Science Grants for Equity, not Science

Physicist Lawrence Krauss writes in the WSJ:

Now Even Science Grants Must Bow to ‘Equity and Inclusion’

Forget the Higgs boson and neutrinos. The Energy Department wants to know your diversity plan.

Starting in fiscal 2023, which began Oct. 1, every proposal responding to a solicitation from the Office of Science is required to include a PIER plan, which stands for Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research, to “describe the activities and strategies of the applicant to promote equity and inclusion as an intrinsic element to advancing scientific excellence.” In the words of the announcement, “The complexity and detail of a PIER Plan is expected to increase with the size of the research team and the number of personnel to be supported.”

When I read this new requirement, I went back to the last grant proposal from our group—which involved exploring gravitational waves, the early universe, Higgs boson physics, neutrino cosmology, dark-matter detection, supersymmetry and black-hole physics. What does any of this have to do with diversity and inclusion? Nothing.

There a cost to this. I expect American Science to ge into a long term decline. Colleges are no long accepting the best students, universities are not hiring the best professors, and the best research is not being funded.

Nobel Prize was Not for Non-locality

Commentary about the 2022 Nobel Physics Prize breaks down into two camps: (1) the experiments confirmed quantum mechanics as it has been understood since 1932; or (2) revolutionary experiments show nature is not real or local.

I pointed out that the Nobel committee stuck to (1), and pointedly did not endorse (2).

Another person who noticed this was Physics Philosopher Tim Maudlin, who wrote:

Unfortunately, much of this history has been garbled in the public discussion of Bell’s work and its experimental tests. The Nobel prize committee itself gets it wrong in its press release,

"John Clauser developed John Bell’s ideas, leading to a practical experiment. When he took the measurements, they supported quantum mechanics by clearly violating a Bell inequality. This means that quantum mechanics cannot be replaced by a theory that uses hidden variables."

But that statement is flatly false. Indeed, it was a theory that uses hidden variables—Bohmian mechanics—that inspired Bell to find his inequalities, and that theory makes the correct prediction that the inequalities will be violated.

The Nobel statement is correct if "theory" means "local theory". For the most part, theories have to be local to be scientific. A nonlocal theory can have magical action-at-a-distiance.

Bohr, Einstein, Bohm, Bell, and everyone else did not believe in nonlocal theories. Bell and Bohm only wrote about Bohm's theory as a mathematical curiosity. Bell was parially motivated by trying to find a local version of Bohm's theory, not to accept a nonlocal theory.

Maudlin is exceptional in that he believes in nonlocal interpretations. I think Botmian pilot wave theory is his favorite, and he claims it can be turned into a full interpreation of quantum mechanics.

Much as poeple like to argue that QM is strange, Bohmian mechanics is far stranger. In it, an electron can be observed in one place, and its ghost can be causing weird effects elsewhere.

Maudlin concludes:

What Bell’s theoretical work and the subsequent experimental work of Clauser, Aspect and Zeilinger proved was non-locality, not no-hidden-variables. Ultimately, they proved Einstein wrong in his suspicions against spooky action-at-a-distance. And that, surely, deserves the highest honors one can bestow.

Yes, they would deserve the highest honors if they proved non-locality, and that spooky action-at-a-distance really does happen. But the Nobel Prize citation pointedly does not say any of those things. The prize was only for experimental work confirming quantum mechanics as it was understood in 1932.

In his later years, Bell adopted a view that a true theory of nature should be based on hidden variables, which he called by a term he coined, "beables". So hidden variables became a philosophical necessity. So when the Bell test experiments ruled out local hidden variables, he adopted nonlocal hidden variables. I think that Maudlin was persuaded by that argument.

But the mainstream textbooks are not persuaded, and neither is the Nobel committee.

Spooky Entanglement or Collapse?

The Nobel Prize news has everybody talking about quantum spookiness, even though the Nobel committee did not endorse any of it.

Dr. Bee tweets:

Sabine Hossenfelder @skdh
Just a reminder that what Einstein referred to as "spooky action at a distance" was not entanglement but the non-local update (aka "collapse") of the wave-function. Entanglement is a non-local correlation but it's locally created, there is nothing "spooky" about it.

Why do I say this? B/c Einstein in his first arguments about the spooky action didn't use entangled particles. He used a single particle whose wave-function spreads in space & that is then then measured in one point, which instantaneously (non-locally) collapse the wave-function.

She is correct. The clip is from the NY Times, which used to idolize Einstein and endorse whatever he was doing.

Articles about quantum mechanics go on and on about spookiness, paradoxes, non-reality, incomprehensibility, etc. My complaint about this is that they are often telling about things that would be true in any theory.

