No Einsteins need apply

A UK Guardian columnist writes:

The kind of idle pastime that might amuse physicists is to imagine drafting Einstein's grant applications in 1905. "I propose to investigate the idea that light travels in little bits," one might say. "I will explore the possibility that time slows down as things speed up," goes another. Imagine what comments these would have elicited from reviewers for the German Science Funding Agency, had such a thing existed. Instead, Einstein just did the work anyway while drawing his wages as a technical expert third-class at the Bern patent office. And that is how he invented quantum physics and relativity.

The moral seems to be that really innovative ideas don't get funded – that the system is set up to exclude them.

No, Einstein did not invent quantum physics and relativity.

Einstein is the only Nobel science prize winner who got the prize for spare time work while holding a day job doing something else. If that were really how science is advance, then I would be all in favor of govt funding agencies looking at spare time grand projects.

But it never happens. First, Einstein was not really an outsider. He was finishing up is doctoral degree at a prestigious university while he took the patent office job. Second, Einstein's great 1905 papers were derivative expositions of research done by others, and did not have any significant impact on the advance of quantum physics or relativity. Third, there is no one else with an Einstein story.

Even if you don't believe me that the Einstein story is bogus, you ought to be able to verify that there are no other Einsteins. Attempting to fund Einsteins will fail.

Anthropologist John Hawks points out that Einstein did not need any grant money because he was not using any equipment or resources, and comments:

Most ideas that appear to be transformative in the end turn out to be bunk. Someone who compares himself to Einstein is overwhelmingly likely to be a charlatan. There should probably be a "No Einsteins need apply" clause in every federal grant program.

Hawks is right. He doesn't realize that Einstein himself was a charlatan, but he is not a physicist and I would not expect him to. But at least he recognizes the futility of funding anyone with an Einstein story.

I do believe in being skeptical about any story of extraordinary human achievement, when it is also claimed that no similar accomplishment has ever been achieved by anyone else.

Scientism is the S-word

Wikipedia defines Scientism as:

Scientism refers to a belief in the universal applicability of the systematic methods and approach of science, especially the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion of other viewpoints.

MIT physicist Ian Hutchinson writes

One of the most visible conflicts in current culture is between “scientism” and religion. Because religious knowledge differs from scientific knowledge, scientism claims (or at least assumes) that it must therefore be inferior. However, there are many other important beliefs, secular as well as religious, which are justified and rational, but not scientific, and therefore marginalized by scientism. And if that is so, then scientism is a ghastly intellectual mistake. ...

Scientism is, first of all, a philosophy of knowledge. It is an opinion about the way that knowledge can be obtained and justified. However, scientism rapidly becomes much more. It becomes an all-encompassing world-view; a perspective from which all of the questions of life are examined: a grounding presupposition or set of presuppositions which provides the framework by which the world is to be understood. In other words, it is essentially a religious position.

Sigmund responds on a leftist-atheist-evolutionist blog:

I’ve begun to view the use of the term “scientism” as the philosophical analogy of using the “N-word”. Scientism, the “S-word”, might be used as a positive term by a tiny minority of individuals, trying to reclaim the term from those flinging it about as a pejorative, yet the standard use remains that of a slur. The aim seems to be to portray those committed to methodological naturalism as devoid of emotion or feeling—the type of individual who would probably judge the merit of a Beethoven symphony using an oscilloscope.

This is not to say that noting the use of “scientism” is entirely without value.

Like the N-word, hearing the S-word tells us precious little about whom it is aimed but reveals a huge amount about the speaker.

Wow, these folks lose their nerve easily.

Michael Shermer wrote in SciAm in 2002:

What is it about Hawking that draws us to him as a scientific saint? He is, I believe, the embodiment of a larger social phenomenon known as scientism. Scientism is a scientific worldview that encompasses natural explanations for all phenomena, eschews supernatural and paranormal speculations, and embraces empiricism and reason as the twin pillars of a philosophy of life appropriate for an Age of Science.

Like any other philosophical term, it is defined a little differently by those who espouse it and those who denounce it. Scientism is defensible. It is funny how many aggressive anti-religion scientists refuse to defend it.

Update: A new book against scientism is Monopolizing Knowledge: A scientist refutes religion-denying, reason-destroying scientism, by Ian Hutchinson. Some chapter are online free.

Life on Earth is special

It seems like every week there is a science story about discovery of new planets and how there could be life on other planets.

