Elegance is the fuzziest aspect of beauty

Physicist Dr. Bee writes, in connections with her new book:

Elegance is the fuzziest aspect of beauty. It is often described as an element of surprise, the “aha-effect,” or the discovery of unexpected connections. One specific aspect of elegance is a theory’s resistance to change, often referred to as “rigidity” or (misleadingly, I think) as the ability of a theory to “explain itself.”

By no way do I mean to propose this as a definition of beauty; it is merely a summary of what physicists mean when they say a theory is beautiful. General relativity, string theory, grand unification, and supersymmetry score high on all three aspects of beauty. The standard model, modified gravity, or asymptotically safe gravity, not so much.

But while physicists largely agree on what they mean by beauty, in some cases they disagree on whether a theory fulfills the requirements. This is the case most prominently for quantum mechanics and the multiverse.

I do not agree that grand unification and supersymmetry are beautiful. They require 100s of new parameters and particles in the theory, over the standard model's 20 or so.

A comment says:

A beautiful equation is also one that exhibits the fewest free parameters while explaining the most physics. That's why general relativity is beautiful while the Lagrangian of the Standard Model is ugly as hell. They both work, one by itself and the other by brute force, although I would never compare one with the other.

No, I disagree. This is like saying that the periodic table of the chemical elements is ugly as hell, because it have 92+ elements and some irregularities. It was vastly simpler than any other categorization of the 1000s of known substances, and put them into simple patterns.

The standard model is just quarks, electrons, and neutrinos, with some flavors, generations, colors, and anti-particles, and some bosons for transmitting forces.

Denying laws of physics in a multiverse

Einstein spent the last 20 years of his life at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, attacking quantum mechanics and pursuing unified field theory. None of that work amounted to anything.

The current director there is physicist and string theorist Robbert Dijkgraaf. He writes a Quanta mag article:

There Are No Laws of Physics. There’s Only the Landscape.

Scientists seek a single description of reality. But modern physics allows for many different descriptions, many equivalent to one another, connected through a vast landscape of mathematical possibility. ...

Did nature have any choice in picking its fundamental laws? Albert Einstein famously believed that, given some general principles, there is essentially a unique way to construct a consistent, functioning universe. In Einstein’s view, if we probed the essence of physics deeply enough, there would be one and only one way in which all the components — matter, radiation, forces, space and time — would fit together to make reality work, just as the gears, springs, dials and wheels of a mechanical clock uniquely combine to keep time.

The current Standard Model of particle physics is indeed a tightly constructed mechanism with only a handful of ingredients. ...

If our world is but one of many, how do we deal with the alternatives? The current point of view can be seen as the polar opposite of Einstein’s dream of a unique cosmos. Modern physicists embrace the vast space of possibilities and try to understand its overarching logic and interconnectedness. From gold diggers they have turned into geographers and geologists, mapping the landscape in detail and studying the forces that have shaped it.

The game changer that led to this switch of perspective has been string theory. At this moment it is the only viable candidate for a theory of nature able to describe all particles and forces, including gravity, while obeying the strict logical rules of quantum mechanics and relativity. The good news is that string theory has no free parameters. It has no dials that can be turned. ...

Why is this all so exciting for physics? First of all, the conclusion that many, if not all, models are part of one huge interconnected space is among the most astonishing results of modern quantum physics. It is a change of perspective worthy of the term “paradigm shift.”

If I did not see the source, I would say that this is the babbling of a crackpot. But this is a top physicist at a top institution publishing in a respected magazine. See also critical comments by Woit.

This is a good example anti-positivist thinking that is the opposite of good science.

Science is all about observing the universe, and developing theories for predicting experiments. Dijkgraaf's approach is to ignore observations, and develop a theory from non-empirical principles.

Some philosophers claim that Einstein discovered relativity with Dijkgraaf-like anti-positivist thinking, but I disprove that in my book and on this blog.

Then Dijkgraaf argues that the exciting part is that theory has no predictive power at all, and is really just a framework for discussing all possible models.

The proponents of many-worlds theory similarly argue that the exciting part of their theory is that all possibilities can happen, and the theory has no predictive power. Their reasoning is different, but the worthlessness of the result is the same.

So why study something that is so transparently worthless? Because it is a paradigm shift, of course, and philosophers assure us that paradigm shifts are not rational.

This article is an even better example of why I wrote a book on How Einstein Ruined Physics. The whole Physics profession has been infected by the most anti-science thinking imaginable.

