Humans not animals with capacity to think

A new paper claims to prove:

Mill’s godson Bertrand Russell also had no doubt that causality and determinism were needed to do science. “Where determinism fails, science fails”, he said. Russell could not find in himself “any specific occurrence that I could call ’will’”. Charles Sanders Peirce “that the state of things existing at any time, together with certain immutable laws, completely determine the state of things at every other time (for a limitation to future time is indefensible). Thus, given the state of the universe in the original nebula, and given the laws of mechanics, a sufficiently powerful mind could deduce from these data the precise form of every curlicue of every letter I am now writing”. ...

A rigorous analysis, from the foundations of physics, it is possible to prove that humans are not even animals or beings with the capacity to think (or decide), in fact, no being is capable of such an ability (according to physics). If the principles upon which physics is constructed are correct, a being able to decide is an impossibility, as we are a fraction of matter subjected to specific laws, the same laws used to describe a stone or any other object apply to humans as well (since humans, as we call it, does not have a privilege state in the universe). Every configuration of the universe in a given moment is predetermined by the conditions of the universe an instant before, dictating in a precise and absolute way the evolution of the entire system, inasmuch as the physical laws are strict and well defined.

This is a fantasy, of course.

I post this to point out that many people believe that determinism is a logical consequence of a scientific worldview. Those people have a big problem with quantum mechanics.

Defending physics from post-empiricism

Peter Woit attacks a string theory philosophy book on a new philosophy blog:

The book in question was Richard Dawid’s String Theory and the Scientific Method [4], which comes with blurbs from Gross and string theorist John Schwarz on the cover. Dawid is a physicist turned philosopher, and he makes the claim that string theory shows that conventional ideas about theory confirmation need to be revised to accommodate new scientific practice and the increasing significance of “non-empirical theory confirmation.”

This is on the blog that defended philosophy from attacks by physicists. I posted some comments:

Does anyone here think that modern philosophers have contributed something useful to this topic? String theory has failed to make testable prediction, or to reproduce existing theory. The Standard Model has succeeded in LHC experiments. Thus the Standard Model has won. Modern philosophy of science has contributed nothing.

Yes, there is a competition to find the best theories for high-energy physics. Many leading physicists were openly hoping that the LHC would falsify the Standard Model so that competing theories could gain traction.

I do think that philosophy of science should be able to say something about whether string theory is a worthwhile scientific endeavor.

I read Pigliucci's complaint that Tyson said that "philosophy has basically parted ways from the frontier of the physical sciences" in the early 20th century. Sorry, but Tyson is right. It is nearly impossible to find any philosopher who has anything worthwhile to say about 20th century physics. Dawid's post-empiricism is just the latest example of foolishness, as Woit explains.

If I were to pick one failure of 20th century philosophers on the subject of physics, it would be the textbook resolution of the Bohr–Einstein debates. From the famous R.P. Feynman Lectures on Physics:

Another thing that people have emphasized since quantum mechanics was developed is the idea that we should not speak about those things which we cannot measure. (Actually relativity theory also said this.)

Philosophers love to give opinions about things that cannot be measured. That is okay with me. My problem is with those who say that it is somehow a shortcoming of the physical theory that it only explains observables.

Four quantum interpretations defended

Physicist Sean M. Carroll explains a video with four major interpretations of quantum mechanics:

The other participants are David Albert, Sheldon Goldstein, and Rüdiger Schack, with the conversation moderated by Brian Greene. The group is not merely a randomly-selected collection of people who know and love quantum mechanics; each participant was carefully chosen to defend a certain favorite version of this most mysterious of physical theories.

David Albert will propound the idea of dynamical collapse theories, such as the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber (GRW) model. They posit that QM is truly stochastic, with wave functions really “collapsing” at unpredictable times, with a tiny rate that is negligible for individual particles but becomes rapid for macroscopic objects.

Shelly Goldstein will support some version of hidden-variable theories such as Bohmian mechanics. It’s sometimes thought that hidden variables have been ruled out by experimental tests of Bell’s inequalities, but that’s not right; only local hidden variables have been excluded. Non-local hidden variables are still very viable!

Rüdiger Schack will be telling us about a relatively new approach called Quantum Bayesianism, or QBism for short. (Don’t love the approach, but the nickname is awesome.) The idea here is that QM is really a theory about our ignorance of the world, similar to what Tom Banks defended here way back when.