Slashdot summarizes:

Planetary scientists say there are aspects to our planet and its evolution that are remarkably strange. In the first place there is Earth's strong magnetic field. No one is exactly sure how it works, but it has something to do with the turbulent motion that occurs in the Earth's liquid outer core and without it, we would be bombarded by harmful radiation from the Sun. Next there's plate tectonics. We live on a planet that is constantly recycling its crust, limiting the amount of carbon dioxide escaping into the atmosphere — a natural way of controlling the greenhouse effect. Then there's Jupiter-sized outer planets protecting the Earth from frequent large impacts. But the strangest thing of all is our big Moon. 'As the Earth rotates, it wobbles on its axis like a child's spinning top,' says Professor Monica Grady. 'What the Moon does is dampen down that wobble and that helps to prevent extreme climate fluctuations' — which would be detrimental to life. The moon's tides have also made long swaths of earth's coastline into areas of that are regularly shifted between dry and wet, providing a proving ground for early sea life to test the land for its suitability as a habitat. The 'Rare Earth Hypothesis' is one solution to the Fermi Paradox (PDF) because, if Earth is uniquely special as an abode of life, ETI will necessarily be rare or even non-existent. And in the absence of verifiable alien contact, scientific opinion will forever remain split as to whether the Universe teems with life or we are alone in the inky blackness.

There are many other unusual things about Earth, the history of Earth, and life on Earth.

For all the discoveries, there is really no more reason to believe in life on other planets than there was 50 years ago. It is plausible that there might only be one Earth-like planet per galaxy. And maybe even less.

New arguments against hidden variables

I was skeptical about a new paper on the reality of the quantum wave function, because it claims to disprove the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Part of the confusion is that the title of the new paper is "The quantum state cannot be interpreted statistically". That is misleading, as it is certainly possible to interpret the quantum wave function statistically. What the paper argues is that the wave function cannot be just a probability distribution for hidden variables.

The paper has generated a lot of attention, and another new paper explains it and gives a similar result. It is Completeness of quantum theory implies that wave functions are physical properties.

Here is the issue. By 1926, it was clear that Heisenberg uncertainties were essential to quantum mechanics. Von Neumann's 1932 textbook considered the possibility that the uncertainties could be eliminated by a hidden variable theory, and argued that no such theory was possible. Hidden variables are physical characteristics, like position, momentum, or spin, which determine the nature of a something, but which are not directly observable. Einstein coauthored a 1935 paper arguing for such a theory anyway.

You can think of an electron wave function as telling you the probability that the electron will be found in a particular region. But if you think of the electron as a point particle, and the wave function as just a probability distribution for the position of that point particle, then you will run into trouble because Heisenberg uncertainty says that the electron cannot be a point particle.

While a lot of work has gone into this issue, most physicists consider the Bell test experiments to be the definitive proof that the hidden variable theories are impossible.

These new papers are additional arguments against hidden variables. They confirm what everyone since 1932 has believed, except for a few curmudgeons like Einstein.

Duff defends string theory

String theorist M. J. Duff has just posted String and M-theory: answering the critics. It is a followup to this 2007 debate transcript and podcast. I noted before that he badmouths those who are skeptical about the "academic consensus of superstrings".

Motl is annoyed by this footnote, and wants an apology:

7 I do not share Lubos Motl’s extreme views on politics, global warming, and sometimes not even string theory. However, he occasionally has some good physics summaries, including a recent one giving a nice history of the triumphs of unification [26].

So Duff in not only aggressively defending the academic consensus on superstrings, he is defending a supposed academic consensus on other leftist political matters.

Motl is right to be offended by this cheap shot. I cite other blogs all the time, but I don't bother to disavow opinions expressed on those blogs about other subjects. Duff acts as if he might demonstrate allegiance to the dominant paradigms, or else he might lose the respect of his colleagues.

If you think that string theory might have accomplished something, then go ahead and read Duff. It is pitiful. Duff attacks Smolin for what his publisher said, but admits that his own publicist has put out exaggerated press releases.

Peter Woit also slams Duff's article.

Duff defends string theory with silly statements like this:

Yet support for superstrings and M-theory is based on their ability to absorb quantum mechanics and general relativity, to unify them in a mathematically rigorous fashion, and to suggest ways of accommodating and extending the standard models of particle physics and cosmology. No religion does that.

Duff says that critics must be stamped out because they threaten funding, and because of a comparison to how a leftist politician blames vaccine critics.

The argument for superstrings hinges on a flawed historical example:

The job of theoretical physicists is two fold: first, to explain what our experimental colleagues have discovered; and second, to predict phenomena that have not yet been found. The history of scientific discovery shows that progress is achieved using both methods.

Quantum theory, for example, was largely driven by empirical results, whereas Einstein’s general theory of relativity was a product of speculation and thought experiments, as well as advanced mathematics.