LuMo's response to defend string theory:

There's no reason to think that the total number of spacetime dimensions is 4, there is nothing wrong mathematically about the numbers 10 and 11, they're in fact preferred by more detailed calculations, and there's nothing unnatural about the compactification to microscopic radii.

But the main point I wanted to convey is that Dijkgraaf seems to deny the reality in these media altogether. He wrote the text as if no "string wars" have ever taken place. But the string wars did take place more than a decade ago. Dijkgraaf was among those who preferred his convenience and didn't do anything at all to help me and others to defeat the enemy – so the enemy has won the battle for the space in the mainstream media.
...

If you ever want articles written for the popular magazines – including the Quanta Magazine – about modern theoretical physics to be meaningful again, you will first have to restart the string wars and win them. I am afraid that the society has sufficiently deteriorated over those 10+ years of your inaction that a physical elimination of the enemy may be needed.

Got that? It is no use promoting string theory to the general public unless the enemies of string theory are physically eliminated.

Congress Democrats want to fund quantum computing

The quatum hype continues:

Quantum computing has made it to the United States Congress. "Quantum computing is the next technological frontier that will change the world, and we cannot afford to fall behind," said Senator Kamala Harris (D-California) in a statement passed to Gizmodo. "We must act now to address the challenges we face in the development of this technology -- our future depends on it." From the report:

The bill introduced by Harris in the Senate focuses on defense, calling for the creation of a consortium of researchers selected by the Chief of Naval Research and the Director of the Army Research Laboratory. The consortium would award grants, assist with research, and facilitate partnerships between the members. Another, yet-to-be-introduced bill, seen in draft form by Gizmodo, calls for a 10-year National Quantum Initiative Program to set goals and priorities for quantum computing in the US; invest in the technology; and partner with academia and industry. An office within the Department of Energy would coordinate the program. Another group would include members from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Department of Energy, the office of the Director of National Intelligence to coordinate research and education activity between agencies. Furthermore, the draft bill calls for the establishment of up to five Quantum Information Science research centers, as well as two multidisciplinary National Centers for Quantum Research and Education.

According to some big-money Democrat donors, Harris is their best hope for winning the USA Presidency in 2020. Her father is Jamaican and her mother east Indian, so they think that she will play well to current Democrat identity politics, where white males are despised. She has been successful in California politics, but would be considered a leftist kook in much of the rest of the USA.

Here are some comments:

Sure, nobody could so far put up any evidence that Quantum Computing will ever be able to be more efficient than conventional computing, but hey, let's allocate billions to the belief in the hype.

AFAIK, your post is complete nonsense. It is perfectly well known for which tasks quantum computing will be more efficient than conventional computing and how many functioning Qbits you need (with given error rates). Note that the computational power does not increase linearly when doubling qbits. Apart from the tasks that we know can be solved, there is an ever expanding list of research results of more tasks that quantum computers are suitable for. You have to think of a quantum computer like a giant and fragile (unfortunately) co-processor that is insanely fast for certain tasks, not as a replacement for conventional computers.

But as the poster you rudely accused of posting nonsense wrote, it's never been demonstrated.

There are legitimate reasons to think it will never happen: Noise, cost scaling of maintaining low entropy space, incompatibility between quantum error correction on qbits and doing logic on those qbits.

I'm a sceptic. I don't expect to see the ECDLP for deployed key sizes solved by quantum computers, ever.

I agree with that last comment.

The physics community is much too corrupt to point out that the Harris bill is a big waste of money.

A foolish unified field theory using E8

Someone asked me about this SciAm article:

A Geometric Theory of Everything
Deep down, the particles and forces of the universe are a manifestation of exquisite geometry
A. Garrett Lisi, James Owen Weatherall
December 1, 2010

This quest for unification is driven by practical, philosophical and aesthetic considerations. When successful, merging theories clarifies our understanding of the universe and leads us to discover things we might otherwise never have suspected. Much of the activity in experimental particle physics today, at accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, involves a search for novel phenomena predicted by the unified electroweak theory. In addition to predicting new physical effects, a unified theory provides a more aesthetically satisfying picture of how our universe operates. Many physicists share an intuition that, at the deepest level, all physical phenomena match the patterns of some beautiful mathematical structure.

The current best theory of nongravitational forces — the electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear force — was largely completed by the 1970s and has become familiar as the Standard Model of particle physics. Mathematically, the theory describes these forces and particles as the dynamics of elegant geometric objects called Lie groups and fiber bundles. It is, however, somewhat of a patchwork; a separate geometric object governs each force. Over the years physicists have proposed various Grand Unified Theories, or GUTs, in which a single geometric object would explain all these forces, but no one yet knows which, if any, of these theories is true.

