Physics skepticism

The two great 20C physical theories are relativity and Quantum mechanics. There is also a well-known history of relativity skepticism for various reasons. Some of this continues today, as with this list of Counterexamples to Relativity.

I am coming to the view that skepticism about quantum mechanics is 100x greater. Every month papers get published in reputable physics journals that question aspects of the theory that I thought were settled in 1930. The issues involve interpretations, ontology, foundations, or some paradox. I guess there are occasional arguments about the relativistic twin paradox, but no reputable physicist would waste time on an issue that was settled a century ago. And yet reputable physicis do waste time on silly quantum paradoxes.

Einstein was famously a quantum skeptic, but the consensus at the time was that he was wrong. I am going to post more about why I think physicists are wrong today.

Einstein's clock paradox

Galina Weinstein has posted another Einstein draft paper, Einstein's Clocks and Langevin's Twins.

2. Clock Paradox
From this Einstein derived a "peculiar consequence":3
"If at the points A and B of K there are clocks at rest which, considered from the system at rest, are running synchronously, and if the clock at A is moved with the velocity v along the line connecting B, then upon arrival of this clock at B the two clocks no longer synchronize,...".

The above "peculiar consequence" came to be known as "the Clock Paradox".

John Stachel explained that, the most new important feature of time to emerge from the special theory of relativity is the clock paradox: a comparison of one clock in a moving system with many clocks in the rest system; there is no reciprocity, but one-many relationship. The clock paradox that was predicted by Einstein embodies the difference between Einstein and pre-relativistic electrodynamics of moving bodies.4

Einstein proposed an experimental test for the clock paradox: "From this we conclude that a balance-wheel clock that is located at the Earth's equator must run very slightly slower than an absolutely identical clock, subjected to otherwise identical conditions, that is located at one of the Earth's poles".5

Lorentz and Poincare had the dilation formulas previously, but did not explicitly mention the possibility that two clocks could fall out of synchronization just because they are moving differently. The closest was Poincare's 1904 St. Louis lecture, where he explains that a moving clock runs slow compared to the other, but did not say that it led to a paradox:

The watches adjusted in that way will not mark, therefore, the true time; they will mark what may be called the local time, so that one of them will be slow of the other. It matters little, since we have no means of perceiving it. All the phenomena which happen at A, for example, will be late, but all will be equally so, and the observer will not perceive it, since his watch is slow; so, as the principle of relativity requires, he will have no means of knowing whether he is at rest or in absolute motion.

But Einstein's experimental test is wrong. Two such clocks will not show a difference.

The closely related twin paradox causes trouble for relativity students even today, but Weinstein sees it as a Jewish issue:

The clock paradox was also an excuse for anti-Semites to blame the theory of relativity as an anti-German science and blame its author as well. In Berlin, Ernst Gehrcke, Philipp Lenard, and Paul Weyland advocated an anti-relativity propaganda campaign after 1916.17

In November 1918 Einstein answered the first two by a Galilean dialogue between a relativist and a critic of the theory of relativity, "Dialogue about Objections to the Theory of Relativity" ...

Those arguments for and against the clock paradox did not involve any Jewish issues, as far as I know. Even when GPS was built a few years ago, I am told that some people were skeptical that relativity would be needed. Even today, Weinstein seems not to realize that Einstein's 1905 experiment test is wrong.

I don't deny that there was some German anti-semitism, and maybe some anti-German bias outside Germany. I just don't see what it had to do with the clock paradox, or with relativity skepticism.

What assumption is wrong?

SciAm announces:

Which of the basic assumptions of modern physics are wrong? Announcing the fourth Foundational Questions Institute essay contest

There’s something unnerving about unifying physics. The two theories that need to be unified, quantum field theory and Einstein’s general theory of relativity, are both highly successful. Both make predictions good to as many decimal places as experimentalists can manage. Both are grounded in compelling principles. Both do have flaws — including an unfortunate tendency to produce the number ∞ — but those flaws remain safely behind the scenes, never undermining the theories’ empirical successes.

And yet, if the theories are incompatible, something has to give. That is what makes unification so hard. In conferences, I see physicists go down the list of assumptions that underpin their theories. Each, it seems, is rock solid. But they can’t all be right. Maybe one will, on closer inspection, prove to be not like the others. Or maybe physicists have left the culprit off their list because it is so deeply embedded in their way of thinking that they don’t even recognize as an assumption. As economist John Maynard Keynes wrote, “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify… into every corner of our minds.”

So, for its latest essay contest, the Foundational Questions Institute is asking entrants to ferret out these mental interlopers: “Which of Our Basic Physical Assumptions Are Wrong?”

I am tempted to submit an essay arguing that our basic wrong assumption is that there is some incompatibility between relativity and quantum mechanics, and that physics needs to unified by resolving it.

Trashing SJ Gould

California CSULB Psychology professor Kevin MacDonald writes:

Stephen Jay Gould is definitely high on the list of ethnically motivated pseudoscientists ... I was struck by how many evolutionary biologists viewed Gould as a charlatan and were willing to say so in public. ...

