Non-local theories violate causality

A new paper by Egg and Esfeld has this abstract:

The paper argues that a causal explanation of the correlated outcomes of EPR-type experiments is desirable and possible. It shows how Bohmian mechanics and the GRW mass density theory offer such an explanation in terms of a non-local common cause.

This is nonsense. A non-local theory is not a causal explanation of anything.

An explanation of how an event A causes an event B means that there is a continuous chain of causes from A to B moving forward in time. A non-local theory is just the opposite, as it posits some sort of action-at-a-distance.

The article says:

There are two principled ways of causally explaining correlations between two distinct events: one can either postulate a direct causal influence of one event on the other or one can suppose that a common cause of the two events accounts for the correlation. In everyday contexts, this distinction is crucial, because it has consequences for the kinds of manipulations that we can perform. If there is a direct causal link from event A to event B, then we can (in principle) bring about changes in B by intervening on A, whereas this is not possible if A and B are only connected via a common cause. In the context of quantum mechanics, however, the distinction between a direct cause (DC) and a common cause (CC) is much more elusive, since we cannot control the outcomes of quantum measurements in the right way to perform the intervention on A that is necessary to distinguish between these two causal structures.

Bohmian mechanics is thus not committed to superluminal causation in an operational sense, but it is so committed in a metaphysical sense: given any initial particle configuration, the theory supports counterfactual claims of the type: “If Alice had chosen a different setting, Bob would have obtained a different outcome”. This might sound like a kind of action at a distance that should be understood in terms of a DC model (see section 2), rather than as the manifestation of a common cause.

I am not why anyone likes a silly theory like Bohmian mechanics, but some people mistakenly believe that it gives a causal interpretation to quantum mechanics. It does not. The ordinarly Copenhagen interpretation is much more compatible with causality than Bohmian mechanics.

Russell denies the law of causality

Explanations of quantum mechanics can get very confusing on the subject of causality. It is odd that people get tripped up on such a simple concept. Apparently there is a long history of smart people saying stupid things about causality.

Bertrand Russell wrote in a 1913 essay on causality:

In the following paper I wish, first, to maintain that the word "cause" is so inextricably bound up with misleading associations as to make its complete extrusion from the philosophical vocabulary desirable; secondly, to inquire what principle, if any, is employed in science in place of the supposed "law of causality" which philosophers imagine to be employed; thirdly, to exhibit certain confusions, especially in regard to teleology and determinism, which appear to me to be connected with erroneous notions as to causality.

All philosophers, of every school, imagine that causation is one of the fundamental axioms or postulates of science, yet, oddly enough, in advanced sciences such as gravitational astronomy, the word "cause" never occurs. Dr. James Ward, in his Naturalism and Agnosticism, makes this a ground of complaint against physics: the business of those who wish to ascertain the ultimate truth about the world, he apparently thinks, should be the discovery of causes, yet physics never even seeks them. To me it seems that philosophy ought not to assume such legislative functions, and that the reason why physics has ceased to look for causes is that, in fact, there are no such things. The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm. ...

We may now sum up our discussion of causality. We found first that the law of causality, as usually stated by philosophers, is false, and is not employed in science. We then considered the nature of scientific laws, and found, instead of stating that one event A is always followed by another event B, they stated functional relations between certain events at certain times,

This is all nonsense. Of course gravitational astronomy speaks of causes, as does all other advanced sciences. It is hard to see how something could be scientific without recognizing causes.

I am trying to understand how people could be so confused about time, causality, determinism, and free will.

Russell appears to believe that determinism is some empirical fact, but it cannot be. Charlotte Werndl shows:

The central question of this paper is: are deterministic and indeterministic descriptions observationally equivalent in the sense that they give the same predictions? I tackle this question for measure-theoretic deterministic systems and stochastic processes, both of which are ubiquitous in science. I first show that for many measure-theoretic deterministic systems there is a stochastic process which is observationally equivalent to the deterministic system. Conversely, I show that for all stochastic processes there is a measure-theoretic deterministic system which is observationally equivalent to the stochastic process.

So some formulation of quantum mechanics may be deterministic or not, but that tells us nothing about whether the real world is.

I don't know why Russell was so opposed to causality, except maybe it is related to his atheism. Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Chris Mooney argues that belief in "teleological thinking" or causality is a major deterrent to people accepting evolution over God.

Kinematics did not distinguish Einstein

Alberto A. Martínez wrote in an article on relativity:

Due to his research on relative motion in optics and electromagnetics, he advanced a series of modifications to the traditional transformations that eventually led to the equations advocated by Larmor, Poincaré, Einstein, and others.8 Hence, Poincaré gave the name ‘‘Lorentz transformations’’ to these new equations, although Woldemar Voigt had published equivalent equations in 1887.9 In 1909 the simpler and older transformation equations were named the ‘‘Galilean transformations’’ by Philipp Frank.10

What distinguished the new transformations in Einstein’s work in comparison to the equivalent equations in the earlier work of other physicists was that Einstein introduced such transformations by means of general kinematic arguments, rather than introducing them exclusively for the solution of problems in optics and electrodynamics.

