Philip Ball attacks scientific mysteries

Science journalist Philip Ball writes:

Imagine if all our scientific theories and models told us only about averages: if the best weather forecasts could only give you the average ...

In a way, that is correct. When the weather forecaster says that there is an 80% chanceof rain, he is giving us a statistical average of how often it rains under current conditions.

In the early days of quantum mechanics, that seemed to be its inevitable limitation: It was a probabilistic theory, telling us only what we will observe on average if we collect records for many events or particles. To Erwin Schrödinger, whose eponymous equation prescribes how quantum objects behave, it was utterly meaningless to think about specific atoms or electrons doing things in real time. ...

But there’s another way to formulate quantum mechanics so that it can speak about single events happening in individual quantum systems. It is called quantum trajectory theory (QTT), and it’s perfectly compatible with the standard formalism of quantum mechanics — it’s really just a more detailed view of quantum behavior. The standard description is recovered over long timescales after the average of many events is computed.

In a direct challenge to Schrödinger’s pessimistic view, “QTT deals precisely with single particles and with events right as they are happening,”

This is probably just an interpretation of quantum mechanics with no real advantages over Copenhagen, but I don't know anything about it.

A previous Ball essay argued that no one knows what quantum mechanics means, because it has not been axiomatized, to his knowledge.

Ball writes a lot about physics and quantum mechanics, but he just ventured out into another area of science, with a London Guardian book review:

The concept of ‘race’ persists, even though it is biologically meaningless. This important book considers why

More than 90% of the top 20 performances in middle- and long-distance running are by black people of African heritage. Are they simply biologically better at it? That is precisely the kind of casual assumption that, as science writer Angela Saini shows in Superior, has kept “scientific racism” alive for centuries. In fact, more than half of those performances are by Kenyans, coming mostly from eight small tribes. One theory is that, having lived at high altitude for millennia, they have adapted to make more efficient use of oxygen when running. But studies have found no physiological advantage, and it’s possible that the answer is instead sociological. One thing is sure: having dark skin pigmentation is as irrelevant here as speaking a Kenyan language. The idea of “race” has nothing to contribute to the debate.

If you’re a typical Guardian reader, you might feel fine about, or flattered by, the notion that black people are better runners – it sounds positively antiracist, right? Yet this is the sort of reasoning that feeds racism: that there are meaningful biological distinctions between groups of humans (often on the basis of visible, literally superficial characteristics) that allow them to be categorised into distinct “races”, from which we can meaningfully predict traits.

The idea is so deeply ingrained that it is hard even to talk about race without seeming to accept its tenets.

Really? Race has nothing to do with why Kenyans win all the long-distance races? Science has proved that the Kenyans have no physiological advantage?

I marvel at how he can just jump from one scientific topic to another. He can just casually say that the evidence in front of your eyes is wrong, because of some weirdo ideological belief.

mail-order DNA analysis companies promote a genetic identity politics ...

Sometimes this racial agenda is subconscious. ... “It takes some mental acrobatics to be an intellectual racist in the light of the scientific information we have today,” says Saini, “but those who want to do it, will.” ...

The problem with scientists, Saini says, is that they too often assume they are above racism and so fail to engage with the history, politics and lived experience of race.

... United States has a racist president ...

Here is an unfavorable review of the same book. Saini wrote a previous book denying sex differences.

If there is no such thing as race, then how can anyone be a racist?

How can I make sense out of Democrat candidate who talk about race-based policies all the time?

Saying there is no such thing as race is just wishful thinking.

Ball and the book reject all the DNA evidence, and assume that scientists are corrupted by prejudice in everything they do on this subject.

If so, is the same true about quantum mechanics? It does indeed take a lot of mental acrobatics to believe in many-worlds or a lot of other variations on textbook quantum mechanics.