Aristotle, Einstein, and the nature of force

Vienna physics professor Herbert Pietschmann writes:

But Newton also removed Aristotles division of the motions into “natural motions” and “enforced motions”. For Newton, also Aristotles “natural motions” became “enforced” by the gravitational force. In this way, he unified our understanding of dynamics in the most general way. ...

In 1915, Albert Einstein had found the basic equation in his theory of general relativity. He published a complete version of his thoughts in 1916. According to this theory, the gravitational interaction was not caused by a force but by a curvature of spacetime. In this basic publication Einstein writes: “Carrying out the general theory of relativity must lead to a theory of gravitation: for one can generate a gravitational field by merely changing the coordinate system.” ...

To summarize, let us state that motion caused by gravitation is not caused by a force; in that sense it differs from all other motions. Einstein made this clear in his quoted paper from 1916. He writes:21 “According to the theory of General Relativity gravitation has an exceptional role with respect to all other forces, especially electromagnetism.” This is what in a sense we might call “return of Aristotelian physics” since it clearly distinguishes between “natural motion” and “enforced motion”, constituting the basic problem of modern physics.

Acceleration is either caused by the geometry of spacetime (gravitation) or by an external force in Euclidian spacetime (all other forces). Mathematically, these two different views are represented either by the Theory of General Relativity (gravitation) or by Quantum Field Theory (all other forces).

This is partially correct. Aristotle's concept of force seems wrong by Newtonian standards, but is actually reasonable in the light of relativity, as I previously argued.

But Einstein did not believe that gravitational acceleration was caused by the geometry of spacetime, as most physicists do today.

Einstein is also making a false distinction between gravity and electromagnetism. The preferred relativistic view of electromagnetism, as developed by Poincare, Minkowski, and maybe Weyl, is that the field is a curvature tensor and the force is a geometrical artifact. In this view, electromagnetism and gravity are formally quite similar.

In his paper on General Relativity from 1916 he writes: “the law of causality makes a sensible statement on the empirical world only when cause and effect are observable.” Since a gravitational “force” was not observable, Einstein had eliminated it from his theory of gravitation and replaced it by the curvature of spacetime. ...

There are people who deduce that the law of causality is invalid because the theory of relativity made it obsolete. Einstein himself seems to have gone back and forth on the issue.

The idea is mistaken, whether it is Einstein's fault or not. Causality is the essence of relativity.

In this connexion it is historically interesting that only ten years later Einstein converted from these ideas which had led him to his most fundamental contributions to physics. Werner Heisenberg who had used the same philosophy for the derivation of his uncertainty relation, recalls a conversation with Einstein in 1926; Einstein: “You don’t seriously believe that a physical theory can only contain observables.” Heisenberg: “I thought you were the one who made this idea the foundation of your theory of relativity?” Einstein: “May be I have used this kind of philosophy, nevertheless it is nonsense.”

Here is where Einstein rejects positivist philosophy for which he is widely credited.

The main reason Einstein is credited for special relativity over Lorentz is for the greater emphasis on observables. But as you can see, Einstein disavowed that view.

For the skeptical view of causality in physics, see this review:

The role of causality in physics presents a problem. Although physics is widely understood to aim at describing the causes of observable phenomena and the interactions of systems in experimental set-ups, the picture of the world given by fundamental physical theories is largely acausal: e.g. complete data on timeslices of the universe related by temporally bidirectional dynamical laws. The idea that physics is acausal in nature, or worse, incompatible with the notion of causality, has attracted many adherents. Causal scepticism in physics is most associated with Russell’s (1913) arguments that a principle of causality is incompatible with actual physical theories. For causal sceptics, insofar as causal reasoning is used in physics, it is at best extraneous and at worst distorts the interpretation of a theory’s content.

No, causal reasoning is essential to physics. The arguments of Bertrand Russell and other philosophers rejecting causality are nonsense.

Google seeks quantum supremacy

Ilyas Khan writes:

I travelled over to the west coast and spent some time with the Artificial Intelligence team within Google at their headquarters just off Venice Beach in LA. Like all who visit that facility, I am constrained by an NDA in talking about what is going on. However in their bid to establish "Quantum Supremacy" the team, led by Hartmut Neven, talks not in terms of decades but in a timetable that is the technology equivalent of tomorrow. For the avoidance of doubt, the "tomorrow" that I refer to is the timeline for building and operating a universal quantum computer.

I interpret "the technology equivalent of tomorrow" as being within two years. Check back here at that time.