Gould’s importance comes from his position at Harvard as well as his access to the media....

Gould is a Jewish intellectual hero, so it’s not surprising to see attempts to rehabilitate him. ...

Gould was a major voice of the Jewish intellectual left — especially influential in the decline of Darwinism in the social sciences. To that extent, his life work can be seen as an evolutionary battle on behalf of his own group against his perceived enemies — people of European descent whom he blamed for historical anti-Jewish attitudes and ultimately for the Holocaust.

I have criticized the late Gould, but I was not aware of the connections between his writings and Jewish identity. For examples of my criticisms, I did not agree with him denying human evolution, liking to quote Freud, saying that science is often a political prejudice, and giving bad descriptions of scientific facts.

For an example of his silliness, here is a video of Gould quoting Freud and Marx to argue that great ideas are in dehumanizing revolutions, that evolution does not make progress, and that science is not objective.

All of this understates the problem with him. Gould was not just a Harvard professor with access to the media, as MacDonald says. He was the most famous scientist in the world, and he was the leading public expositor of what science was all about. He was elected president of thee AAAS, the leading American science organization. His most famous work, The Mismeasure of Man, became of the most broadly acclaimed science books of the last 50 years.

And yet nearly everything Gould says in this book is wrong. He was repeatedly refuted by other scholars, and never defended himself against the criticisms, except to imply that his critics were racists. He was a fraud.

Gould used (or misused) his status to promote his leftist (Marxist) views. Scientists are entitled to their political and religious views, of course, but he would give fallacious pseudoscientific arguments for them. There are also many non-Jews who are arrogant, over-opinionated, mistaken, and over-ambitious.

Gould has been called "the second most influential historian of science (next to Thomas Kuhn)." A SciAm blog just reprinted a profile of Kuhn that shows his confusing disregard for scientific truth. Both were famously promoters of Paradigm shift theory, which I sharply criticize in my book as being historically inaccurate and faulty as a description of science.

I used to think that it was impossible for a high-status and highly-respected scientist to be so wrong on so many things. (There is also a hot dispute between Dawkins and EO Wilson over what evolution is all about, but I have not yet decided who is correct. I also got banned from Jerry Coyne's blog for saying, among other things, that Coyne harshly criticized Gould.)

New books reviewed

The NY Times has a review of Free Radicals: The secret anarchy of science, by Michael Brooks:

Scientists overlook inconvenient results, writes Mr. Brooks, a British science writer who holds a doctorate in quantum physics and writes a weekly column for The New Statesman. They ignore data that conflict with their ideas. Einstein, for example, bristled at criticism of his papers, withdrawing one submitted to The Physical Review after an anonymous peer reviewer pointed out an error. He published the paper elsewhere, Mr. Brooks writes, “complete with the mistake.”

Not exactly. Einstein revised the paper in accordance with some of the corrections to the anonymous referee. No credit to the referee, of course, and still wrong about gravity waves. See also this description (pdf).

There is also a podcast review saying that Einstein once did an experiment where got values of 1.02 and 1.45, when he was expecting 1.00. He published 1.02. A few years later, others discovered that the true value was 2.00.

The same paper has a review of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, Chad Orzel:

Discussing the Michelson-Morley experiment in the 1880s, which purported to disprove the previous findings of the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell about the speed of light, Professor Orzel calls it “arguably the greatest failed experiment in the history of physics.”

I do not think that they claimed to disprove Maxwell. What Michelson actually wrote in his 1881 paper was:

This conclusion directly contradicts the explanation of the phenomenon of aberration which has been hitherto generally accepted, and which presupposes that the earth moves through the ether, the latter remaining at rest.

The experiment showed that certain aether theories were wrong, but said nothing about whether the aether exists or not.

Maxwell (no relation to my dog) was right, as years of further experimentation would show. Not only that, but the failure of Michelson-Morley helped vanquish the old notion of a “luminiferous aether” through which light was supposed to move, and contributed to the mathematical tools Einstein needed to publish his first relativity papers in 1905. As Professor Orzel tells Emmy: “Einstein succeeded where others had failed by showing that a careful treatment of time and motion make these effects inevitable.”

Emmy: “Wait, Einstein didn’t come up with relativity on his own?”

Orzel: “Other people worked out all of the mathematical apparatus before him.”

Emmy: “So why is Einstein all famous, while I haven’t heard of these other guys?”

Orzel: “Because they all balked at the weirdness of the predictions, so none of them got it right.”

This is explained in my book, How Einstein Ruined Physics. It is not true that "they all balked at the weirdness". One of the weirdest predictions was that Michelson-Morley experiment, but Einstein's predecessors squarely addressed that and Einstein did not. Einstein historians mostly say that Einstein may not have even known about the experiment, altho Einstein's own explanations are contradictory on that point. The next weirdest prediction was local time, which contributed to the Nobel Prize in 1902 well before Einstein, as explained below.

There are 500 books on Einstein besides mine, but none give a straight answer to the dog's question, “So why is Einstein all famous, while I haven’t heard of these other guys?”

