Radical re-examination of the invisible frameworks

Raymond Tallis writes:

But there could not be a worse time for philosophers to surrender the baton of metaphysical inquiry to physicists. Fundamental physics is in a metaphysical mess and needs help. The attempt to reconcile its two big theories, general relativity and quantum mechanics, has stalled for nearly 40 years. Endeavours to unite them, such as string theory, are mathematically ingenious but incomprehensible even to many who work with them. This is well known. A better-kept secret is that at the heart of quantum mechanics is a disturbing paradox – the so-called measurement problem, arising ultimately out of the Uncertainty Principle – which apparently demonstrates that the very measurements that have established and confirmed quantum theory should be impossible. Oxford philosopher of physics David Wallace has argued that this threatens to make quantum mechanics incoherent which can be remedied only by vastly multiplying worlds.

Beyond these domestic problems there is the failure of physics to accommodate conscious beings. The attempt to fit consciousness into the material world, usually by identifying it with activity in the brain, has failed dismally, if only because there is no way of accounting for the fact that certain nerve impulses are supposed to be conscious (of themselves or of the world) while the overwhelming majority (physically essentially the same) are not. In short, physics does not allow for the strange fact that matter reveals itself to material objects (such as physicists).

And then there is the mishandling of time. The physicist Lee Smolin's recent book, Time Reborn, links the crisis in physics with its failure to acknowledge the fundamental reality of time. Physics is predisposed to lose time because its mathematical gaze freezes change. Tensed time, the difference between a remembered or regretted past and an anticipated or feared future, is particularly elusive. This worried Einstein: in a famous conversation, he mourned the fact that the present tense, "now", lay "just outside of the realm of science".

Recent attempts to explain how the universe came out of nothing, which rely on questionable notions such as spontaneous fluctuations in a quantum vacuum, the notion of gravity as negative energy, and the inexplicable free gift of the laws of nature waiting in the wings for the moment of creation, reveal conceptual confusion beneath mathematical sophistication. They demonstrate the urgent need for a radical re-examination of the invisible frameworks within which scientific investigations are conducted. We need to step back from the mathematics to see how we got to where we are now. In short, to un-take much that is taken for granted.

Physicists are asking for this sort of nonsense. They often say things to give the impression that quantum mechanics is an incoherent theory, or that it contradicts gravity, or that trying to understand the reality of time is a crisis in physics, or anything else in the above nonsense.

I found this Poincare quote:

When a scientific theory, claims to tell us what heat, what electricity, or what life really is, it stands convicted at the outset.

Unnatural constants make life possible

Natalie Wolchover writes:

Physicists reason that if the universe is unnatural, with extremely unlikely fundamental constants that make life possible, then an enormous number of universes must exist for our improbable case to have been realized. Otherwise, why should we be so lucky? Unnaturalness would give a huge lift to the multiverse hypothesis, which holds that our universe is one bubble in an infinite and inaccessible foam.

This is more religion than science.

Physics PhD in wrong theory

A theoretical physicist defends what he does:

I study a theory called N=4 super Yang-Mills. ...

First of all, N=4 super Yang-Mills involves supersymmetry. Some forms of supersymmetry are being searched for by the Large Hadron Collider. But those forms involve symmetries that are broken, which allow the particles to have distinctive characters.

In N=4 super Yang-Mills, supersymmetry is unbroken. Every particle has the same mass and the same charge. Furthermore, in N=4 super Yang-Mills that mass is equal to zero; like photons, the particles of N=4 super Yang-Mills would all travel at the speed of light.

There is no group of particles like that in the Standard Model. They can’t be undiscovered particles, either. Particles that travel at the speed of light are part of the everyday world if they have any interaction with normal matter whatsoever, so if the particles existed, we’d know about them. Since they don’t in N=4 super Yang-Mills, we know the theory isn't “true.”

Even with this knowledge, there is an even more certain way to know that N=4 super Yang-Mills isn't “true": it was never supposed to be true in the first place.

