Rothman on Einstein's famous equation

Tony Rothman writes a SciAm article on Was Einstein the First to Invent E = mc²?:

According to scientific folklore, Albert Einstein formulated this equation in 1905 and, in a single blow, explained how energy can be released in stars and nuclear explosions. This is a vast oversimplification. Einstein was neither the first person to consider the equivalence of mass and energy, nor did he actually prove it.

I pointed out Rothman saying similar things in 2011 and 2013. He once claimed that Einstein did everything credited to him, and changed his mind in the light of all the evidence that Einstein got his famous big ideas from others.

Robert A. Herrmann wrote a 2000 paper explaining why the equation is not Einstein's discovery.

SciAm has a whole issue on the 100th anniversary of general relativity. Not much is new. I may comment on more of it. In the meantime, you can read previous blog postings on the subject, or my book, How Einstein Ruined Physics.

Rothman also has a new paper on Cardano v Tartaglia: The Great Feud Goes Supernatural. There was a hot 16th century rivalry between two mathematicians trying to solve cubic equations. The myth is that one had the other arrested on charges of heresy for having cast a horoscope of Jesus Christ. Rothman tries to get to the bottom of it, and finds this and related stories to be improbable.

Preparing for that mythical quantum computer

SciAm and Nature magazine have today's crypto scare story:

Cryptographers Brace for Quantum Revolution
Encryption fix begins in preparation for arrival of futuristic computers

It is an inevitability that cryptographers dread: the arrival of powerful quantum computers that can break the security of the Internet. Although these devices are thought to be a decade or more away, researchers are adamant that preparations must begin now.

No, it is not inevitable. Those devices are centuries away, if ever. So what researchers are adamant?

But on the day that the first large quantum computer comes online, some widespread and crucial encryption methods will be rendered obsolete. Quantum computers exploit laws that govern subatomic particles, so they could easily defeat existing encryption methods.

“I’m genuinely worried we’re not going to be ready in time,” says Michele Mosca, co-founder of the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo in Canada and chief executive of evolutionQ, a cyber-security consulting company.

Oh, someone at the Institute for Quantum Computing is worried. He is so worried that he is doing fundraising to get everyone else worried.

At the time, it was not clear whether such a machine would ever be built, says Mosca, because researchers assumed that it would need to operate flawlessly. But a theoretical discovery in 1996 showed that up to a limit, a quantum computer with some flaws could be just as effective as a perfect one.

He is talking about error-correcting qubits, when no one can make scalable qubits anyway.

Published experiments with small quantum devices are starting to approach this faultiness threshold, notes Mosca. And because secretive organizations such as the NSA are keenly interested in the technology, it is widely assumed that these published results do not represent the cutting edge of research. “We have to assume there’s going to be people that are a few years ahead of what’s available in the public literature,” says Mosca. “You can’t wait for the headlines in The New York Times to have your plan in place.”

This is one situation where the NY Times stories are way ahead of the research. By centuries.

Researchers believe that it takes existing computers a long time to factorize big numbers, partly because no one has yet discovered how to do it quickly. But quantum computers could factorize a large number exponentially faster than any conventional computer, and this nullifies RSA’s reliance on factoring being difficult.

Aaronson likes to point out that it is not really exponential faster.

This is like saying that we need to build more nuclear bomb ICBMs because Russia might be building a missile defense. Or that we must pass laws about time travel, just in can someone builds a time-travel machine. Someday books will be written about how all these smart people and money chased an impossibility.

Paper on pragmatic quantum mechanics

A, S. Sanz looks for a pragmatic understanding of quantum mechanics:

To date, quantum mechanics has proven to be our most successful theoretical model. However, it is still surrounded by a "mysterious halo" that can be summarized in a simple but challenging question: Why quantum phenomena are not understood under the same logic as classical ones? ...