But this story is wrong, as I explain in my book. Special relativity was discovered by Lorentz and Poincare based directly on experiments. Poincare was the first to apply the theory to gravity, and used it to partially explain an anomaly in Mercury's orbit. Einstein's main contribution was to extend Poincare's argument. Einstein later denied that he was motivated by such empirical issues, but we know from his letters that he was concerned with Mercury all along.

It is a big myth that Einstein revolutionized physics from speculation, thought, and math, and no empirical results. This myth is always used to justify bogus research programs like string theory.

The qubit payoff

MIT computer scientist Scott Aaronson has a new NY Times essay promoting quantum computers:

Thus, the sole reason to prefer a quantum computer is that the subatomic world obeys different laws of probability than the ones we are used to. In everyday life, it would be silly to speak of a “minus 30 percent chance of rain tomorrow,” much less a “square root of minus 1 percent chance.” However, quantum mechanics is based on numbers called amplitudes, which are closely related to probabilities but can also be negative (in fact, they are complex numbers). ...

But the biggest payoff so far may have been an improvement in the way quantum mechanics itself is taught and understood. Since its beginnings in the 1920s, quantum mechanics has been considered the prototype of an abstruse, complicated theory: something beyond the grasp of all but a few physicists. Today, though, I and others regularly explain its underlying logic to students by focusing on the simplest imaginable system to which that logic applies: the qubits that make up a quantum computer.

Like fusion power, practical quantum computers are a tantalizing possibility that the 21st century may or may not bring — depending on the jagged course not only of science and technology, but of politics and economics. By contrast, as a scientific endeavor that combines many of the deepest questions of physics and computer science, there’s no need to wait for quantum computing: It’s already here.

No, quantum computers are not like fusion power. Fusion has been physically demonstrated in H-bombs, and are only impractical today because of engineering difficulties. I quoted Aaronson below saying “It’s entirely conceivable that quantum computing is impossible for some fundamental reason.”

He brags of factoring 15 in the article, but in the podcast he tells of a recent paper on the Quantum Factorization of 143.

That "biggest payoff" is absurd. That 1920s quantum mechanics was widely understood by 1930. He may think that it helps to explain the theory in terms of qubits, but no one has ever been able to make a true qubit, and quantum mechanics is used to solve problems every day anyway. He says that the central idea is that probabilities can be negative. However I don't think that it is helpful at all to think about negative probabilities. He says that it helps understand how waves interfere, but I don't.

Update: A new paper argues that entanglement is necessary for the quantum computational speedup. Others have disagreed.

A computer that thinks like the universe

The Boston Globe has a breathless essay about the future of quantum computing:

The creation of the modern computer in the 1940s was a watershed moment in that quest; today’s super-fast computers are still essentially built on that achievement. Now, however, we’re poised to take another leap forward. That leap is the quantum computer?—?a computer built on an atomic scale. Though they’re still mostly theoretical, quantum computers would use individual atoms to do their computations, instead of circuits etched in silicon. Such a computer wouldn’t just be built differently?—?it would also think differently, using the uncertainty of particle physics instead of the rigid on/off circuitry of a modern computer.

For years, excitement about quantum computing has been growing among scientists and tech visionaries. Quantum computers, if they succeed, promise to make a whole new range of problems accessible to computers, from breaking difficult codes to unlocking complicated biological processes now out of reach for even the fastest machines. The hype has, at times, verged on science fiction, and there are still many skeptics who argue that quantum computers might be physically impossible, or at least too technically complicated to work.

In recent years, however, a series of increasingly capable prototypes have brought the future a little closer. And as that future approaches, it is also starting to attract another kind of attention: Quantum computers, some researchers argue, will help us think differently about what we can and can’t know, and forge a new understanding of how the world of logic and information connects to the material one. Quantum computing, says Seth Lloyd, a researcher at MIT, might “allow us to understand the universe in its own language” — a prospect that has energized philosophers as well as scientists. ...

That’s the dream, at least. The rise of quantum computing theory has been accompanied by a vigorous debate about whether it can work at all. It may never be technically feasible to build the computers at a large scale. Some also think that the quantum approach to computing is, in some basic sense, getting physics wrong. As Scott Aaronson, a computational complexity theorist at MIT, has written, “It’s entirely conceivable that quantum computing is impossible for some fundamental reason.”

At least the essay admits that the whole thing may be impossible.

I think that quantum computing will eventually be understood to be impossible, just as perpetual motion machines are contrary to the laws of physics. So how has anyone made progress?

There are people who also claim to be making progress towards a perpetual motion machine. They increase the efficiency of some device, in the hope that they will eventually exceed 100%. They never do, of course, and their progress is an illusion.