A theory by any other name

More than a few of you are probably objecting to my use of the word “theory” in the last few paragraphs. If N=4 super Yang-Mills isn't part of the real world, how could it possibly be a theory? After all, a scientific theory is "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment.”

That's courtesy of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Confused? You must have been talking to the biologists again. Let’s explain. ...

I’m not a mathematician, however. I’m a physicist. I don’t study things merely because they are mathematically interesting. Given that, why do I (and many others) study theories that aren’t true?

Let me give you an analogy. Remember back in 2008, when Sarah Palin made fun of funding “fruit fly research in France?" Most people I know found that pretty ridiculous.

The AAAS is dominated by leftist-atheist-evolutionists who are sensitive about use of the word "theory" in "theory of evolution". I understand that they are on the warpath against Christians and creationists, but in my experience, scientists frequently use the word theory to describe a collection of ideas that have not been substantiated or confirmed at all.

Fruit fly research is at least telling us truths about fruit flies. One man's research could be proved wrong by another man doing a fruit fly experiment. This guy is bragging that nothing can be done to prove anyone wrong in the field, because the whole field is wrong.

A couple of the comments say that his work is justified because he is a mathematician doing math. But he explicity denies that he is a mathematician, so that is not right.

He also explains:

In referring to the theory I study as “wrong”, I’m attempting to bring readers face to face with a common misconception: the idea that every theory in physics is designed to approximate some part of the real world. For the physicists in the audience, this is the public perception that everything in theoretical physics is phenomenology. If we don’t bring this perception to light and challenge it, then we’re sweeping a substantial amount of theoretical physics under the rug for the sake of a simpler message. And that’s risky, because if people don’t understand what physics really is then they’re likely to balk when they glimpse what they think is “illegitimate” physics.

Silly me, I thought that science was all about trying to approximate the real world. Until I discovered string theorists and others who want nothing to do with the real world.

Photons entangled without coexisting

AAAS Science magazine reports:

Physicists have long known that quantum mechanics allows for a subtle connection between quantum particles called entanglement, in which measuring one particle can instantly set the otherwise uncertain condition, or "state," of another particle — even if it's light years away. Now, experimenters in Israel have shown that they can entangle two photons that don't even exist at the same time. ...

The experiment shows that it's not strictly logical to think of entanglement as a tangible physical property, Eisenberg says. "There is no moment in time in which the two photons coexist," he says, "so you cannot say that the system is entangled at this or that moment." Yet, the phenomenon definitely exists. Anton Zeilinger, a physicist at the University of Vienna, agrees that the experiment demonstrates just how slippery the concepts of quantum mechanics are. "It's really neat because it shows more or less that quantum events are outside our everyday notions of space and time."

So what's the advance good for? Physicists hope to create quantum networks in which protocols like entanglement swapping are used to create quantum links among distant users and transmit uncrackable (but slower than light) secret communications. The new result suggests that when sharing entangled pairs of photons on such a network, a user wouldn't have to wait to see what happens to the photons sent down the line before manipulating the ones kept behind, Eisenberg says. Zeilinger says the result might have other unexpected uses: "This sort of thing opens up people's minds and suddenly somebody has an idea to use it in quantum computing or something."

I don't doubt this experiment, but the explanation is really misleading. Quantum mechanics teaches that photons never exist as particles. They have some particle properties and some wave properties.

A lot of these quantum paradoxes depend on you thinking of photons as particles, analogous to macroscopic particles with which we have personal experiment, like marbles or ping pong balls. Think of photons as particles, and almost everything about light is very mysterious. Stop thinking about them as particles, accept quantum mechanics, and light is not so strange.

There are no applications to uncrackable secret communications or to quantum computing. This is just quantum mechanics, not some great new physics.

Hawking on God's dice

I have noted how non-physicists say silly things about determinism and free will, but physicists are almost as bad.