The famous Bohr-Einstein debates 4 ended in the 1930s with the orthodox or Copenhagian view of quantum systems, which has healthfully survived to date: the quantum world is essentially probabilistic and hence it does not make any sense asking questions intended for going beyond probabilities. Actually, these probabilities are such that if we try to determine accurate (probabilistic) information about one of the variables (A) from a pair of (classical) canonically conjugate variables, we will be unable to obtain any relevant information about the other (B), and vice versa. This is the essence of Bohr’s complementarity principle, which formally translates into the well-known Heisenberg uncertainty relation, ...

Bell’s contribution not only started the revolution of quantum technologies, leading to the development of the quantum information theory, quantum computing, quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation, etc., but indirectly he also motivated a reconsideration of Bohm’s approach.

This is mostly conventional wisdom, but I disagree with a couple of details.

The quantum world is not essentially probabilistic. What does not make sense is asking about observations that have not been performed. You can think about speculation about unmeasured variables as "going beyond probabilities", but I would not put it that way.

The word "revolution" seems to be used here in the Kuhnian sense of not being a scientific advance, but enable some sort of paradigm shift. There is an industry pursuing quantum info, computing, crypto, and teleportation, but nothing has come of it.

Bohm's work is also wildly overrated, possibly because he was a Commie fellow traveler.

Chapter 2 of Feynman’s renowned Lectures on Physics starts as 13 “In this chapter we shall tackle immediately the basic element of the mysterious behavior in its most strange form. We choose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery. We cannot make the mystery go away by “explaining” how it works. We will just tell you how it works. In telling you how it works we will have told you about the basic peculiarities of all quantum mechanics.” Effectively, the two-slit experiment summarizes the essence (“mystery”) of quantum mechanics. However, like Dirac, Feynman also thought that each individual particle self-interfered, apparently being unaware of Pozzi’s and Tonomura’s experiments on the two-slit experiment. His scientific authority reinforced the Copenhagian viewpoint, but should things have been different if Feynman would have watched Tonomura’s movie 11 of his two-slit experiment with electrons?

Everyone likes to quote R.P. Feynman saying:

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.

But this was not an attack on quantum mechanics. What he meant was that he did not have an intuitive understanding of how an electron can interfere with itself inn the two-slit experiment.

Arguments about interpretations continue. Carlo Rovelli gives An argument against the realistic interpretation of the wave function, and just a few days later, H. Dieter Zeh posts a rebuttal. They each have their own peculiar interpretations that they push.

Krauss attacks religion again

Lawrence Krauss has a video on the xenophobia inherent in religion. This is mostly off-topic for this blog, but he is a prominent physicists, and he is reciting nonsense. He says:

It is created by Iron Age peasants who didn't even know the Earth orbited the Sun. ...

The xenophobia ... People who don't conform are to be ostracized or killed. ...

Islam is 500 years younger than say Christianity. And 500 years ago Christianity was producing far more violence than Islam is today, from the Crusades to the Inquisition.

If Christianity were so xenophobic, then the USA and Europe would never admit the millions of Moslem immigrants and refugees. Christians do not kill people for non-conformity.

There is some opposition to the foreigners, but it appears to be mainly based on secular concerns like cost, crime, disruption, non-assimilation, etc, and not based on organized religion.

No, Christianity was never as violent as Islam. Islam spread by conquering foreign lands. The Crusades and Inquisition were defenses against Moslem invaders.

The history of Europe is one of regular warfare for millennia, but that cannot be blamed on Christianity.

The Earth-Sun motion is relative. Most professors today do not seem to understand that. He as might as well say "peasants who didn't even know about dark matter clumping in galaxies." It has little to do with the religious messages.

Krauss wrote a book about how we don't need God because the laws of physics can create a universe out of nothing. There is some logic to the core of his argument. But when he goes on these rambling anti-religion diatribes, he is way out of his expertise. The vast majority of Christians accept nearly all scientific knowledge.

Krauss also has an article in the current SciAm on What Einstein Got Wrong. Black holes, gravity waves, quantum mechanics, big bang, etc.