My job, of course, will be to defend the honor of the Everett (many-worlds) formulation. I’ve done a lot less serious research on this issue than the other folks, but I will make up for that disadvantage by supporting the theory that is actually true. And coincidentally, by the time we’ve started debating I should have my first official paper on the foundations of QM appear on the arxiv: new work on deriving the Born Rule in Everett with Chip Sebens.

QBism is essentially the same as the Copenhagen interpretation, as promoted by Bohr and Heisenberg around 1930.

GRW has the virtue of being potentially testable, but there is no evidence for it yet. Albert likes it mainly out of a philosophical rejection of positivism, and a belief that GRW somehow better satisfies his beliefs in scientific realism.

The argument for Bohmian mechanics is even more philosophically misguided. It is based on a belief that a theory of nonlocal hidden variables with action-at-a-distance is somehow more scientific that a theory based on observables and experiment. The truth is nearly the opposite.

The many-worlds interpretation adds mysterious unobservable parallel universes, without any scientific payoff.

Quantum mechanics has certain paradoxes, but so do other theories. Relativity has the twin paradox, the reality of the length contraction, and the fact that two events can appear simultaneous to one observer, and not to another.

We do not have reputable physicists running around complaining that relativity does not match their intuitions. Relativity explains the observations, and if it upsets your intuitions, then there is something wrong with your intuitions.

Likewise quantum mechanics matches the observations. For Albert, Carroll, Greene, and Goldstein to complain that it is not scientifically realistic or has some other philosophical defect, they are just showing their stubbornness to accept what was established in 1930.

Lumo explains:

The many worlds "interpretation" doesn't allow us to calculate – or imprint – the generally different probabilities of different outcomes into the "strands" of the film. Even the fans of this religion admit it's the case but some of them say that they are "working on a fix" which is supposed to be enough. (A similarly "modest" fix makes Genesis compatible with all the detailed data about the cosmic microwave background, the DNA, and genetics.)

What they don't realize is that the inability of this theory or "interpretation" to calculate any probabilities isn't just a moderate vice or disadvantage. It is a complete, rigorous proof that this philosophy has nothing to do with the empirical data or science whatever and people who are defending it don't have the slightest clue what they are talking about. Everything that modern science predicts are probabilities or their functions. If your ideas don't predict any probabilities, they don't predict anything at all. They have nothing to do with science.

Moreover, there can't be any fix. There can't even exist a candidate theory that would "extract" the probabilities from something else.

You might think that that an event would be consider more probable if it occurs in most of the parallel universes. However the MWI advocates deny any scientific meaning to counting the universes. Mitchell Porter explains:

If you are a many-worlds theorist, and you want to explain e.g. why QM says event A is twice as probable as event B, the logical explanation is that event A is twice as common as event B, when all the parallel worlds are considered. But Deutsch, Wallace, and now Carroll and Sebens, all reject this approach.

Carroll and Sebens explicitly recommend against trying to count parallel worlds / branches of the wavefunction. For example, on page 15 they speak of “the unrealistic assumption that the number of branches in which a certain outcome occurs is well-defined”.

They simply don't believe in probabilities of outcomes because they believe all outcomes happen. They are denying modern science as we know it, and so are Albert, Greene, and Goldstein.

Lumo writes again:

The people who are trying to revive the objective reality – whether they are assuming Bohmian "real particles plus guiding waves" or various forms of "objective GRW-like collapses" or "many worlds" or any other classical visualization what's going on – are not closer than proper quantum mechanical physicists to genuine science. Instead, they are stubbornly defending the indefensible, a notion (of the objective reality) similar to a tooth fairy that cannot be extracted from our real perception of observations and that may actually be shown to be wrong by a careful enough (but not excessively complicated) analysis of several representative processes in the microscopic world.

I would not phrase it that was, but I do think that belief in those interpretation is rooted in some faulty idea about what science is all about. Instead of accepting that science is about observations, they have a belief that science is about hidden variables instead.

Magazines promote nonlocal pilot waves

Smithsonian Mag has an article against quantum mechanics:

What If There's a Way to Explain Quantum Physics Without the Probabilistic Weirdness?
An old idea is back in vogue as physicists find support for "pilot wave theory," a competitor to quantum mechanics ...