This article is a good example of why I wrote a book on How Einstein Ruined Physics.

The paper does not solve any physical or mathematical problems. It does not explain any experiments. The only thing going for it is a philosophical belief in unification, which is essentially the opposite of reductionism.

In science, reductionism is a good thing, not unification. The Standard Model reduces the 100s of known particles to a 12-parameter Lie group. The philosophy behind these grand unified models is that this was too much reductionism, and we should use a much larger group that does not separate the forces. The above paper uses a 248-parameter group. That means at least 236 more particles than have ever been seen in nature.

The term "simple" in the title does not mean it is a simple model. It means that it uses a mathematical group that is simple in the sense of not being reducible to smaller groups.

Got that? We have a 12-parameter model that matches experiments perfectly, and that allows the fundamental forces to be understood as strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravity. Lisi and Weatherall say that it is philosophically desirable to trade that for a 248-parameter model that does not match any experiments, but which is supposed to be better because it does not allow treating the fundamental forces separately.

I believe this entire line of research into unified field theories to be wrong-headed. Reductionism is what makes the Standard Model and other good theories great, and not a bad thing. The unified field theorists hate the Standard Model for the same reasons that made it so successful.

These researchers are widely believed to be crackpots, but somehow they got an article in Scientific American. That magazine has really gone downhill.

Maudlin attacks positivism in book review

Philosopher of Physics Tim Maudlin writes in a book review, which is really just an excuse to write a nice essay on his favorite topics:

Logical positivism is a very attractive view for people who do not want to worry about what they cannot observe. It is ultimately a theory about meaning, about the content of a theory. According to the positivists, a theory says no more than its observable consequences.

Logical positivism has been killed many times over by philosophers. But no matter how many stakes are driven through its heart, it arises unbidden in the minds of scientists. For if the content of a theory goes beyond what you can observe, then you can never, in principle, be sure that any theory is right. And that means there can be interminable arguments about which theory is right that cannot be settled by observation. ...

Einstein was the great anti-positivist. His position is often called realism, but a better name is perhaps common sense. ...

So Einstein and Bohr were polar opposites in their approach to physics. Einstein demanded a clear and comprehensible account of what is going on in the physical world — at all scales — in space and time. Bohr thought that the key to quantum mechanics was the realization that no such thing could be had.

When the Copenhagen interpretation got imported to the pragmatic soil of the United States, Bohr’s incomprehensible nonsense was replaced by the more concise “shut up and calculate.” That is the philosophy that dominates physics to this day.

Maudlin is partial to interpretations of quantum mechanics that try to theorize about things that cannot be observed.

He is right that philosophers have done everything they can to kill logical positivism, but their arguments are unconvincing to many scientists. Einstein's anti-positivism has been a gigantic failure. Nothing good has come out of it.

On the other hand, all the great Physics triumphs of the XX century have been explicitly or implicitly positivist.

Einstein's early work was considered to be implicitly positivist. Many physicists praise him for what appeared to be positivist thinking. But he repudiated positivism in later life, and pursued unified field theories and attacked quantum mechanics.

"Realism" is a poor name for anti-positivism. The observations are what is real. Speculating about what cannot be seen is not.

The quantum (anti-positivist) realist seeks to find some intuitive simplistic mathematical model of the atom, like the Bohr atom of the old quantum theory. That might be nice, but there is good reason to believe that no such thing exists. The electron is not really a particle or a wave or anything else similar to any macroscopic object. The faulty models of the non-standard quantum interpretations have not been helpful.

As the great physicist Murray Gell-Mann said, after conversations with Putnam, “Bohr brainwashed a generation of physicists.” A vivid illustration of Kuhn’s kinship to Bohr in this respect can be drawn from Morris: “What I hated most about Kuhn’s lectures was the combination of obscurantism and dogmatism. On one hand, he was extremely dogmatic. On the other, it was never really clear about what.” It is no stretch to apply this precise description to Bohr, and not much of one to apply it to The Critique of Pure Reason as well.

There is something very strange about accusing a positivist of being obscure and dogmatic. The positivist is just the opposite.

The positivist talks about what is measurable and demonstrable. His conclusions can all be shown by experiments and logic. He remains silent on matters that cannot be empirically or logically decided.

I agree that Kuhn and later philosophers were obscure and dogmatic. Kuhn claimed to have some grand theory about how science works, but none of it makes any sense on closer inspection. He was mainly famous for his "paradigm shift" book, but no one can agree on what a paradigm shift is.