Update: Krauss just wrote a New Yorker article titled All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists:

The Kim Davis controversy exists because, as a culture, we have elevated respect for religious sensibilities to an inappropriate level that makes society less free, not more. ...

In science, of course, the very word “sacred” is profane. ...

I see a direct link, in short, between the ethics that guide science and those that guide civic life. Cosmology, my specialty, may appear to be far removed from Kim Davis’s refusal to grant marriage licenses to gay couples, but in fact the same values apply in both realms. ... Five hundred years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance.

No, there is no scientific argument for same-sex marriage, and the objections to it are not necessarily religion. Krauss's cosmology does not inform us on the issue.

Even some supporters of same sex marriage say that jailing Davis was illegal and unnecessary.

A lot of people feel strongly about same-sex marriage, and even jailing Davis as a public show of subservience to LGBT ideals. But for Krauss to say that this is the reason for all scientists to become militant atheists, he is am embarrassment to science. Stick to cosmology.

Update: Atheist-nonleftist-physicist Lubos Motl piles on:

Is atheist jerk Krauss worse than religious fanatics? ...

Why is someone like Lawrence Krauss willing to write something so utterly insane, such as the claim that there exists a link between the insights of cosmology and the right attitude to Kim Davis' actions? Is it because he can't see that there exists no scientific derivation of the "right attitude to Kim Davis"? I doubt so. The actual reason is that Lawrence Krauss' attitude to cosmology is based on lots of arbitrary unjustified prejudices, too. He lacks the integrity not only as a human being but as a scientist, too.

In the context of recent controversies, this is most clearly seen on Krauss' support of the concept of the multiverse. We don't know whether this concept is relevant for a proper scientific understanding of anything, and if it is, we don't know in what form it is relevant. But folks like Krauss indeed promote this idea for the same reasons why they are against Kim Davis – because they love to promote left-wing political views. There is no valid evidence behind either of their approaches.

This is something left-wing about the multiverse. Leftists take great pleasure in arguing that humans are not special, that Western culture is not special, that Earth is not special, etc. Now they like to say that even our universe is not special, and that maybe homosexuals do all the breeding in some parallel universe.

Intel joins search for quantum computing

ExtremeTech reports:

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich released an open letter today, pledging to dedicate $50 million to long-term research of quantum computing. The CPU giant is partnering with TU Delft, the largest and oldest Dutch public technical university, and will work with QuTech, TU Delft’s quantum research institute. Intel is also pledging to dedicate its own resources and engineers to solving the problems of quantum computing.

It might seem odd to see Intel pumping so much money into quantum computing research, given that D-Wave’s systems have been tested and largely verified to be quantum computers.

Maybe you should sell Intel stock.

In case you think Intel is always right to such technical matters, remember the Intel Itanium. For about 5 years, HP and Intel convinced the world that they had a superior computer processor architecture. Rivals were dropping out of the business because everyone was so sure that Intel's chip would dominate the market. The chip was a spectacular failure.

Someday this quantum computing research will be seen as seriously misguided. Intel will never sell a quantum computer processor.

Update: I never saw a good explanation as to why the Intel Itanium was such a failure. They certainly spent enuf billions of dollars on development, and made chips that worked as designed. But the main advantage was supposedly that long complex instruction sets were superior to reduced (and simplified) instruction sets that were popular. Intel's simulations showed huge performance advantages, but apparently they never took into account all the extra time to load those long instructions from memory. It is hard to see how so many smart people could have bet so much money on something so foolish.

John Dvorak wrote in 2009:

This continues to be one of the great fiascos of the last 50 years, and not because Intel blew too much money on its development or that the chip performed poorly and will never be widely adopted. It was the reaction and subsequent consolidation in the industry that took place once this grandiose chip was preannounced.

I witnessed this in real time, in person, and I've never seen anything like it before or since.

In 1997 Intel was the king of the hill; in that year it first announced the Itanium or IA-64 processor. That same year, research company IDC predicted that the Itanium would take over the world, racking up $38 billion in sales in 2001. Wow! Everybody paid attention. ...