This is a typical strained effort to credit Einstein, even tho the Lorentz transformations were named after Lorentz before Einstein wrote about them.

The explanation is nonsense. Lorentz devised the transformations to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment and other electromagnetic puzzles. So yes, Michelson-Morley was an experiment on the speed of light, so it was for optics and electrodynamics. Einstein's method was also for optics. After all, the transformations involve the speed of light and he used light throughout his analysis.

Kinematics is a word meaning the study of motion without considering forces. It has nothing to do with whether optics and electrodynamics are used. Einstein believed that he had a conceptual simplification in explaining Lorentz's theory by first describing the consequences when no forces are involved.

But Einstein failed to get to the heart of relativity. Poincare and Minkowski introduced the transformations with non-Euclidean geometry, and that is the preferred method today, and has been since about 1908. That is, they removed the motion and the forces, and made it a theory of spacetime geometry. Then they showed how the motion and forces are affected by the geometry. They were not influenced by Einstein who did not even understand what they did.

Martinez is typical of Einstein idolizing scholars. They know about the work of Lorentz and Poincare, so they are hard-pressed to say that Einstein did anything original. The closest they can come is to mumble something about kinematics, meaning that Einstein took Lorentz's equations and observed that they apply when forces are absent. They try to trick you into believing that this was a step towards the spacetime geometry, but it was not, as Poincare wrote his 1905 paper on the spacetime geometry before Einstein's paper was published.

Lorentz was an honorable man

In response to Equivalence between Lorentz and Einstein, I got this comment:

[ad hominem attack snipped] Lorentz has been quoted from 1905 to his death that Einstein was the sole architect of special relativity. I don't understand what you don't understand about that. Moreover, they were very close friends, another fact that would repudiate your "argument" if you had one other than citing arcane quotes without proper context or citation. Case closed. And special relativity is NOT Einstein's greatest paper. That statement alone invalidates the rest of your hogwash.

It is simply not true that Lorentz credited Einstein with all of special relativity. As quoted on the above post, Lorentz said "Einstein simply postulates what we have deduced". Also, Einstein did not refute Lorentz.

Lorentz and Einstein were not close friends. Lorentz was an honorable man who always scrupulously credited his sources. Einstein was not.

Eisntein's 1905 relativity paper is widely regarded as his greatest paper, if not the greatest physics paper of the 20th century. I agree that the paper was not so great, but I am reciting popular opinion.

Einstein was a monster

I just stumbled across a web page on THE EINSTEIN MONSTER:

EINSTEIN THE PLAGIARIST
EINSTEIN THE MISTAKEN
EINSTEIN THE ABUSER
EINSTEIN THE SERIAL ADULTERER
EINSTEIN THE "DEAD BEAT DAD"
EINSTEIN THE ATTENTION WHORE
EINSTEIN THE COMMUNIST
EINSTEIN THE WARMONGER
EINSTEIN THE ANTI-AMERICAN
EINSTEIN THE GLOBALIST
EINSTEIN THE MASS MURDERER
EINSTEIN THE RACE AGITATOR
EINSTEIN THE ZIONIST

I have posted mainly about Einstein's scientific contributions. Yes, he was a plagiarist in the sense that he published the ideas of others, and failed to credit them. Most of his fame is for work that was actually done previously by others.

I am more interested in the science because there are some lessons about how scientific progress happens.

But if you read any of the Einstein biographies, you will see that he was a pretty horrible human being.

The word is science

The Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year is Science. Strange. Did science suddenly become important last year?

The runners-up were: cognitive, rapport, communication, niche, ethic, paradox, visceral, integrity, metaphor.

Irreversible loss of information

Physicist Sean M. Carroll writes:

This year we give thanks for an idea that establishes a direct connection between the concepts of “energy” and “information”: Landauer’s Principle. ...

Landauer’s Principle states that irreversible loss of information — whether it’s erasing a notebook or swiping a computer disk — is necessarily accompanied by an increase in entropy. Charles Bennett puts it in relatively precise terms:

Any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths, must be accompanied by a corresponding entropy increase in non-information bearing degrees of freedom of the information processing apparatus or its environment.

The principle captures the broad idea that “information is physical.”

Okay, fine, but various big-shot physicists foolishly insist that information is always preserved. They have to deny information loss in order to argue for many-worlds (MWI) and black hole firewalls.