No, Google is not going to succeed. This is not like self-driving cars, where it is clear that the technology is coming, as prototypes have proved feasibility. For that, computers just have to mimic what humans do, and have several advantages, such better sensors, faster reactions, and real-time access to maps.

Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in investment, there is still no convincing demonstration of quantum supremacy, or any proof that any method will scale.

Google is all about scale, so I am sure that its researchers have a story to tell their senior management. But it is covered by a non-disclosure agreement, so we do not know what it is.

You can bet that if Google ever achieves a universal quantum computer, or even just quantum supremacy, it will brag to everyone and attempt to collect a Nobel prize. If you do not hear anything in a couple of years, then they are not delivering on their promises.

Darwin did not discredit Lamarck

Genomicist Razib Khan writes about a New Yorker mag mistake:

But there’s a major factual problem which I mentioned when it came out, and, which some friends on Facebook have been griping about. I’ll quote the section where the error is clearest:

…Conceptually, a key element of classical Darwinian evolution is that genes do not retain an organism’s experiences in a permanently heritable manner. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, in the early nineteenth century, had supposed that when an antelope strained its neck to reach a tree its efforts were somehow passed down and its progeny evolved into giraffes. Darwin discredited that model….

It is true that in Neo-Darwinian evolution, the modern synthesis, which crystallized in the second quarter of the 20th century, genes do not retain an organism’s experiences in a permanently heritable manner. But this is not true for Charles Darwin’s theories, which most people would term a “classical Darwinian” evolutionary theory.

Not just the New Yorker.

For some reason, the Darwin idolizers frequently stress that he proved Lamarck wrong about heredity. This is misguided for a couple of reasons.

First, they are usually eager to convince you of some leftist-atheist-evolutionist-naturalist-humanist agenda, but they could make essentially the same points if Lamarckianism were true.

Second, Darwin was a Lamarkian, as a comment explains:

Darwin’s On the Origin of Species proposed natural selection as the main mechanism for development of species, but did not rule out a variant of Lamarckism as a supplementary mechanism.[11] Darwin called his Lamarckian hypothesis pangenesis, and explained it in the final chapter of his book The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), after describing numerous examples to demonstrate what he considered to be the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Pangenesis, which he emphasised was a hypothesis, was based on the idea that somatic cells would, in response to environmental stimulation (use and disuse), throw off ‘gemmules’ or ‘pangenes’ which travelled around the body (though not necessarily in the bloodstream). These pangenes were microscopic particles that supposedly contained information about the characteristics of their parent cell, and Darwin believed that they eventually accumulated in the germ cells where they could pass on to the next generation the newly acquired characteristics of the parents. Darwin’s half-cousin, Francis Galton, carried out experiments on rabbits, with Darwin’s cooperation, in which he transfused the blood of one variety of rabbit into another variety in the expectation that its offspring would show some characteristics of the first. They did not, and Galton declared that he had disproved Darwin’s hypothesis of pangenesis, but Darwin objected, in a letter to the scientific journal Nature, that he had done nothing of the sort, since he had never mentioned blood in his writings. He pointed out that he regarded pangenesis as occurring in Protozoa and plants, which have no blood. (wiki-Lamarckism)

Here is more criticism of the New Yorker and part 2.

I have heard people say that the New Yorker employs rigorous fact checkers, but I don't think that they try to check that the science is right. It is a literary magazine, and they check literary matters.

Denying relativity credit to Poincare

I stumbled across this 1971 book review:

In a third article Stanley Goldberg gives a remarkably clear picture of Einstein's special relativity theory and the response of the British, French, and Germans to the theory. Starting with two simple postulates, videlicet [= as follows] the constancy of the velocity of light and the impossibility of determining an absolute motion of any kind, Einstein was able to derive the Lorentz transformation with ease as well as many other relations of a kinematical nature. The "ether" was dismissed in a short sentence. The German physicists understood the theory, but not all agreed with it. The British stuck with the ether and didn't even try to understand special relativity. The French were not much interested in the theory either; even Poincaré failed to mention it in his writings on electrodynamics.

Poincare did not fail to mention it; he created the theory. Poincare is mainly responsible for the spacetime geometry and electromagnetic covariance of special relativity, along with elaborations by Minkowski. I don't know how physicists could be so ignorant of one of the great advances of physics.

I do not know anything like it in the history of science. Every discussion of relativity goes out of its way to attribute the theory solely to Einstein, and to give some history of how it happened. And they get the story wrong every time. I explain more in my book.