The problem was that Intel wasn't the only company drinking the Kool-Aid. The entire industry took this project so seriously that the press was inundated by both a massive roll-out campaign and a press kit that had releases from all the strategic partners—which was practically everyone in the Valley…and beyond.

What we heard was that HP, IBM, Dell, and even Sun Microsystems would use these chips and discontinue anything else they were developing. This included Sun making noise about dropping the SPARC chip for this thing—sight unseen. I say "sight unseen" because it would be years before the chip was even prototyped. The entire industry just took Intel at its word that Itanium would work as advertised in a PowerPoint presentation.

Because this chip was supposed to radically change the way computers work and become the driving force behind all systems in the future, one promising project after another was dropped. The MIPS chip, the DEC Alpha (perhaps the fastest chip of its era), and anything else in the pipeline were all cancelled or deemphasized. Why? Because Itanium was the future for all computing. Why bother wasting money on good ideas that didn't include it?

The failure of this chip to do anything more than exist as a niche processor sealed the fate of Intel — and perhaps the entire industry, since from 1997 to 2001 everyone waited for the messiah of chips to take us all to the next level.

It did that all right. It took us to the next level. But we didn't know that the next level was below us, not above. The next level was the basement, in fact. Hopefully Intel won't come up with any more bright ideas like the Itanium. We can't afford to excavate another level down.

It is going to be the same thing with quantum computers. Everyone is going to wonder how so many smart people with convinced by a slide show, when no one had any real results to show.

Belief in farfetched physics ideas

I mentioned Lubos Motl and the quantum gravity religion, and now he elaborates on his beliefs:

We haven't visited a black hole – no one will ever return alive from the black hole interior. We haven't directly and/or clearly observed the Hawking radiation, the Unruh radiation, a singularity in general relativity, gravitational waves let alone gravitons, excited strings, additional compactified spatial dimensions, superpartners, quanta of the inflaton field, regions with a different value of the inflaton field, regions with differently compactified extra dimensions than our way, and many other things.

Nevertheless, theoretical physicists generally assume that all those things – or at least most of them – exist. They do so most of the time. They say that they "believe" that those things are needed. Is the word "believe" another proof that their activity has evolved into a religion?

Not at all. The words "I believe X" simply means "my opinion is that X is probably right". Both religious and irreligious people have the right to "believe". The churches have no monopoly over the word. And religious and irreligious people may become convinced about something equally staunchly and feel the same psychological certainty about something. Where the churches differ from the scientists is in the methods to arrive to a "belief".

This is a fair comment. There are atheist-evolutionists who get very upset at the notion that scientists have beliefs, but they clearly do. The beliefs preferably have some evidentiary support, but that is almost nonexistent in his examples.

He skips some other common physicist beliefs: many-worlds, other forms of the multiverse, proton decay, holographic universe, quantum nonlocality, super-Turing quantum computing, and Barack Obama Hope and Change. Okay, I am just joking about the last one.

A person who is viscerally hostile towards physics may call the opinion that gravitational waves exist "religion". A physicist knows that the person from the previous sentence is an ignoramus. After all, a Nobel prize in physics has already been given primarily for the indirect detection of gravitational waves. ...

OK, I obviously consider those who disagree with the existence of gravitational waves to be close to the "deniers of high school science" who also reject the existence of ice ages or heliocentrism. If you're one of them, please try to adjust your comments to the fact that I basically consider you a wild animal, a skunk of a sort. This is not meant to be insulting. It's meant to be as accurate an appraisal of the intellectual depth of two mammals as I am capable of producing.

Just about everything shows wave behavior at some scale, so I can believe in gravity waves.

I have beliefs against many of the above things. I am skeptical about superpartners (SUSY particles), proton decay, and quantum computing partially because these are farfetched and dubious theories, but mostly because experimental attempts have been such failures.