In classical mechanics, two particles can have a common origin, and so measurements of them will be correlated. That is what entanglement is. Also classical Bayesian inference requires updating distributions and probabilities. That is essentially the same as collapse of the wave function.

You will say that QM is different because Bell proved that the quantum correlations are higher. They can be 80% instead of 75%. Yes, but this is a pretty subtle difference, and not worthy of all the hyped nonsense. It is not the difference between reality and non-reality.

There is a lot of confusion about entanglement. Schroedinger coined the term, and said it was the essence of quantum mechanics. He is also known for his famous cat, which illustrates superposition can collapse, but not entanglement. Superposition also has classical analogues, as in any theory that says two outcomes are possible.

Scientific American reports:

The Universe Is Not Locally Real, and the Physics Nobel Prize Winners Proved It

Elegant experiments with entangled light have laid bare a profound mystery at the heart of reality

One of the more unsettling discoveries in the past half century is that the universe is not locally real. “Real,” meaning that objects have definite properties independent of observation — an apple can be red even when no one is looking; “local” means objects can only be influenced by their surroundings, and that any influence cannot travel faster than light. Investigations at the frontiers of quantum physics have found that these things cannot both be true. Instead, the evidence shows objects are not influenced solely by their surroundings and they may also lack definite properties prior to measurement. As Albert Einstein famously bemoaned to a friend, “Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?”

This is, of course, deeply contrary to our everyday experiences. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the demise of local realism has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Blame for this achievement has now been laid squarely on the shoulders of three physicists: John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger. They equally split the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.”

Note that the Nobel citation is for experimental work, and not for any views or conclusions about quantum foundations, reality, or locality.

It is just wrong to say "evidence shows objects are not influenced solely by their surroundings and they may also lack definite properties prior to measurement." The Nobel committee did not say anything like that. All evidence is that objects are influenced solely by their surroundings. No evidence for action-at-a-distance has ever been found.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle says that you cannot measure an electron's position and momentum at the same time. So you could say that it lack definite values for position and momentum  prior to measurement. But that is all. The electron still has properties before measurement.

Physicists skeptical of quantum mechanics proposed that there were “hidden variables,” factors that existed in some imperceptible level of reality beneath the subatomic realm that contained information about a particle’s future state. They hoped in hidden-variable theories, nature could recover the local realism denied to it by quantum mechanics.

“One would have thought that the arguments of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen would produce a revolution at that moment, and everybody would have started working on hidden variables,” Popescu says. ...

The lack of interest was driven in part because John von Neumann, a highly regarded scientist, had in 1932 published a mathematical proof ruling out hidden-variable theories.

No. Quantum mechanics had been spectacularly successful in 1930, and von Neumann had a seemingly convincing argument that hidden variable theories were impossible as an alternative. EPR had some philosophical objections based on Elements of Physical Reality. Some say that is what EPR really stands for. Nobody cared at the time because everyone was convinced that quantum mechanics was right and hidden variable theories were wrong.

Now you could say that the hidden variable theories were not truly ruled out until Bell proved his theorem in 1964, the Bell test exst experiments were done in the 1980s, and the Nobel Prize was awarded in 2022. Okay, now one can truly say that the local hidden variable thoeries are wrong.

But this is not news. The conventional wisdom in 1932 was that they were wrong.

So what does any of this have to do with reality and locality? Nothing. It has been known since the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle of 1926 that measurements must be made to get definite values for observables. If that causes you to make a philosophical comment about the world not being real, you could have said that in 1926.

I don't disagree with the Nobel for Clauser et al, since it was specifically given narrowly for experimental work. They did some fine experiments confirming existing knowledge. But they did not prove anything about reality, locality, foundations, information, cryptology, or quantum computation. And the Nobel committee pointedly avoided saying that they did.

A lot of people have been pushing for a Bell Test Nobel Prize for decades, because they wanted an official endorsement of the goofy ideas in the above SciAm article. But no, the Swedes did not do that.

Update: Here is more craziness from SciAm:

Normally, hidden-variable theories and quantum mechanics predict indistinguishable experimental outcomes. What Bell realized is that under precise circumstances, an empirical discrepancy between the two can emerge.

No, that is wrong. Normally hidden variable theories have the observables commute, and there is no Heisenberg Uncertainty. Quantum mechanics from 1926 was premised on noncommuting observables, and the consequential Heisenberg Uncertainty. From that point on, no one, except maybe Einstein and a few other stubborn resistors, thought that hidden variables could be consistent with QM.

As it turned out, Bohm showed that nonlocal hidden variables might be consistent with QM. But nonlocal variables were spooky and unrealistic, and no one wanted them, not even Einstein.

In 1967, John Clauser, then a graduate student at Columbia University, accidentally stumbled across a library copy of Bell’s paper and became enthralled by the possibility of proving hidden-variable theories correct. ...

