New book on existence

I quoted Jim Holt on physics philosophy, but I did not realize that he had his own book on the subject in the oven. NewScientist reports:

NOVELIST Martin Amis once said we are about five Einsteins away from explaining the universe's existence. "His estimate seemed about right to me," says Jim Holt at the beginning of his book Why Does the World Exist? "But I wondered," he continues, "could any of those Einsteins be around today? It was obviously not my place to aspire to be one of them. But if I could find one, or maybe two or three or even four of them, and then sort of arrange them in the right order... well, that would be an excellent quest." Thus begins his humorous yet deeply profound journey to solve the great mystery: why is there something rather than nothing? ...

For instance, Holt writes that a theory of everything, uniting relativity and quantum mechanics, would be the closest science can get to an explanation for existence. "But the final theory of physics would still leave a residue of mystery - why this force, why this law?" Holt writes. "It would not live up to the principle that every fact must have an explanation: the Principle of Sufficient Reason. On the face of it, the only theory that does obey this principle is the Theory of Nothingness. That is why it's surprising that the Theory of Nothingness turns out to be false, that there is a world of Something."

Sounds as if he does not take the subject too seriously. I saw Larry Krauss on the Comedy channel Colbert Report claiming that there is no God and physics can explain a universe from nothing, but he got stumped on whether something could come from the nothing that is God.

Needle of mathematical consistency

The Quantum Pontiff blog agrees with this comment:

…Gil and other modern skeptics need a theory of physics which is compatible with existing quantum mechanics, existing observations of noise processes, existing classical computers, and potential future reductions of noise to sub-threshold (but still constant) rates, all while ruling out large-scale quantum computers. Such a ropy camel-shaped theory would have difficulty in passing through the needle of mathematical consistency.

That is saying that it is hard to construct a mathematically consistent theory that excludes quantum computers. But it is also hard to construct a mathematically consistent theory that includes quantum computers.

My FQXi essay tries to explain the foolishness of this "needle of mathematical consistency" argument. There is a similar argument about Bell test experiments. They are unremarkable except that many physicists and philosophers find that they conflict with their prejudices about mathematical needles, whatever they are.

His comment is like saying that gravity is impossible because it is hard to see how quantum gravity would pass through the needle of mathematical consistency. People are always making weird consistency arguments about quantum mechanics. If your take those people seriously, then there is no reality. But you take them just seriously enough to believe in quantum computers? I say that quantum computers are impossible.

The Socrates cave allegory

A core principle of quantum mechanics is the idea that observations require projections to a lower dimension. I believe that this idea is at the root of many quantum confusions.

The idea was described by the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates in about 400 BC, and written by Plato as the Allegory of the Cave. People in the cave see shadows, and do not appreciate the 3-D nature of the objects causing the shadows. They are seeing a 2-D projection of 3-D objects.

A photograph is also a 2-D projection of a 3-D scene. A measurement with a meter stick is a 1-D projection. Other observations can also be viewed as projections of some more complex reality.

Quantum mechanics is the first theory to truly take the cave allegory seriously. It has a theory for how observations correspond to projections, without ever trying to explain what is outside the cave. The theory concocts representations of reality, but is never sure about what the reality is.

Much of the confusion about quantum mechanics occurs when people try to ask about what the theory says about reality. It does not directly say anything about reality. It describes projections of that reality into subspaces, and predicts observations.

FQXi essay contest

I submitted an essay to the FQXi essay contest. As mentioned below, it is supposed to answer the question, What assumption is wrong? Thanks to readers who encouraged me to make a submission. My essay was one of the first submitted, but there are now about 15 others.

I am trying to resist the temptation to badmouth my competition.

The first phase of the contest is to collect ratings at the above FQXi site. Some essays will get low ratings because the readers think that the author is wrong. But the whole idea of the essay contest is to produce essays that say everyone else is wrong about something. So if someone gets a very high rating, I will be suspicious that he did not write a sufficiently provocative essay. Of course I want a high rating anyway, as the higher-rated essay will get read more and taken more seriously. Maybe the ideal essay to leave the reader thinking, "Sounds convincing, but it cannot be right or someone would have said that before." Or maybe, "At first I thought the proposal was absurd, but now I think that it is obvious."

You can also download the essay here on my site, where the references are clickable links. You can also comment on it at the FQXi site.

Physical reality hypothesis

It is common for physicists to say that quantum mechanics show that there is no objective reality, but it is hard to know what they mean by that. They are not saying that we are products of someone imagination or that we are part of some Matrix-style simulation.

I propose what I call the physical reality hypothesis. It says that all physical systems, from a single electron up to the entire universe, have an objective physical reality, but no faithful mathematical model.

By "objective", I mean independent of any observer. Different observers might still see different things, if the act of observation interferes with the system. By "faithful", I mean an error-free representation of the physics.

This hypothesis is contrary to the Weak mathematical universe hypothesis.

