Grounded in 19C materialism

The UK Guardian reports:

Werner Heisenberg, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, once observed that history could be divided into periods according to what people of the time made of matter. In his book Physics and Philosophy, published in the early 60s, he argued that at the beginning of the 20th century we entered a new period. It was then that quantum physics threw off the materialism that dominated the natural sciences of the 19th century. ...

Today we live in the 21st century, and it seems that we are still stuck with this narrow and rigid view of the things. As Rupert Sheldrake puts it in his new book, published this week, The Science Delusion: "The belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a 19th-century ideology."

String theorist Lubos Motl adds:

Of course, the main arena where this obsolete viewpoint manifests itself is quantum mechanics. A huge percentage of scientists, especially those who are not working with quantum mechanics on a daily basis and in "practical proportions", still think that the world is ultimately classical in the sense that everything we have ever observed is a reflection of an objective reality that in principle contains some totally accurate information that we could learn (and all of us could agree about) if we only overcame various obstacles all of which are surely just technical in character...

On the other hand, there are lots of crazy people who are convinced that quantum physics is destined to prove their particular religious or spiritual speculations about the usual topics that religious and superstitious people love to care about – afterlife, soul flying away from your body, direct communication with the Creator, methods to make outcomes of quantum experiments more favorable to subjects who have prayed, telepathy, other paranormal phenomena, and so on.

I agree with Motl here. Science writing seems divided among (1) those stuck in 19C materialism, (2) promoters of pseudoscientific mysticism, and (3) physicists who denounce the first two groups, and yet promote their own incoherent interpretations of modern physics. Relativity and quantum mechanics seem less well understood today than in 1930. I have my sharpest criticisms for that third group, because they should know better.

I don't think that the situation is improving. There are textbooks from decades ago that explained quantum mechanics well, and yet modern physicists and respectable science publications continue to say goofy things about quantum mechanics.

Who believes in many worlds?

The Many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics is often claimed to be widely accepted, such as by this poll:

"Political scientist" L David Raub reports a poll of 72 of the "leading cosmologists and other quantum field theorists" about the "Many-Worlds Interpretation" and gives the following response breakdown [T].

1) "Yes, I think MWI is true" 58%
2) "No, I don't accept MWI" 18%
3) "Maybe it's true but I'm not yet convinced" 13%
4) "I have no opinion one way or the other" 11%

Amongst the "Yes, I think MWI is true" crowd listed are Stephen Hawking and Nobel Laureates Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman. Gell-Mann and Hawking recorded reservations with the name "many-worlds", but not with the theory's content. Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg is also mentioned as a many-worlder, although the suggestion is not when the poll was conducted, presumably before 1988 (when Feynman died). The only "No, I don't accept MWI" named is Penrose.

However, I believe that this is incorrect. Hawking, Gell-Mann, Feynman, and Weinberg do not favor MWI in their latest opinions on the subject. Eg, this recent paper of Gell-Mann on the subject mentions MWI only in a footnote without any endorsement.

Hawking's recent book on the subject, The Grand Design, talks a lot about the multiverse, but does not mention MWI at all. Weinberg's recent paper on the subject has only negative comments about MWI. Also, PBS says:

[Physicist Richard] Feynman went on record as saying, in essence, "Well, this is not possible because there can't be multiple universes."

Apparently some of these physicists have discussed MWI in the context of the other worlds being mathematical fictions that are not real. That makes MWI trivial. The MWI advocates use the term to mean that the other worlds are real. While there are experiments that would convince me of quantum computing, supersymmetry, global warming, etc, there are no experiments that would convince me of MWI. The concept is incoherent and untestable.

No quantum gravity is testable

Freeman Dyson explains:

A simple calculation, based on the known laws of gravitation and quantum mechanics, leads to a striking result. To detect a single graviton with a LIGO apparatus, the mirrors must be exactly so heavy that they will attract each other with irresistable force and collapse into a black hole. In other words, nature herself forbids us to observe a single graviton with this kind of apparatus.

I propose as a hypothesis, based on this single thought-experiment, that single gravitons may be unobservable by any conceivable apparatus.

