Reality and the Tooth Fairy

Max Tegmark writes in the current SciAm magazine, defending the multiverse:

1) Omnivision assumption: physical reality must be such that at least one observer can in principle observe all of it.

2) Pedagogical reality assumption: physical reality must be such that all reasonably informed human observers feel they intuitively understand it. ...

(1) and (2) appear to be motivated by little more than human hubris. The omnivision assumption effectively redefines the word "exists'' to be synonymous with what is observable to us humans, akin to an ostrich with its head in the sand. Those who insist on the pedagogical reality assumption will typically have rejected comfortingly familiar childhood notions like Santa Claus, local realism, the Tooth Fairy, and creationism — but have they really worked hard enough to free themselves from comfortingly familiar notions that are more deeply rooted? In my personal opinion, our job as scientists is to try to figure out how the world works, not to tell it how to work based on our philosophical preconceptions.

It is strange to compare local realism with the Tooth Fairy. Local realism is one of those bedrock principles of physics like conservation of energy that has directly inspired numerous scientific breakthrus and has never been contradicted by experiment. Yes, I know that there are some obscure interpretations of quantum mechanics that deny local reality, but those are fringe beliefs. I say that Tegmark is the one who is disconnected from reality.

Local reality is not a childish notion. It is more intuitively understandable than the alternatives. Those who accept the pedagogical reality assumption are also likely to accept local reality. Ostriches do not bury their heads in the sand either.

Free will in the multiverse

SciAm writer John Horgan reviews a new book in the WSJ:

Mr. Deutsch has earned notice for his vigorous advocacy of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics -— the idea that, although we see a particle follow only one path in our world, it actually follows all possible paths in other universes. Mr. Deutsch touches on this and other esoteric concepts in "The Beginning of Infinity," but his book is animated by an ambition much greater than defending a particular theory. Mr. Deutsch wants us to share his radically optimistic vision of humanity's future, one in which progress continues forever. ...

Mr. Deutsch's emphasis on the nonmaterial qualities of the mind dovetails with his insistence that progress stems, above all, from human creativity. Although we are subject to the laws of nature, he says, we can control our destiny through our own free choices. This might not seem like a terribly controversial claim, but many leading scientists -— from Albert Einstein and Francis Crick to Stephen Hawking -— have argued that free will is an illusion, because our "choices" are pre-determined by physical processes beyond our conscious control. I am heartened that Mr. Deutsch resists this appalling scientific determinism.

I would not get excited by Deutsch's idea of free will. He believes that every time you make a decision, the universe splits into two, with your alter-ego in the other universe suffering from the opposite of your decision. Everything you do to make the universe a better place is actually making some alternate universes into worse places.

The new Scientific American (August 2011) has the multiverse on the cover. Only the pro-multiverse articles are free. Max Tegmark believes that all mathematical ideas are really alternate universes, and compares himself to Giordano Bruno, a medieval heretic. He has no observable evidence for the multiverse but says that opposition is motivated by human hubris, and that anyone who rejects the Tooth Fairy should also reject that human hubris and accept the multiverse.

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne tries to assure us that the multiverse is not something scientists concocted to get around the fine-tuning arguments that the laws of physics are designed to make human life possible. As Tegmark says in SciAm:

Our universe appears surprisingly fine-tuned for life in the sense that if you tweaked many of our constants of nature by just a tiny amount, life as we know it would be impossible. ... Some of the fine-tuning appears extreme enough to be quite embarrassing — for example, we need to tune the dark energy to about 123 decimal places to make habitable galaxies.

The leftist-atheist-evolutionists find this fine-tuning argument very disturbing.

The multiverse is a Kuhnian paradigm shift argument. That means that there is no scientific evidence for it, but it catches on anyway by fashion or fad. Tegmark ridicules belief in observable reality as "akin to an ostrich with its head in the sand". Actually, ostriches do not bury their heads in the sand. He also makes an analogy to the Earth revolving around the Sun. As I explain in my book, modern physicists often make such bogus arguments when they have no science to back up what they say.

Plait attacks Chopra

The Bad Astronomer writes:

Last month, Playboy magazine ran an interview with Deepak Chopra, ... I received an email from an editor of Playboy asking me if I’d like to write an OpEd ...

Deepak Chopra has once again failed to grasp the reality around him....

This also extends to his pronouncements about quantum mechanics, where he universally garbles even the most basic premise of the science. To someone unaccustomed to it, he sounds profound, but to someone who actually knows QM what he says is mumbo jumbo. And when he tries to defend himself he says things that are simply false. ...

But what makes me really unhappy — yes, even angry — is that he’s shortchanging the Universe.

Unfortunately, he did not give Playboy readers any example of Chopra being wrong about physics.