The difference between indicative propositions about the actual world and counterfactual propositions about mere possibilities is illustrated by these two conditionals: if Lee Harvey Oswald did not shoot John F. Kennedy, then someone else did (indicative and true); and if Oswald had not shot Kennedy, then someone else would have (counterfactual and probably false).

I do think that this sort of confusion about counterfactuals is at the root of some of the gripe about quantum mechanics. If you ask questions like "if the photon went thru this slit, then where would it hit the screen?", then it is hard to see why there is a diffraction pattern on the screen.

Kuhn implicitly accepts the descriptive view. The meanings of theoretical terms such as “mass” are determined by the theories in which they are deployed. Mass as used by Newton means something different from mass as employed by Einstein because the theories they are embedded in are different. Therefore Newtonians cannot really communicate with Einsteinians, Ptolemaic astronomers cannot really communicate with Copernican astronomers, and so on. This is why, for Kuhn, scientific revolutions cannot be settled by rational means: the disputants necessarily speak different languages.

The descriptive view was demolished by Kripke and Putnam in a series of lectures and papers in the 1970s.

Yes, that is at the core of what is wrong with Kuhn. Kuhn deduces that science is an irrational process (or "arational", which is the term he prefers). Denying that science is rational is a direct attack on the whole idea that scientists seek truth.

LuMo writes about a tweet:

The Defeat of Reason: Philosopher Tim Maudlin rebuts the influential relativism of Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics and Kuhn's interpretation of science. https://t.co/YLo5oYnCzh
— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) June 3, 2018

Pinker has basically endorsed an embarrassing, supportive review by Tim Maudlin of the painful anti-quantum book by Adam Becker. It's no coincidence that the title of Maudlin's reason describes quantum mechanics (plus, less importantly, Kuhn's views about the evolution of science as a human enterprise) as a "defeat of reason".

Again, it is odd to conflate Bohr's positivism with Kuhn's arational anti-positivism. Arguing that quantum mechanics is somehow a defeat of reason is really wacky. Pinker should stick to his field, which is psychology and language.

Relativity founded on experiment, not ad hoc

Wikipedia is a great resource on relativity, but of course it cites a lot of oddball reasons for crediting Einstein. In particular, it gives a silly argument cooked up the Einstein-loving historians about being "ad hoc", such as here:

Eventually, Albert Einstein (1905) was the first[4] to completely remove the ad hoc character from the contraction hypothesis, by demonstrating that this contraction did not require motion through a supposed aether, but could be explained using special relativity, which changed our notions of space, time, and simultaneity.[5] Einstein's view was further elaborated by Hermann Minkowski, who demonstrated the geometrical interpretation of all relativistic effects by introducing his concept of four-dimensional spacetime.[6]

and here:

In 1907 Einstein criticized the "ad hoc" character of Lorentz's contraction hypothesis in his theory of electrons, because according to him it was an artificial assumption to make the Michelson–Morley experiment conform to Lorentz's stationary aether and the relativity principle.[A 25] Einstein argued that Lorentz's "local time" can simply be called "time", and he stated that the immobile ether as the theoretical foundation of electrodynamics was unsatisfactory.[A 26]

FitzGerald and Lorentz looked at the Michelson-Morley experiment, and other experiments, and deduced that the speed of light appeared the same for all observers. This could be explained by a length contraction.

Einstein looked at the work of Lorentz, and postulated that the speed of light was the same for all observers. Then he deduced the same length contraction.

FitzGerald's and Lorentz's works are said to be ad hoc, because they based it on experiment. Einstein's was not, according to this argument, because he based it on postulates.

Einstein did not have the modern geometrical understanding of relativity. Minkowski demonstrated the geometrical view and elaborated on Poincare's concept of four-dimensional spacetime, but it does not appear that Einstein had any influence on Minkowski.

Special relativity did change our notions of space, time, and simultaneity, but not because of anything Einstein said. Everything Einstein said on these subjects was said earlier and better by Lorentz, Poincare, and Minkowski.

Poincare argued several years earlier that Lorentz's local time can be simply called time. Einstein was just agreeing with Poincare.

I cannot correct Wikipedia, because policy favors the so-called "reliable sources", such as Einstein biographies. The fact is that most of the historians favor Einstein. But if you trace Wikipedia articles to the primary sources, you can see that Einstein's contributions were merely expository.

