, then maybe I am mistaken. Otherwise I can base my decisions on the outcome of the measurement and not possible for any entity to predict my resulting actions a priori. The cause of my actions is the measurement result that is random with no discernible cause. The cause and effect chain starts only after measurement and not before.

I agree my brain is made from atoms but don’t agree it is just atoms as I look at collections of atoms that form my environment. My two dogs are collections of atoms but I realize one of them is not even bright enough to collapse the wave function. 🙂

How would one prove unequivocally there is no free will. Maybe if there were some digital simulation of me that perfectly predicted my actions then I would have to accept my sense of free will is illusory.. The future is perfectly predictable.

My point is that I can take steps to render a simulation inaccurate by consciously taking actions dependent on some measurement that cannot be known before the fact.

In lieu of a perfect simulation of me I will continue to believe that I have free will and that my future isn’t fully determined in a mechanistic way. If you have some predictive model of me we can conduct the experiment now to see if in fact I am perfectly predictable. I am ready and eager to participate. If you don’t then the claim that there is no free will is an unsupported belief while my belief I do have free will is supported by the failed experiment.

Free will is mostly a philosophical issue, but a few things can be said.

Everyone, except possibly for schizophrenics and stubborn philosophers, experiences free will and lives his life accordingly.

The above argument that science precludes free will is entirely fallacious.

Rejecting free will leads to nihilism and dispair.

Making a freely willed decision is somewhat like measuring an electron spin. For all the successes of quantum mechanics, we do not have a good theory for how such a measurement is determined. At best we can give probabilities. Some have even suggested that human consciousness is involved, it is so mysterious.

I am not saying that I have a physical explanation for how free will works. I do not. But it is also not the case that anyone has a deterministic explanation for how quantum measurements work.