Since 1926, Heisenberg and Bohr have based quantum mechanics on the idea that observations can be accurately modeled mathematically, but not the underlying physical reality. Von Neumann showed in 1930 that straightforward attempts to mathematize the physical reality with hidden variables fail. Bohm found an exception to von Neumann's proof, but only by abandoning causality. His work has been a dead-end.

The Bell test experiments showed that electron and photon spin cannot be mathematized (with local hidden variables) independent of observation.

So this physical reality hypothesis is squarely within mainstream physics. It is very hard to make sense out of 20th century physics otherwise.

But nevertheless many people seem to implicitly assume that the hypothesis is false. For example, a quantum computer is characterized by:

In general, a quantum computer with n qubits can be in an arbitrary superposition of up to 2ⁿ different states simultaneously (this compares to a normal computer that can only be in one of these 2ⁿ states at any one time). A quantum computer operates by manipulating those qubits with a fixed sequence of quantum logic gates.

So believers in quantum computing seem to think that they can create arbitrary superpositions, that these mathematical superpositions will perfectly reflect reality, and that these states can be perfectly manipulated by the transformations corresponding to quantum gates. These superpositions and transformations must be accurate to many decimal places because of the way quantum algorithms work.

The quantum computer scientists are always saying that their theory is a consequence of what we know about quantum mechanics. It seems to me that it is the opposite. The lesson of 20C quantum mechanics is that we do not have faithful representations of n-qubit states or any other complex state.

Finding the Higgs mechanism and boson

A physicist make this controversial comment:

The Higgs was discovered in the 70's when the standard model was put together; this is just the latest confirmation of the standard model. It once again disputes all the naysayers, who think the heirarchy problem is fake. No. The higgs is real. The standard model is real. Its properties, such as the heirarchy problem, are real. Nature has spoken, we have listened.

I agree with it. The Higgs mechanism is an essential part of the Standard Model of high-energy physics and has been quantitatively confirmed since the 1970s. The value of the mass was unknown, and there is always the possibility of some other explanation for the data, but the Higgs was discovered in the 1970s.

There is a separate Wikipedia article on the Higgs boson, where it is described as "a hypothetical elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics." According to rumors at the above blog, the boson has been found to have a mass of 125 GeV, and it will be announced by the LHC as soon as all the data are double-checked.

There will be a fight for credit for the Higgs boson. Part of the problem is that Nobel prizes are not given for theoretical physics, so no prize was given for the Higgs mechanism. So some physicists will be claiming that they should be credited now for work that they did in the 1960s.

It did not really take 50 years to appreciate the value of that work. By 1970, it was clear that the Higgs mechanism gave an important class of models that were advantageous over all the known alternatives. By 1975, we were getting experimental confirmation of those models. The recent LHC experiments add the value of the Higgs mass, but the theoretical and experimental evidence for the SM with Higgs mechanism had been known for decades.

In sum, the Higgs mechanism was proposed by Anderson in 1962, adapted to the SM in the following decade, and experimentally confirmed in the 1970s. The Higgs boson was proposed by Higgs in 1964, and is just now being experimentally confirmed by the LHC (if the rumors are correct).

Following wrong relativity lessons

When physicists promote some abstract untestable theory like string theory or quantum gravity, they often claim to be following Einstein's example, and sometimes claim more specifically that they are following the history of special relativity. Here is a an example, from a few days ago.

Quantum gravity physicist Carlo Rovelli writes an essay:

The prototype of this way of thinking, I think the example that makes it more clear, is Einstein's discovery of special relativity. On the one hand there was Newtonian mechanics, which was extremely successful with its empirical content. On the other hand there was Maxwell's theory, with its empirical content, which was extremely successful, too. But there was a contradiction between the two.

If Einstein had gone to school to learn what science is, if he had read Kuhn, and the philosopher explaining what science is, if he was any one of my colleagues today who are looking for a solution of the big problem of physics today, what would he do?

He would say, okay, the empirical content is the strong part of the theory. The idea in classical mechanics that velocity is relative: forget about it. The Maxwell equations, forget about them. Because this is a volatile part of our knowledge. The theories themselves have to be changed, okay? What we keep solid is the data, and we modify the theory so that it makes sense coherently, and coherently with the data.

That's not at all what Einstein does. Einstein does the contrary. He takes the theories very seriously. He believes the theory. He says, look, classical mechanics is so successful that when it says that velocity is relative, we should take it seriously, and we should believe it. And the Maxwell equations are so successful that we should believe the Maxwell equations. He has so much trust in the theory itself, in the qualitative content of the theory, that qualitative content that Kuhn says changes all the time, that we learned not to take too seriously, and so much faith in this, confidence in that, that he's ready to do what? To force coherence between these two, the two theories, by challenging something completely different, which is something that is in our head, which is how we think about time.

This is all nonsense, as Einstein was not the one to discover special relativity. I exaplain it in my book, How Einstein Ruined Physics.