Following up Obama being the first gay President, physics popularist Brian Greene has a Newsweek cover story on his multiverse book:

“What really interests me is whether God had any choice in creating the world.”

That’s how Albert Einstein, in his characteristically poetic way, asked whether our universe is the only possible universe. ...

The multiverse, as this vast cosmos is called, is one of the most polarizing concepts to have emerged from physics in decades, inspiring heated arguments between those who propose that it is the next phase in our understanding of reality, and those who claim that it is utter nonsense, a travesty born of theoreticians letting their imaginations run wild.

I am going with utter nonsense. None of this is scientific.

Einstein's performance review

A reader sends the '05 Annual Performance Review: Albert Einstein that he might have gotten from the Swiss patent office. Funny. He unifies space and time, but that is not part of his job description, and he need to learn to share credit with others appropriately.

While Einstein's 1905 papers made a splash, it was not that big a splash. He continued to work at the patent office, and did not get an academic job until several years later after (1) Poincare published a geometric spacetime version of relativity, (2) Minkowski published a widely disseminated version of Poincare's relativity, (3) Poincare moved on to other subjects, and (4) Minkowski died. All of a sudden, relativity was a hot topic and Einstein was the young expert. The offers flowed in.

The closest I have to an actual performance review is this:

On July 6, 1909, Einstein handed his resignation notice from the Patent Office to Haller, effective October 15 1909.114 Haller placed on record that the Expert II Class had performed highly valued services. His departure is a loss to the office. However, Herr Einstein feels that teaching and scientific research are his real profession, and for that reason the Director of the Office made no attempt to bind him to the Office by better financial arrangements.115

The same article has this account of Einstein getting his first academic job at Zurich:

At the beginning of 1909, while Einstein was a Privatdozent at the University of Bern, Alfred Kleiner attended one of Einstein's lectures. His impression was that Einstein lectured poorly. ...

Einstein gave a lecture to the "Physical Society", and there he was able to correct the impression. On April 28th, 1909 Einstein reported to his close friend Conrad Habicht: "I am fairly sure now of getting my post at Zürich University".111

The faculty was not eager to accept Einstein. They wrote, "Herr Dr Einstein is an Israelite and since precisely to the Israelites among scholars are ascribed (in numerous cases not entirely without cause) all kinds of unpleasant peculiarities of character, such as intrusiveness, impudence, and a shopkeeper's mentality in the perception of their academic position. It should be said, however, that also among the Israelites there exist men who do not exhibit a trace of these disagreeable qualities and that it is not proper, therefore to disqualify a man only because he happens to be a Jew". And the committee and faculty did not consider it compatible with their dignity in democratic Zürich to adopt anti-Semitism as a matter of policy; so that the information which Kleiner provided about Einstein "reassured" them.112

Quantum guru shuts down comments

MIT quantum computing guru Scott Aaronson now says:

I’ve further decided to impose a moratorium, on this blog, on all discussions about the validity of quantum mechanics in the microscopic realm, the reality of quantum entanglement, or the correctness of theorems such as Bell’s Theorem.

Furthermore, he has blocked my comment from a week before his moratorium:

Wow, this is getting nasty, as you try to start a boycott of FQXi. Why stop there? Let me remind you that MIT has a professor named Noam Chomsky who has endorsed X who politically supports Y. You can fill in the blanks. Therefore I am refusing any offer of an MIT professorship and urging all others to do the same, until MIT stops lending its legitimacy to Chomsky. I haven’t been getting any money from MIT anyway, but maybe communication about this issue with the MIT leadership will give hope that we’ll be able to resolve it to all sane parties’ satisfaction.

Just this week, Nature Physics published a paper that was submitted under the nonsensical title, “The quantum state cannot be interpreted statistically?” That title led me to believe that the authors had some mathematical misunderstanding of some trivial concept. Fortunately the editors required the authors to change the title to something less silly, as the paper does have some merit. But papers related to Bell’s theorem go downhill from there. For some reason, the whole subject causes otherwise educated people to say crazy things. Many physics professors advise their students to stay away from the subject, in the same way that they advise not to try LSD. So Joy Christian did not take the advice. He might still be right about quantum computers being impossible.

Bell’s Theorem is of course correct as a mathematical theorem, but its physical significance is hotly disputed. Some people claim that it is one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science, and others say that it is a trivial observation of no importance. No Nobel Prize has been given for work related to it. Gerard 't Hooft is arguably the most widely respected theoretical phyisicist alive today, and he disputes the accepted interpretations of Bell's theorem in 2007 and 2009 papers. No one disputes the validity of quantum mechanics until people like Aaronson claim that it entails quantum computers, and that has never been shown. I think that Aaronson was stung by some of the criticism of his boycott of a research institution that supports a quantum computing skeptic.

Aaronson has built is whole career on the quantum computing hypothesis, even tho he acknowledges that no quantum computer has been built, may not be built for a century, and may not even be possible. That is okay with me. I just object to him saying that it is necessary from the validity of quantum mechanics, and that skeptics should be ignored because they cannot prove the impossibility of quantum computers.

Update: Joy Christian has been fired.