Philosopher disses black hole paradox

I posted that physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, aka B, tried to answer:

Why do physicists worry so much about the black hole information paradox ...?

Now she is at it again:

Is the black hole information loss paradox really a paradox? Tim Maudlin, a philosopher from NYU and occasional reader of this blog, doesn’t think so. Today, he has a paper on the arXiv in which he complains that the so-called paradox isn’t and physicists don’t understand what they are talking about. ...

First, let me point out that this is hardly news. As Maudlin himself notes, this is an old story, though I admit it’s often not spelled out very clearly in the literature. ...

Either way, none of this is really new. Maudlin’s paper is just reiterating all the options that physicists have been chewing on forever: Accept unitarity violation, store information in remnants, or finally get it out. ...

For all I can tell I don't disagree with Maudlin. I merely think the paper lacks some context and makes physicists look rather stupid by leaving out part of the story.

Lubos Motl trashes everyone, as usual.

What Tim Maudlin has done is nothing else than to repeat one side of the paradox – the side that ends up with "and the information is therefore lost". Too bad, he completely misunderstands the other side which happens to be the side producing the right answer – the information is not lost – the opposite answer to his. He's a guy who only understands one-half of some basic material, the easier one-half, and sells his more-than-half-empty skull as a skull of a brilliant guy immersed among idiots because he's a wonderful dimwit.

My opinion, last posted in Dec. 2016, is:

There is no black hole information paradox. And if there were, there would be no scientific way to resolve it.

It is the modern of equivalent of the supposed medieval debate over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. (I think that it is myth about medieval monks.)

When physicists say that no info is lost in a black hole, it is because they believe that no info is lost when you burn a book or do anything else. Of course info is lost, unless you redefine info to include info that is completely unobservable but assumed to exist because of some quasi-religious belief in info conservation.

(This post was slightly updated later in the day.)

Einstein and Minkowski lied about Poincare

From the book Space and Time: Minkowski's papers on relativity:

I have not found any clue of how Minkowski would have explained the obvious fact -- that Poincare was not mentioned in his Cologne lecture Space and Time. Minkowski was certainly aware of Poincare’s paper Sur la dynamique de l’´electron published in 1906 (but received by Rendiconti del Circolo matematico Rendiconti del Circolo di Palermo on July 23, 1905) since he quoted it in his previous lectures given in November and December 1907. In his paper Poincare first published the important result that the Lorentz transformations had a geometric interpretation as rotations in what he seemed to have regarded as an abstract four-dimensional space with time as the fourth dimension.41

Here are two attempts to explain Minkowski’s omission to mention Poincare’s paper in his Cologne lecture. ...

I think one should also ask why in 1946 in his Autobiography44 (as quoted in Section 2) Einstein wrote that Minkowski "showed that the Lorentz transformation [...] is nothing but a rotation of the coordinate system in the four-dimensional space." It seems Einstein was either unaware in 1946 (which is highly unlikely) of the fact that it was Poincare who first published that result, or he knew (perhaps from Born) that Minkowski independently had made the same discovery.

Everyone agrees that Poincare made the discoveries and published them first, that Einstein and Minkowski knew about it but refused to credit Poincare.

One can speculate that Minkowski might have independently made the discoveries before Poincare, but that does not help the reputations of Einstein and Minkowski. If Einstein thought that Minkowski and Poincare independently made the same discovery, he could have just said so. If Minkowski wanted to claim priority over Poincare, he could have put in a footnote saying "this fact was also discovered by Poincare" or something like that.

No, the only possibilities are: (1) Einstein and Minkowski did not understand Poincare's papers (in which case they did not understand the core of relativity), (2) Einstein and Minkowski were egotistically trying to hog all the credit for themselves, or (3) Einstein and Minkowski had some other beef with Poincare, and maliciously tried to cheat him out of the credit.

There are scholars today who have some bizarre quibble with Poincare's philosophy, and justify denying him credit for that reason, so reason (3) is possible. But the honest thing is still to credit him with what he published.