If this hypothesis were true, it would imply that theories of quantum gravity are untestable and scientifically meaningless. The classical universe and the quantum universe could then live together in peaceful coexistence. No incompatibility between the two pictures could ever be demonstrated. Both pictures of the universe could be true, and the search for a unified theory could turn out to be an illusion.

I make a similar argument in my book. I say that there is no incompatibility between the laws of gravitation and quantum mechanics, and that unified theory is untestable and scientifically meaningless.

The current SciAm claims that space is quantized:

Craig Hogan believes that the world is fuzzy. This is not a metaphor. Hogan, a physicist at the University of Chicago and director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center near Batavia, Ill., thinks that if we were to peer down at the tiniest subdivisions of space and time, we would find a universe filled with an intrinsic jitter, the busy hum of static. This hum comes not from particles bouncing in and out of being or other kinds of quantum froth that physicists have argued about in the past. Rather Hogan’s noise would come about if space was not, as we have long assumed, smooth and continuous, a glassy backdrop to the dance of fields and particles. Hogan’s noise arises if space is made of chunks. Blocks. Bits. Hogan’s noise would imply that the universe is digital.

The author says that he is building a machine to test the hypothesis. I predict that he fails to find any grainyness in space, but the quantum gravity folks are not deterred in the slightest.

Weinberg says Einstein was wrong

I just watched Steven Weinberg on C-SPAN2 Book TV plugging his latest book:

Q: What was Einstein wrong about?

Weinberg: Oh, a number of things. One of the reasons I wrote that essay was to show the spirit of science that even the -- we recognize that even the greatest -- Einstein was certainly the greatest scientist of the twentieth century, and one of the greatest of all times -- could be wrong about things and we are capable of pointing that out. Einstein's work is not a sacred text that we are forbidden to depart from.

Of course Einstein made mistakes. There is a whole book on Einstein's Mistakes. Here is Weinberg's essay on Einstein's mistakes.

Weinberg is a big-shot physicist, and his opinion of Einstein should be taken seriously, but I think that he idolizes Einstein for faulty reasons. Here is Weinberg's 2005 praise for Einstein:

Most advances in the history of science have been marked by discoveries about nature, but at certain turning points we have made discoveries about science itself. These discoveries lead to changes in how we score our work, in what we consider to be an acceptable theory.

For an example look back to a discovery made just one hundred years ago. As you recall, before 1905 there had been numerous unsuccessful efforts to detect changes in the speed of light due to the motion of the earth through the ether. Attempts were made by Fitzgerald, Lorentz, and others to construct a mathematical model of the electron (which was then conceived to be the chief constituent of all matter), that would explain how rulers contract when moving through the ether in just the right way to keep the apparent speed of light unchanged. Einstein instead offered a symmetry principle, which stated that not just the speed of light but all the laws of nature are unaffected by a transformation to a frame of reference in uniform motion. Lorentz grumbled that Einstein was simply assuming what he and others had been trying to prove. But history was on Einstein’s side. The 1905 Special Theory of Relativity was the beginning of a general acceptance of symmetry principles as a valid basis for physical theories.

This was how Special Relativity made a change in science itself. From one point of view, Special Relativity was no big thing — it just amounted to the replacement of one 10 parameter spacetime symmetry group, the Galileo group, with another 10 parameter group, the Lorentz group. But never before had a symmetry principle been taken as a legitimate hypothesis on which to base a physical theory...

No, it was Poincare who clearly articulated the Principle of relativity as applying to all of the laws of physics, and the Lorentz group as a symmetry group. These were published before Einstein wrote anything about relativity, and Einstein's famous 1905 paper lacks these ideas. These are even Poincare's terms, not Einstein's, and everyone accepts them as Poincare's terms. Poincare takes the ideas further, and searches for laws of physics that are invariant under the Lorentz group. He was years ahead of Einstein. So while Weinberg praises the importance of "symmetry principles as a valid basis for physical theories", that is what Poincare did with relativity, not Einstein.

Lorentz did just grumble that Einstein was simply assuming what he and others had been trying to prove. Lorentz said that Einstein postulated what he (Lorentz) and Poincare had proved. Again, there cannot be any serious doubt about it. Einstein's famous 1905 paper start by saying that he is postulating Lorentz's 1895 theorem of corresponding states, without mentioning the 1904 improvements. Poincare's 1905 relativity paper proves the Lorentz invariance of Maxwell's equations, but Einstein's 1905 does not, and merely postulates what Lorentz had proved. This is all explained in my book.