My skepticism in extra compactified dimensions and extra universes is a little different. These are ideas that are not testable and do not really explain anything either. I am not even what there is to believe in, because their ideas do not have much to do with observational science, as it has always been understood. I certainly do not believe in that nonsense, but I am not sure it makes any sense to disbelieve it either.

If you tell me that you have a spiritual connection with your grandmother, and then ask me my opinion, I would not have any opinion. I do not know how I would ever be able to come to a conclusion that your belief is true or false. It does not have any objective meaning that can be analyzed by the tools that I have.

Likewise, you are free to believe in other universes with different inflaton fields, if you wish. Motl is right that irreligious people have the right to have their own beliefs, even if there is no way to test or demonstrate them. I only raise objections when you claim to have some sort of scientific backing for them.

The quantum gravity religion

I have agreed with physicist Lubos Motl a couple of times recently, but he is back off the rails with his latest rant. He complains that this is a dumb question:

Why do physicists believe that a mathematically consistent model that unites quantum mechanics and general relativity exists?

If mathematics breaks down when applied to black holes, why do scientists believe that mathematics can describe black holes? Perhaps the search for the mathematics that unites quantum mechanics and general relativity is pointless. Mathematics is a useful tool for modelling the universe in many ways, but maybe black holes are exceptional entities that can't be modeled by mathematics. Is it possible that the interior of black holes are so alien to our known universe and so different that current mathematical models/abstractions simply do not apply.

It is a good question, and obviously hit a nerve. I have written a FQXi essay on this topic, and many blog postings. Today's theoretical physicists are preoccupied with the belief that there is some inconsistency between quantum mechanics and relativity that must be resolved, especially for black holes.

In fact there is no inconsistency as a physical problem. Quantum mechanics has been made fully consistent with relativity and gravity for all observable scales. To get a problem, you have to assume that all the mass of an electron is concentrated in a point, reject QFT renormalization, and look for the electron's event horizon. Of course, the electron is not really a point particle.

What annoys Motl is that well-known Berkeley professor Richard Muller does not subscribe to the string theory religion on this question:

It is almost a physics religion to believe that relativity can ultimately be combined with quantum physics. There is no evidence for this other than the fact that all the other forces of physics have been "unified". It is possible that relativity is different; that it is geometric and not quantum mechanical. But most physicists think that will not be the case, in large part because quantum physics has been so successful in the past. That's why they are looking to unify them. But it is worthwhile to recognize that this is based on hope, not on any firm physics or mathematics reason. ...

Much of the enthusiasm for string theory is that it addresses this [renormalization] problem, while introducing many more (extra dimensions, huge numbers of parameters, etc). Personally, given the problems of string theory, I am not optimistic that it will be with us 20 years from now.

He is right. Motl answers:

Well, the person who wrote this question is a layman who obviously doesn't understand what the words "mathematics" and "science" mean. Mathematics can't "fail" as a description of Nature because mathematics is, pretty much by definition, the language of the most accurate and reliable description of anything. ...

Dr Muller clearly stands next to the most insane pro-religion nuts who say that theoretical physics is just another religion – one that only tries to compete with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Math is all about deducing consequences from axioms. Physics is all about explaining the natural world. The study of quantum gravity is neither.

When our leading theoretical physicists focus on questions with no possible observable consequences, then it is like discussion of theological issues.

Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder attempts to answer these questions:

1. Why do some physicists think our universe may be a hologram?

2. Why is it interesting that our universe might be a hologram?

3. Where are we in the holographic universe?

4. How well does this duality work?

5. Does this have something to do with Stephen Hawking's recent proposal for how to solve the black hole information loss problem?

To summarize, our physics elites believe we are in a hologram, but there is no rigorous math for this, and no observable consquences.

Sometimes physics is determined by a boundary value problem, and the boundary to the universe can be considered the set of black hole event horizons. So maybe we are all determined by black hole boundaries. Sound profound? No, it is just a stupid idea to use some mathematical trickery to confuse you.

Update: Motl attacks another Muller answer on black holes.