According to modern notions of quantum physics, at the very smallest scales — in the realm of electrons and photons and quarks — the world is not obvious, direct and deterministic. Rather, the world is one of probabilities. Electrons seem to exist in a cloud of possibilities, inhabiting an area but no particular space. It isn't until you look that this aura of probability collapses and the electron inhabits a particular place.

For some people, such a probabilistic interpretation of the world is simply unnerving. For others, though, the probabilistic interpretation seems unnecessary from a scientific perspective. There might be another way to explain the weird behavior seen in the double-slit experiment that doesn't devolve into quantum mechanics' usual probabilistic weirdness, says Quanta Magazine.

Known as “pilot wave theory” this line of thinking goes that, rather than electrons and other things being both quasi-particles and quasi-waves, the electron is a discrete particle that is being carried along by a separate wave. What this wave is made of no one knows. But recent experimental research shows that, in the lab, particles being carried around by waves will exhibit many of the same weird behaviors that were thought to be exclusive to the domain of quantum mechanics (as seen in the video above).

Not being able to explain what the wave is is a problem, but so is the inherent randomness of modern quantum physics.

This old idea is a crazy idea. It is based on a strange ideological prejudice against probabilities.

The concept of probability pervades modern science. It is often used on quantum mechanics, but no more so that any other branch of science. There is no reason to get of it. Nor is it possible, as any experimental attempt to confirm Bohmian mechanics or pilot wave theory will use the same statistics as with quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics does have some mysterious aspects to it, but probability is least of it.

The pilot wave theory approach is to try to nail down the electron as a particle, which it is not. So it becomes a particle attached to a pilot wave, which is a very strange entity that is more mysterious than anything in orthodox quantum mechanics.

So how is that better? There are philosophers who have a mystical belief in nonlocality. They would like to believe that their consciousness is at one with the universe. The Bohm pilot wave theory is nonlocal. So they like it.

Quanta Mag article also says:

Later, the Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell went on to prove a seminal theorem that many physicists today misinterpret as rendering hidden variables impossible. But Bell supported pilot-wave theory. He was the one who pointed out the flaws in von Neumann’s original proof. And in 1986 he wrote that pilot-wave theory “seems to me so natural and simple, to resolve the wave-particle dilemma in such a clear and ordinary way, that it is a great mystery to me that it was so generally ignored.”

The neglect continues. A century down the line, the standard, probabilistic formulation of quantum mechanics has been combined with Einstein’s theory of special relativity and developed into the Standard Model, an elaborate and precise description of most of the particles and forces in the universe. Acclimating to the weirdness of quantum mechanics has become a physicists’ rite of passage. The old, deterministic alternative is not mentioned in most textbooks; most people in the field haven’t heard of it. Sheldon Goldstein, a professor of mathematics, physics and philosophy at Rutgers University and a supporter of pilot-wave theory, blames the “preposterous” neglect of the theory on “decades of indoctrination.” At this stage, Goldstein and several others noted, researchers risk their careers by questioning quantum orthodoxy.

Neglect? I would not say "combined with Einstein's theory" because Einstein stubbornly refused to accept quantum mechanics. The textbooks do explain why he lost the Bohr–Einstein debates. In short, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, von Neumann, and quantum mechanics were correct, and Bohm, Einstein, Bell, and hidden variables were wrong.

Orthodox quantum mechanics has led to about a trillion dollar computer chip economy. Bohm, pilot waves, Bell, and hidden variables have led to nothing.

Update: Lumo piles on:

I've been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of idiocy about quantum mechanics that we may encounter in the would-be scientific mainstream media. A new wave of nonsense claiming that someone overthrew quantum mechanics is appearing on a daily basis. ...

I really can't understand what drives people to saying and even writing these breathtakingly childishly stupid things. If you have a slightly retarded 6-year-old baby, it may ask you why cars move. And you explain to her that there is an elephant inside the car. ...

Clearly, quantum mechanics was too hard and too new for some physicists from the beginning – including a revolutionary named Einstein – so these people clearly didn't belong among the "we" of the people who properly understood quantum mechanics. But even the people who effectively understood quantum mechanics would find some differences in their "interpretation" of quantum mechanics – and the most reasonable ones would point out that the very phrase "interpretation of quantum mechanics" is silly. Quantum mechanics is the new theory so once we describe its rules and axioms, we know them and there's nothing to interpret.