Using Galileo to push climate policy

Water conservationist Peter Gleick (and brother of a famous science writer) writes in Forbes magazine, starting:

When scientific findings have big consequences for policy and politics, anti-science ideology and denial flourish. Religious ideology led the Church to deny Galileo’s scientific findings about the motion of the planets and stars and has fed the continuing denial of evolution in favor of fundamentalist claims of creationism. Stalinist ideology denied the science of genetics and led to a crippling of Soviet agriculture and biology for decades. And a mix of anti-government, pro-fossil fuel, and anti-environmental ideology underlies current denial of human-caused climate change.

Those who use science to promote leftist political policies nearly always invoke Galileo and Darwin. If this history is really so important, then we should get it right.

The Church never denied any of Galileo’s scientific findings. You can read the Wikipedia Galileo affair for details. A historian disects the myth:

According to popular legend, when Galileo presented his telescope to senior cardinals/Jesuits/Aristotelian philosophers/the Inquisition (delete as applicable) they refused to even look through it. This tale has become a standard trope for when we want to attack anyone who won't accept 'obvious' evidence. As the last chapter of my book will be on Galileo, I thought I should try to nail down the primary sources for the legend. ...

So who refused to look through Galileo's telescope? According to the historical record, no one did for certain. The argument was over what they could see once they once they did look.

In particular, no one disputed the moons of Jupiter or the phases of Venus that Galileo discovered and published in 1610. The Church invited him to write a book on heliocentrism, as long as he presented the scientific arguments for and against. His book's main argument was that the motion of the Earth was proved by the once-a-day tides. The Church recognized that this argument was bogus. There are two tides a day, not one, and they are caused by the gravity of the Moon, not the motion of the Earth. The book ignored the Tychonic system, the leading geocentric system of the previous 40 years.

Dawkins believes a Galileo myth

Richard Dawkins told this story a year ago:

I was told this by a tutor, Arthur Cain, and I have never found the original source. Perhaps you know it? Galileo was once demonstrating something through his telescope to a learned man, who said something like this, "Signor Galileo, your demonstration is so convincing that, were it not that Aristotle positively states the contrary, I would believe you." For a modern scientist, the issue is simple: Galileo had a telescope. Aristotle didn't. Yet, in the mind of this savant, Aristotle's word still trumped Galileo's. This sums up, in my mind, what is so baffling about the whole way of thinking that I presume characterises theology.

Dawkins was University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science, and spends much of his time attacking theology. And yet his presumed characterization of theology is some story that he has never been able to verify?!

The myth here is that Catholic Church scholars refused to look thru his telescope, and accept his discoveries. The myth is completely false. Galileo had to rush his 1610 book, Starry Messenger, into print because others were seeing the same thing thru the newly discovered telescope. No Church scholar or anyone else disputed what could be seen thru his telescope.

Symmetry and conservation laws

One of the most important results of 20th century mathematical physics Emmy Noether's theorem of 1918. She proved that there is a correspondence between symmetries of a physical system, and conservation laws like the principle that energy cannot be created or destroyed.

A new paper traces the history of this idea, and finds that a similar idea was discovered earlier:

In this paper we provide a translation of a paper by T. Levi-Civita, published in 1899, about the correspondence between symmetries and conservation laws for Hamilton's equations. We discuss the results of this paper and their relationship with the more general classical results by E. Noether.

Levi-Civita is also credited (by Einstein biographers) with tutoring Einstein on general relativity. Einstein had published some wrong papers on the subject, until Levi-Civita and Hilbert showed him how the equations could be Lorentz covariant.

Peter Woit writes that Noether's theorem is his favorite deep explanation:

It turns out that there’s a general principle at work: for any symmetry of a physical system, you can define an associated observable quantity that comes with a conservation law:

1. The symmetry of time translation gives energy
2. The symmetries of spatial translation give momentum
3. Rotational symmetry gives angular momentum
4. Phase transformation symmetry gives charge

In classical physics, a piece of mathematics known as Noether’s theorem (named after the mathematician Emmy Noether) associates such observable quantities to symmetries.