Unfortunately for Clauser and his infatuation with hidden variables, once he and Freedman completed their analysis, they could not help but conclude that they had found strong evidence against them.

That's right. Clauser was out to prove QM wrong. The whole point of the Bell test experiments was to disprove QM. They could win a Nobel Prize for that, but not for confirming what everyone already knew.

There are physicists doing wonderful experiments testing whether energy and momentum are conserved. If they ever find a violation of a conservation law, they will be big heroes for discovering a new phenomenon. But they do not win any prizes for just confirming known laws.

What Bell tests allow physicists to do is remove the bias of anthropocentric aesthetic judgments from the equation; purging from their work the parts of human cognition that recoil at the possibility of eerily inexplicable entanglement, or that scoff at hidden-variable theories as just more debates over how many angels may dance on the head of a pin. The award honors Clauser, Aspect and Zeilinger, but it is testament to all the researchers who were unsatisfied with superficial explanations about quantum mechanics, and who asked their questions even when doing so was unpopular.

Wow, I don't even know what this is saying. It was never unpopular to do an experiment confirming QM. And purging the bias of human cognition? That is just nuts.

We have a trillion dollar semiconductor and laser industry founded on QM. The theory is not wrong. I just read somewhere that the world now makes 20 trillion transistors every second. They are understood with QM. The Bell test experiments are nice, but they did not tell us anything new.

Brian Greene Explains the Nobel Prize

Physicist Brian Greene explains in a 7 minute video:

#QuantumEntanglement #nobelprize #BrianGreene
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for their groundbreaking work in Quantum Entanglement. Here is a brief visual summary of the essential physics.

Greene is usually a good explainer, but this does not explain the award well.

z He spends the first couple of minutes arguing that Newtonian mechanics is deterministic, white quantum mechanics is not. I dont think this has anything to do with the Bell test work.

At 4:50, he says that a measurement on one particle can have an instantaneous effect on a distant particle. This is false. Any experimental proof of this would have immediate Nobel prizes.

He says that Einstein wrote a 1935 paper arguing that QM cannot be the whole story. And this Nobel prize winning work addresses that. But Greene does not explain whether the work proved Einstein right or wrong.

Einstein implied that he preferred a local hidden variable theory. The Bell test experiments prove that impossible, so they prove Einstein wrong. Greene says Einstein also wanted a non-probabilistic theory, although that is not so clear from the paper.

I guess Greene is trying to say that Einstein rejected mainstream thinking in 1935, and this prize is for work showing that the mainstream thinking was correct.

But dozens of Nobel prizes have been given for quantum mechanics, so why give another one now?

Greene answer seems to be that the prize work proved action-at-a-distance. It does not.

Nobel Prize for Bell Test Experiments

It has long been argued that John Stewart Bell deserved a Nobel prize for work he did in the 1960s. A prize has now been given for experiments testing his theorem:

Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger have each conducted groundbreaking experiments using entangled quantum states, where two particles behave like a single unit even when they are separated. Their results have cleared the way for new technology based upon quantum information. ...

For a long time, the question was whether the correlation was because the particles in an entangled pair contained hidden variables, instructions that tell them which result they should give in an experiment. In the 1960s, John Stewart Bell developed the mathematical inequality that is named after him. This states that if there are hidden variables, the correlation between the results of a large number of measurements will never exceed a certain value. However, quantum mechanics predicts that a certain type of experiment will violate Bell’s inequality, thus resulting in a stronger correlation than would otherwise be possible.

It was not much of a question. John von Neumann and others convinced everyone that it was impossible in 1931.

These Bell test experiments proved that quantum mechanics could not be replaced by a classical theory. Some say that they are the most profound results in all of science, but they really just confirm what was discovered around 1930.

Bell, Clauser, and others were hoping to disprove QM. That certainly would have been a big deal, but the experiments only confirmed QM.

Many others say that the experiments proved that the world is random and nonlocal, and showed the possibility of quantum cryptography and quantum computing. The Nobel citation conspicuously avoids endorsing any of these ideas.

Indeed, the overwhelming empirical evidence in the realms of atomic and optical physics was, to most practitioners, confirmation of the potent predictive power of quantum mechanics. Thus, to them, the experiments of Clauser and Aspect came as no surprise. Others saw them as fundamental discoveries about the nature of physical reality, providing an ultimate verification of quantum mechanics in a regime that is far removed from classical laws and reasoning.

This year’s Nobel prize is for experimental work.

Just for experimental work, and not for any philosophical ramblings about locality or randomness or reality.

It does acknowledge several researsch topics:

Today, quantum technology refers to a very broad range of research and development. As an illustration we mention that the EU financed Quantum Technology Flagship [30] lists four main areas: quantum computing, quantum simulation, quantum communication and quantum metrology and sensing. In all of these areas quantum entanglement plays a fundamental role. This is an inappropriate venue to survey this vast landscape of innovative research.