More doubts about big bang gravity wave

Quanta Mag tells doubts about BICEP2:

Most of them were careful to point out that the revolutionary claim from the scientists involved in the experiment, which used the BICEP2 telescope (for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization, second generation), must be confirmed by additional experiments that could rule out alternative explanations. But because BICEP2’s very technical paper asserted that the possibility of the gravitational-wave signal being false was very low, the discovery seemed like a done deal to most people.

But not to David Spergel. Spergel earned his stripes in astrophysics as a team member on the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), a radio telescope that launched into orbit in 2001. ...

QUANTA MAGAZINE: You are a leading critic of the BICEP2 team’s claim to have discovered the existence of primordial gravitational waves. Why?

DAVID SPERGEL: The BICEP2 astrophysicists should have been more cautious. The evidence they have reported fails to convince me that the signal they interpret as being caused by gravitational waves is not, in fact, caused by galactic dust.

So maybe they saw a shock wave from the biggest event in the history of the universe. Or maybe they just saw dust. No one can be sure.

Why didn’t they use the raw Planck data?

Planck’s raw data will not be made public until the end of the year.

Did you ask the BICEP2 scientists for access to their data?

Yes, but they declined to release it, saying that their data is not calibrated.

Is it common practice to hold onto such data?

It’s fine to keep raw data secret until it is properly calibrated by scientists who understand the limitations of the instrument that collected the data. But if you are willing to publish a paper based upon your data, then you should make that data public.

That is a little fishy. When scientists hold press conferences, and start divvying up the Nobel prizes, they ought to be willing to share their data with peers for analysis.

Carroll goes nuts with many worlds

After defending bad science philosophy, physicist Sean M. Carroll foes off the deep end with his own bad quantum philosophy, and posts Why the Many-Worlds Formulation of Quantum Mechanics Is Probably Correct:

There are other silly objections to EQM, of course. The most popular is probably the complaint that it’s not falsifiable. That truly makes no sense. It’s trivial to falsify EQM — just do an experiment that violates the Schrödinger equation or the principle of superposition, which are the only things the theory assumes. Witness a dynamical collapse, or find a hidden variable. Of course we don’t see the other worlds directly, but — in case we haven’t yet driven home the point loudly enough — those other worlds are not added on to the theory. They come out automatically if you believe in quantum mechanics.

This is nonsense. I don't want to keep picking on Carroll, but it seems that more and more physicists are reciting such nonsense in favor of MWI. (Carroll also calls it Everettian quantum mechanics, EQM.)

Lumo explains how Carroll is wrong

At the same time, salesmen like Carroll offer you lots of incredible statements such as the statement that this "many worlds interpretation" directly follows from quantum mechanics, is directly justified by quantum mechanics (more justifiable in quantum mechanics than in classical physics), and unlike proper quantum mechanics, it doesn't introduce any new physical laws. All these statements are untrue. They are really the polar opposite of the truth.

First, many worlds surely don't follow from quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics is the universal framework of modern physics which is a natural science. As every natural science, physics predicts or explains the observations that are actually being made in one Universe.

The 2013 paper, On Quantum Theory, by Berthold-Georg Englert also explains:

Quantum theory had essentially taken its final shape by the end of the 1920s and, in the more than eighty years since then, has been spectacularly successful and reliable — there is no experimental fact, not a single one, that contradicts a quantum-theoretical prediction. Yet, there is a steady stream of publications that are motivated by alleged fundamental problems: We are told that quantum theory is ill-defined, that its interpretation is unclear, that it is nonlocal, that there is an unresolved “measurement problem,” and so forth.

It may, therefore, be worth reviewing what quantum theory is and what it is about.

That is correct. Quantum mechanics, as it has been described in textbooks for decades, is a perfectly good theory. It is strikingly successful, and yet from Einstein in the 1930s to many well-known physicists today, they act as if the theory is broken. They even say that realizing that quantum mechanics requires many worlds is like the Copernican revolution.

This modern rejection of quantum mechanics is just as crazy as if modern physicists went around claiming that particles can go faster than light because they don't believe relativity. I wonder how they ever passed their PhD qualifying exams without understanding quantum mechanics.

Carroll is proof that a physicist can lose the capacity for scientific thinking if his brain is infected with lousy philosophy.

The principle reason for rejecting MWI is that it postulates an infinity of unobservable worlds without any physical benefit. It adds no practical or conceptual advantages over textbook quantum mechanics, and is unscientific in having supernatural beliefs. It even has disadvantages, because it makes probabilities nearly impossible to interpret. Its advocates claim that it cures some philosophical defect of quantum mechanics, but there is no such defect.