Einstein systematically lied about the origin of relativity from 1905 to 1946 and later.

I had a reader argue that Einstein should get credit for gravitational waves, even tho he first had the idea about 10 years after Poincare published the idea. The argument was mainly that Einstein knew that the waves had to be Ricci-flat, but then Einstein got that from Grossmann and Hilbert.

Seeking that deeper concept

Peter Woit writes:

I think Close is on the right track with his final argument where he concludes “My conjecture is that in some future theory of everything, space and time will turn out not to be fundamental and will emerge from some deeper concept. Whoever first establishes what this is will enter the pantheon of science, along with Newton, Maxwell and Einstein.”

Yes, this is the belief that underlies most research in quantum gravity, string theory, and other branches of theoretical physics.

This belief is foolish.

A lot of really smart ppl have been pursuing it for decades. They have essentially nothing to show for it. They are like the alchemists looking to turn lead into gold, or others seeking the Holy Grail. It is a pipe dream.

Listen to Bohr: There is no quantum world.

Science is about experimenting and explaining what we can observe, not constructing some abstract models about what we can never see anyway. Physics has lost its way when everything thinks that some magic deeper concept is going to explain everything.

New Einstein Genius TV show

National Geographic is currently broadcasting a mini-series on Einstein Genius. Here is a YouTube video criticizing it:

National Geographic aired a new show, “Genius” focusing on the life of Einstein, claiming he solved the mysteries of the universe despite being hated by Germans for being Jewish. In reality, Einstein was a plagiarist, communist, Zionist and a fraud. He is a constructed myth.

You will not learn any physics from either the mini-series or the video, but it is true that Einstein's most famous accomplishments were plagiarized from others.

The bigger issues being discussed are political. The mini-series does portray Einstein as a Communist and a Zionist, and the video says that is correct. He is portrayed as standing up to the evil Nazis, but Einstein's own personal politics were just as evil.

The mini-series presumably also portrays Einstein as having radical ideas that challenged the scientific authorities at the time. But the scientific authorities of the day were Lorentz and Poincare, and it would be more accurate to say that Einstein plagiarized them and agreed with their theories, rather than challenging them.

In later years Einstein challenged Bohr and others on quantum mechanics, but Einstein was wrong about that stuff.

What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like

If you have ever suspected that the philosophy profession was morally bankrupt, here is the proof:

In late March, Hypatia, a feminist-philosophy journal, published an article titled “In Defense of Transracialism” by Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, as part of its spring 2017 issue. The point of the article, as the title suggests, is to toy around with the question of what it would mean if some people really were — as Rachel Dolezal claimed — “transracial,” meaning they identified as a race that didn’t line up with how society viewed them in light of their ancestry. ...

Tuvel is now bearing the brunt of a massive internet witch-hunt, abetted in part by Hypatia’s refusal to stand up for her. The journal has already apologized for the article, despite the fact that it was approved through its normal editorial process, and Tuvel’s peers are busily wrecking her reputation by sharing all sorts of false claims about the article that don’t bear the scrutiny of even a single close read.

The biggest vehicle of misinformation about Tuvel’s articles comes from the “open letter to Hypatia” that has done a great deal to help spark the controversy. That letter has racked up hundreds of signatories within the academic community ...

In the letter, the authors ask that the article be retracted on the grounds that its “continued availability causes further harm” to marginalized people. ...

Unfortunately, Hypatia simply surrendered to this sustained misinformation campaign. On April 30, one of the journal’s editors, Cressida Hayes, posted a lengthy apology to Facebook, later posted to the journal’s Facebook page as well, from “the members of Hypatia’s Board of Associate Editors.” ...

Rather, what’s disturbing here is how many hundreds of academics signed onto and helped spread utterly false claims about one of their colleagues, and the extent to which Hypatia, faced with such outrage, didn’t even bother trying to sift legitimate critiques from frankly made-up ones.