Stop asking whether quantum computing is possible

The current SciAm mag has a paywalled article describing three competing research programs trying to build the first quantum computer, and concludes:

The time has come to stop asking whether quantum computing is possible and to start focusing on what it will be able to do. The truth is that we do not know how quantum computing will change the world.

Huhh?

No, quantum computing is probably impossible, and would not change the world even if it were possible.

One supposed application is a "quantum internet", which quantum computers are used as routers to transmit qubits from one user to another. The only known use for that is for so-called quantum cryptography, but that has no advantages over conventional cryptography. It would cost a million times as much, and be hopelessly insecure by today's standards. It cannot authenticate messages, and all implementations have been broken, as far as I know.

The article also mentions quantum clocks. I do not know what that is all about, but we already have extremely cheap clocks that are far more accurate than what is needed by anyone.

Meanwhile, IBM claims to have 5 qubits:

IBM said on Wednesday that it's giving everyone access to one of its quantum computing processors, which can be used to crunch large amounts of data. Anyone can apply through IBM Research's website to test the processor, however, IBM will determine how much access people will have to the processor depending on their technology background -- specifically how knowledgeable they are about quantum technology.

If IBM really had a revolutionary computer, it would be able to figure out something to do with it. No, it cannot "be used to crunch large amounts of data."

Wired explains entanglement

Famous physicist Frank Wilczek explains entanglement in a Wired/Quanta mag article:

An aura of glamorous mystery attaches to the concept of quantum entanglement, and also to the (somehow) related claim that quantum theory requires “many worlds.” Yet in the end those are, or should be, scientific ideas, with down-to-earth meanings and concrete implications. Here I’d like to explain the concepts of entanglement and many worlds as simply and clearly as I know how. ...

So: Is the quantity of evil even or odd? Both possibilities are realized, with certainty, in different sorts of measurements. We are forced to reject the question. It makes no sense to speak of the quantity of evil in our system, independent of how it is measured. Indeed, it leads to contradictions.

The GHZ effect is, in the physicist Sidney Coleman’s words, “quantum mechanics in your face.” It demolishes a deeply embedded prejudice, rooted in everyday experience, that physical systems have definite properties, independent of whether those properties are measured. For if they did, then the balance between good and evil would be unaffected by measurement choices. Once internalized, the message of the GHZ effect is unforgettable and mind-expanding.

To get to this conclusion, you have to equate "definite properties" with measurement outcomes.

A electron has definite properties, but it is not really a particle and does not have a definite position. If you measure the electron, using a method that puts it in a definite position, then it is in that position for the instant of the measurement. A nanosecond later, it is back to its wave-like state with indeterminate position.

For more on Wilczek, see this Edge interview.

New book on spooky action

I previously trashed George Musser's new book (without reading it), and now he was on Science Friday radio promoting it:

Could the space we live in—our everyday reality—just be a projection of some underlying quantum structure? Might black holes be like the Big Bang in reverse, where space reverts to spacelessness? Those are the sorts of far-out questions science writer George Musser ponders in his book Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon that Reimagines Space and Time—And What it Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything. In this segment, Musser and quantum physicist Shohini Ghose talk about the weird quantum world, and the unpredictable nature of particles.

Here is an excerpt:

The world we experience possesses all the qualities of locality. We have a strong sense of place and of the relations among places. We feel the pain of separation from those we love and the impotence of being too far away from something we want to affect. And yet quantum mechanics and other branches of physics now suggest that, at a deeper level, there may be no such thing as place and no such thing as distance. Physics experiments can bind the fate of two particles together, so that they behave like a pair of magic coins: if you flip them, each will land on heads or tails—but always on the same side as its partner. They act in a coordinated way even though no force passes through the space between them. Those particles might zip off to opposite sides of the universe, and still they act in unison. These particles violate locality. They transcend space.

Evidently nature has struck a peculiar and delicate balance: under most circumstances it obeys locality, and it must obey locality if we are to exist, yet it drops hints of being nonlocal at its foundations. That tension is what I’ll explore in this book. For those who study it, nonlocality is the mother of all physics riddles, implicated in a broad cross section of the mysteries that physicists confront these days: not just the weirdness of quantum particles, but also the fate of black holes, the origin of the cosmos, and the essential unity of nature.

Everything in the universe obeys locality, as far as we know.

Musser's previous book was The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory, and that does not require spooky action, so presumably he understands that the spookiness is just goofiness to sell books. He may understand that string theory is all a big scam also.