The quantum computing folks, like David Deutsch, love MWI because the extra universes are supposedly where the super-Turing computation takes place. No such computation has ever been observed, and the whole field is a big funding scam.

Poincare also led celestial and quantum mechanics

I have posted about how Henri Poincaré discovered the essence of special relativity, and that we got the Lorentz group, spacetime, non-Euclidean geometry, electromagnetic covariance, etc. from him, and not Einstein.

Poincare was primarily known as a mathematician. So did he do any other physics, besides relativity? Yes, he was also a leader in celestial mechanics and quantum mechanics. See and The algebraic cast of Poincaré's Méthodes nouvelles de la mécanique céleste and Poincaré's proof of the quantum discontinuity of nature. (And also articles here and here on quantum mechanics, and Lorentz 1914.)

Poincare introduced his 1911 quantum paper by saying:

Here is the profoundest revolution that natural philosophy has undergone since Newton.

This was from the guy who revolutionized space, time, electromagnetism, and gravity several years earlier. That paper, more than any other single paper, convinced Europe of Planck's quantum hypothesis. Poincare was the first to compare special relativity to Copernicus, and the first to say that quantum mechanics was revolutionary. Now these are considered the two great physics revolutions of the 20th century.

Mark Yasuda wrote:

Although it's rather well known that Henri Poincare anticipated a number of results in special relativity prior to Einstein's 1905 publication, it seems that fewer people are aware that Poincare also played a role in another revolution in physics at the beginning of the 20th century -- namely, quantum mechanics (I guess there are some people who might also argue that he participated in another revolution for his pioneering work in dynamical systems). Recently, I had the good fortune to come across Russell McCormmach's excellent article "Henri Poincare and the Quantum Theory" (Isis; Volume 58 (191); 1967; pages 37-55). Besides discussing Poincare's work, it offers some fascinating glimpses into the first Solvay Conference that took place in October and November of 1911. Below are a few (six) excerpts that I've selected from McCormmach's article, which I highly recommend for people interested in the historical development of physics during this time period:

1. At the time, Maurice de Broglie remarked to F. A. Lindemann that of all those present Poincare and Einstein were in a class by themselves (p 40).

2. Lorentz recalled that in the discussions Poincare had shown "all the vivacity and penetration of his spirit, and that one had admired the facility with which he entered vigorously into even those questions of physics which were new to him" (p. 40).

3. ... it was Planck, however, who stimulated Poincare's most penetrating, questioning spirit ....

4. In a descriptive essay he spelled out the essence of Planck's theory as it appeared to him: "A physical system is capable of only a finite number of distinct states; it jumps from one of those states to another without going through a continuous series of intermediate states." The image of a physical system jumping from one discrete state to another put him in a speculative frame of mind. He considered the possibility that a particle might trace only certain allowed paths in phase space, shifting discontinuously between them. And he supposed that the universe as well as an electron ought to experience quantum jumps. Since there would be no distinguishable instants within the motionless states between universal jumps, there should exist an "atom of time." Such were the kinds of ideas going through Poincare's mind shortly before he died; there was nothing timid or grudging about his late acquaintance with the quantum theory (p 50).

5. ... above all it was the unquestioned authority of Poincare in mathematical matters which secured him an attentive audience. Jeans undoubtedly voiced a majority sentiment when he said that "we shall probably feel inclined to trust to the accuracy of Poincare's mathematics." (pp 51-52).

6. Whereas Jeans had strongly opposed the quantum theory in Brussels ..., he came out vigorously in support of quanta at the Birmingham meeting of the British Association in September 1913, fourteen months after Poincare's death. There is no doubt about what caused him to change his mind. Jeans had read Poincare's paper and been converted by it. ... The French scientist's arguments had been so completely persuasive that from this time on every theory would have to "logically involve either the belief that Poincare is wrong, or the belief that he is right, together with all that this involves. ... And Jeans himself felt compelled to accept the quantum hypothesis in its entirety." (p. 53).

The 1927 Solvay Conference was famous for getting together the founders of quantum mechanics and discussing what it meant. But that first 1911 Solvey Conference was for getting quantum mechanics started. It must have seemed strange at the time for some rich business to invite a few scholars in an obscure field to a conference.