All of those involved here are extreme leftists. Trying to read the arguments is like listening to Leninists argue with Trotskyists or Stalinists. No one is suggesting publishing scientific or objective truths about trans ppl.

Anumeric people cannot count nuts

An anthropology professor writes:

'Anumeric' People: When Languages Have No Words for Numbers ...

Cultures without numbers, or with only one or two precise numbers, include the Munduruku and Pirahã in Amazonia. Researchers have also studied some adults in Nicaragua who were never taught number words.

Without numbers, healthy human adults struggle to precisely differentiate and recall quantities as low as four. In an experiment, a researcher will place nuts into a can one at a time, then remove them one by one. The person watching is asked to signal when all the nuts have been removed. Responses suggest that anumeric people have some trouble keeping track of how many nuts remain in the can, even if there are only four or five in total.

This and many other experiments have converged upon a simple conclusion: When people do not have number words, they struggle to make quantitative distinctions that probably seem natural to someone like you or me. While only a small portion of the world's languages are anumeric or nearly anumeric, they demonstrate that number words are not a human universal.

It is worth stressing that these anumeric people are cognitively normal, well-adapted to the environs they have dominated for centuries.

No, these anumeric people are not cognitively normal. They lack the ability for elementary mental functions.

Cultures without numbers also offer insight into the cognitive influence of particular numeric traditions. Consider what time it is. Your day is ruled by minutes and seconds, but these entities are not real in any physical sense and are nonexistent to numberless people.

I disagree again. Time is as real as distance or mass or anything else.

Bell did not show nonlocality

A new paper argues:

A die-hard tendency in and out of the area of the foundations of quantum mechanics periodically re-emerges, attempting to claim that after all the Bell theorem did not provide a demonstration that the microphysical world, whatever it is, is nonlocal, but simply an elegant rephrasing of a truism, namely that quantum mechanics is not a classical theory! In this note, I argued against the most recent reformulation of this stance, exemplified by the Boughn 2017 paper, by showing that its flaws concern both the logical structure of the nonlocality theorem and its conceptual content.

That's right, most physicists believe that the microphysical world obeys locality. Bell's theorem is just a clever way of showing that quantum mechanics is not a classical theory.

More specifically, Bell showed that quantum mechanics does not match any classical theory of local hidden variables.

There continues to be a minority of crackpots who continue to claim that Bell proved that quantum mechanics was incompatible with any local theory. No, he only ruled out the classical theories of local hidden variables.

Go ahead and read the above paper, for an example of one of those crackpots. He is some Italian named Federico Laudisa. There seems to be some part of quantum mechanics that he does not accept, but his paper is too incoherent for me to figure it out.

Wikipedia explains:

Bell's theorem states that any physical theory that incorporates local realism cannot reproduce all the predictions of quantum mechanical theory. Because numerous experiments agree with the predictions of quantum mechanical theory, and show differences between correlations that could not be explained by local hidden variables, the experimental results have been taken by many as refuting the concept of local realism as an explanation of the physical phenomena under test. For a hidden variable theory, if Bell's conditions are correct, the results that agree with quantum mechanical theory appear to indicate superluminal effects, in contradiction to the principle of locality.

These three key concepts – locality, realism, freedom – are highly technical and much debated. In particular, the concept of realism is now somewhat different from what it was in discussions in the 1930s. It is more precisely called counterfactual definiteness; it means that we may think of outcomes of measurements that were not actually performed as being just as much part of reality as those that were made. Locality is short for local relativistic causality. (Currently accepted quantum field theories are local in the terminology of the Lagrangian formalism and axiomatic approach.) Freedom refers to the physical possibility of determining settings on measurement devices independently of the internal state of the physical system being measured.

That is a pretty good overview. Bell only disproves locality for classical hidden variable theories. Quantum locality is fine. Bell only disproves "realism" if the term is expanded to include the reality of measurements that were not actually performed. Quantum mechanics is silent about unperformed measurements.