But no prize for this stuff. It only says that Bell test experiments could make quantum key distribution more secure. Maybe so, but it is hard to see how QKD could ever be as secure as the non-quantum methods that are used all over the world today.

Here is the NY Times account:

The laureates’ research builds on the work of John Stewart Bell, a physicist who strove in the 1960s to understand whether particles, having flown too far apart for there to be normal communication between them, can still function in concert, also known as quantum entanglement.

According to quantum mechanics, particles can exist simultaneously in two or more places. They do not take on formal properties until they are measured or observed in some way. By taking measurements of one particle, like its position or “spin,” a change is observed in its partner, no matter how far away it has traveled from its pair.

No, QM does not teach that a particle can exist in two places at once. That is just an interpretation. And no, measuring an entangled particle does not cause a change to be observed in its partner. That is nonlocality spookiness that the Nobel citation managed to avoid. There is no action-at-a-distance.

Measuring one particle can affect what is predicted about the other. That is called entanglement. It is also true about classical (non-quantum) systems. The difference is the strength of the correlation. That is what Bell showed.

Bell later falsely claimed that he proved nonlocality. The Nobel citation politely avoids mentioning this.

Prize for Discoverying Neantherthal Ancestry

The Nobel Prize folks announced:

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to award the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Svante Pääbo for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution

Humanity has always been intrigued by its origins. Where do we come from, and how are we related to those who came before us? What makes us, Homo sapiens, different from other hominins?

Through his pioneering research, Svante Pääbo accomplished something seemingly impossible: sequencing the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans. He also made the sensational discovery of a previously unknown hominin, Denisova. Importantly, Pääbo also found that gene transfer had occurred from these now extinct hominins to Homo sapiens following the migration out of Africa around 70,000 years ago. This ancient flow of genes to present-day humans has physiological relevance today, for example affecting how our immune system reacts to infections.

That last sentence was probably thrown in to justify giving this award in "Physiology or Medicine". They don't usually give awards in archeology or paleontology.

Paabo discovered that modern non-African humans are descended from Neanderthals. So why do they keep calling the Neanderthals "extinct"? Neanderthals were thought to be extinct before Paabo, but the DNA evidence proved that Neanderthals mated with other hominins, resulting in today's humans. Neanderthals are no more extinct than the other hominin ancestors.

The wording is so strange. Saying "gene transfer had occurred from these now extinct hominins to Homo sapiens" is like saying, "gene transfer occurred from the now extinct Spanish Conquistadors to humans in the Aztec empire. The conquistadors were human also.They mated and had offspring.  

You could say that we have more DNA in common with the Africans than the Neanderthal, so it is more appropriate to call the Africans the homo sapiens. Your Neanderthal DNA is about the same as that of your great-great-great-grandfather.

But the Neanderthals had big brains, and there is no evidence that the Africans were any smarter. Maybe interbreeding resulted in humans smarter than either group. The Neanderthals had brow ridges, but I don't think that made them sub-human.

The Nobel folks are not the only ones who badmouth Neanderthals. A lot of others do also. I think it used to be done in order to preserve some Adam and Eve Out of Africa story. But Paabo proved that Neanderthal were human ancestors about ten years ago, so the story needs to be updated.

The Physics prize went for Bell test experiments. More on this later.

Einstein did not Accept Geometric Relativity in 1911

From a new paper:

When A. Einstein realized, in 1907, the incompatibility of his ideas with the Newtonian's concepts about gravity he tried to reconcile his ideas with the special relativity and find out a new form to treat gravity using the equivalent principle as a light. Even when H. Minkowski found the geometry meaning of the Lorentz transformation A. Einstein did not use it at all in 1911.

The paper is mainly about Einstein's 1911 assumption that gravity alters the speed of light. This assumption was later abandoned.

The author is trying to credit Einstein with good ideas, not undermine him. But look at what this says.

Everybody knew in 1907 that relativity was inconsistent with gravity. H. Poincare wrote a famous paper in 1905 proposing a relativistic theory of gravity. I think H. Lorentz did also. If Einstein just realized it in 1907, it is because it took him two years to understand from others.

Relativity caught on big after Minkowski published his geometric version in 1907, referencing Poincare's 1905 version. It is that geometric version that is in use today, not Einstein's version. But note that four years later, in 1911, Einstein was still rejecting it.

I wrote a book about this. See this blog post, for more about how Einstein rejected geometric relativity. When someone credited Einstein with a geometrical interpretation, Einstein published a letter in 1911 denying it.

It is baffling how anyone could credit Einstein for special relativity, or for recognizing the need for a relativistic theory of gravity. As you can see, he was well behind others.