I wish these scientists would show off their scientific reasoning. If Chopra says something that is scientifically wrong, then there must be some way to prove him wrong. The Bad Astronomer attacks Chopra a lot, but the most specific criticism I can find is when he cites Michael Shermer's essay:

Deepak’s use and abuse of quantum physics is what the Caltech quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann calls “quantum flapdoodle,” which is when you string together a series of terms and phrases from quantum physics and assume that explains something in the regular macro world in which we live. “The mind is like an electron cloud surrounding the nucleus of an atom,” Chopra writes in his 2006 book Life After Death. “Until an observer appears, electrons have no physical identity in the world; there is only the amorphous cloud. In the same way, imagine that there is a cloud of possibilities open to the brain at every moment (consisting of words, memories, ideas, and images I could choose from). When the mind gives a signal, one of these possibilities coalesces from the cloud and becomes a thought in the brain, just as an energy wave collapses into an electron.”

This is only wrong if you take it too literally. As an analogy, it is not too bad.

You can prove a negative

It is often said that it is impossible to prove a negative, as if that were some obvious truism. It is not. You can prove a negative.

The Large Hadron Collider is the most expensive and sophisticated scientific instrument ever built. Its chief purpose is to find the Higgs boson. We don't know very much about the particle, but various people think that it will solve various physics conundrums, and it has to have mass in a certain range and various other properties in order to satify the theorists.

The viXra blog says that the LHC and other experiments are ruling out nearly all the hypothesized possibilities for the Higgs boson. We could get an announcement this week. If so, the LHC will prove a negative, and become the most exponsive failed experiment ever.

Update: Here is an amusing example of a politician claiming it’s impossible to prove a negative:

While Republicans produced no evidence of voter fraud from impersonation, Mecklenborg and other GOP leaders say they believe it is going on unreported. “I believe it happens, but it’s proving a negative,” Mecklenborg told reporters after the vote. “It’s impossible to prove a negative. How do you prove that fraud doesn’t exist there?”

Atheists deny free will

The atheist neuroscientist Sam Harris claims that he agrees with Einstein, who did not believe in free will and connected scientific and moral truth. Fellow leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne agrees, and also denies free will, as he has in several recent posts.

To them, denying free will is essential to their materialist atheist humanist world view. They don't want to believe in good and evil, or supernatural purposes, or personal responsibility, or anything that might give religion meaning.

There are two main scientific arguments against free will. One is that materialism is necessarily deterministic, and the other is that certain brain functions give detectable clues a second in advance. Both of these arguments are entirely fallacious. Free will is a question for philosophy, not science.

The Einstein Telescope

IEEE Spectrum reports:

According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, such events should create powerful waves of gravity—ripples in the curvature of space-time that alternately stretch and compress everything in their path.

Although scientists have been trying for decades, they have yet to directly observe these waves. ...

The instrument, which won't start making observations until 2025 at the earliest, isn't a telescope in the Galilean sense; it and its predecessors are laser interferometers that measure tiny distortions—much smaller than the diameter of a proton—in the length of tubes several kilometers long. The telescope design includes three detectors, each consisting of two 10-kilometer-long arms—more than twice the size of the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the largest second-generation gravitational interferometer.

Einstein himself once wrote a paper claiming to show that gravity waves did not exist. The referee showed that he was wrong, and Einstein wrote a nasty letter to the editor. Einstein then submitted the paper elsewhere, using the referee's work to correct his errors. Einstein did not acknowledge the referee, of course, and only submitted to journals that would publish his papers without refereeing.

LIGO and the Einstein telescope are very similar to the Michelson-Morley experiment, which tried to measure the motion of the Earth in 1887, and which inspired relativity theory. Like the 1887 experiment, LIGO has failed to find any motion. Michelson-Morley is the most famous failed experiment, while LIGO is the most expensive failed experiment. The Large Hadron Collider may ultimately be the most expensive failed experiment.

The chief difference between Michelson-Morley and LIGO is that Michelson-Morley was trying to measure the motion of the Earth, while LIGO was trying to detect motion in another galaxy. That's right, it is supposed to ignore everything on Earth, our Solar System, and in this galaxy. The biggest source of error is when a bus drives down a nearby street.

Relativity anomalies

A libertarian blog says Einstein Was Wrong, and has a list that rivals Conservapedia's Counterexamples to Relativity.

Some of these are genuine anomalies that have puzzled scientists. Others are paradoxes and misunderstandings that are explained in standard textbooks.

As I explain in my book, Einstein was wrong about a lot of things, but we have no substitute for relativity. It is essential to modern physics. Relativity is usually described as strange, but the world would be much stranger without it.