There is something insidious about this whole concept of a theory being ad hoc. Basing a theory on experiment is a good thing, not a bad thing. If an experiment comes along that challenges your theories, like Michelson-Morley did, then finding some way to modify your theories to accommodate the experiment is just what a good scientist should do.

You might say that you don't just want to fudge your formulas to match the data. It is better to have an underlying theory to explain the fudge. But FitzGerald and Lorentz had exactly that. They had a belief that solid matter was held together by electromagnetic forces, and that changes in the fields would contract the matter. Wikipedia denigrates this, because detailed theories for molecular forces were only worked out later. But nevertheless, their beliefs turned out to be correct, and solid matter is held together by electromagnetic forces. The length contraction can be derived from Lorentz transformations and Maxwell's equations, as Lorentz proved, long before Einstein.

But Einstein had a better explanation, you might say. But that is not true. Einstein did not have the geometrical interpretation that is preferred today, and rejected it for years after others accepted it.

No, the rationale for crediting Einstein is based on anti-scientific ideologies, such as preferring postulates to experiments, and deriving theories grounded in experiemnt as being ad hoc.

For details, see my book, How Einstein Ruined Physics, and postings on this blog, such as this 2017 book update.

How mathematicians connected with physicists

ProfessorDavid R. Morrison just posted Geometry and Physics: An Overview:

We present some episodes from the history of interactions between geometry and physics over the past century.

He says "we", but he is the sole author.

In 1954, during the era of minimal communication between mathematics and theoretical physics, C. N. Yang and R. L. Mills [YM54] introduced gauge transformations consisting of locally varying symmetries taking values in a compact Lie group3 G, and studied physical theories which are invariant under such gauge transformations. These generalized the already-familiar abelian gauge transformations from electromagnetism - the same ones we encountered in Section 1 - for which G = U(1). These gauge theories (or "Yang-Mills theories") eventually became the basis of the Standard Model of particle physics, the formulation of which was finalized in the mid 1970s using the group4 G = (SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1))/Z6.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Yang got acquainted with James Simons, then the mathematics department chair at SUNY Stony Brook where Yang was a professor of physics. In the course of their conversations,5 Yang and Simons came to recognize that there were important similarities between formulas which were showing up in Yang's work, and formulas which appeared in parts of mathematics which Simons was familiar with. Simons identified the relevant mathematics as the mathematical theory of connections on fiber bundles, and recommended that Yang consult Steenrod's foundational book on the subject [Ste51] (which coincidentally was published just a few years prior to the work of Yang and Mills). Yang found the book difficult to read, but through further discussions with Simons and other mathematicians (including S.-S. Chern) he came to appreciate the power of the mathematical tools which fiber bundle theory offered. ...

Simons communicated these newly uncovered connections with physics to Isadore Singer at MIT who in turn discussed them with Michael Atiyah of Cambridge University. It is likely that similar observations were made independently by others.

I have heard this story directly from Singer, Chern, and others, but I find it hard to believe.

I believe Chern said that Yang took a differential geometry course from him in China, before that 1954 paper was written. So Yang did not really re-invent gauge theories. Yang was also an ego-maniac, so maybe he pretended to.

Indeed, the names "gauge theory" and "gauge transformation" date back to some mathematical physics by Hermann Weyl in 1918. Wikipedia says that Pauli popularized the first widely accepted gauge theory in 1941. Some of the main ideas seem to have been published as early as 1914.

At some point it must have been obvious that special relativity could be elegantly described as spacetime with the metric dx² + dy² + dz² - dt², with electromagnetism being a connection on a circle (S¹) bundle. But I cannot find who explicitly said this first.

Weyl was very close to saying this in 1919, and so was Kaluza, also in 1919. So the idea that this formulation was only discovered in the 1970s is absurd.

One possible explanation is that mathematicians did not realize the importance of bundles, not derived from tangent spaces, until the 1950s. Also, mathematicians quit talking to physicists around 1950. So mathematicians had an intuitive understanding in the 1920s, but would not have expressed it in terms of bundles until the 1950s, and physicists never learned it. I am not sure it ever made it into physics textbooks until recently.

At any rate, the standard model of particle physics is based on replacing the circle with SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1), and using the same geometric formalism. So you would think that physicists would think that the geometric interpretation of electromagnetism would be fundamental and important enough for elementary textbooks.

While Morrison's paper has many examples of mathematical advances related to geometry and physics, the gauge theory of the standard model is the only one that involves genuine physics. The others could be more accurately described as mathematics that was partially inspired by physics, but which does not actually apply to any physical situation.