Stephen Hawking gave this lecture:

Many scientists are like Einstein, in that they have a deep emotional attachment to determinism. Unlike Einstein, they have accepted the reduction in our ability to predict, that quantum theory brought about. But that was far enough. They didn't like the further reduction, which black holes seemed to imply. They have therefore claimed that information is not really lost down black holes. ...

To sum up, what I have been talking about, is whether the universe evolves in an arbitrary way, or whether it is deterministic. The classical view, put forward by Laplace, was that the future motion of particles was completely determined, if one knew their positions and speeds at one time. This view had to be modified, when Heisenberg put forward his Uncertainty Principle, which said that one could not know both the position, and the speed, accurately. However, it was still possible to predict one combination of position and speed. But even this limited predictability disappeared, when the effects of black holes were taken into account. The loss of particles and information down black holes meant that the particles that came out were random. One could calculate probabilities, but one could not make any definite predictions. Thus, the future of the universe is not completely determined by the laws of science, and its present state, as Laplace thought.

Pierre-Simon Laplace lived around 1800 and not only proposed scientific determinism, he also predicted black holes and Bayesian probability. He said: "...[It] is therefore possible that the largest luminous bodies in the universe may, through this cause, be invisible." This idea was so far-fetched that it was removed from later editions of the book.

Laplace was not so silly as to think that black holes have something to do with determinism. That takes a modern physicist with a big reputation and wacky ideas like Hawking. Laplace had a much better understanding of what science was all about.

The equations of quantum mechanics are not any more or less deterministic than the equations of classical mechanics. They both formally predict the future, but cannot be completely deterministic because the inputs cannot be completely known.

Einstein's view was what would now be called, a hidden variable theory. Hidden variable theories might seem to be the most obvious way to incorporate the Uncertainty Principle into physics. They form the basis of the mental picture of the universe, held by many scientists, and almost all philosophers of science. But these hidden variable theories are wrong. The British physicist, John Bell, who died recently, devised an experimental test that would distinguish hidden variable theories. When the experiment was carried out carefully, the results were inconsistent with hidden variables. Thus it seems that even God is bound by the Uncertainty Principle, and can not know both the position, and the speed, of a particle. So God does play dice with the universe. All the evidence points to him being an inveterate gambler, who throws the dice on every possible occasion.

This argument for God playing dice is based on a mismatch between the mythical hidden variables and the observable variables. But if you accept those Bell test experiments, then the hidden variable do not exist, and the argument is fallacious. It tells us nothing about whether God plays dice or not.

Quantum computer with no quantum speedup

MIT complexity theorist Scott Aaronson is back on the warpath against those claiming successful quantum computing:

“Look, Scott, let the investors, government bureaucrats, and gullible laypeople believe whatever they want — and let D-Wave keep telling them what’s necessary to stay in business.  It’s unsportsmanlike and uncollegial of you to hold D-Wave’s scientists accountable for whatever wild claims their company’s PR department might make.  After all, we’re in this game too!  Our universities put out all sorts of overhyped press releases, but we don’t complain because we know that it’s done for our benefit.  Besides, you’d doubtless be trumpeting the same misleading claims, if you were in D-Wave’s shoes and needed the cash infusions to survive.  Anyway, who really cares whether there’s a quantum speedup yet or no quantum speedup?  At least D-Wave is out there trying to build a scalable quantum computer, and getting millions of dollars from Jeff Bezos, Lockheed, Google, the CIA, etc. etc. to do so—resources more of which would be directed our way if we showed a more cooperative attitude!  If we care about scalable QCs ever getting built, then the wise course is to celebrate what D-Wave has done—they just demonstrated quantum annealing on 100 qubits, for crying out loud!  So let’s all be grownups here, focus on the science, and ignore the marketing buzz as so much meaningless noise — just like a tennis player might ignore his opponent’s trash-talking (‘your mother is a whore,’ etc.) and focus on the game.”

I get this argument: really, I do. I even concede that there’s something to be said for it. But let me now offer a contrary argument for the reader’s consideration. ... If that happens, then I predict that the very same people now hyping D-Wave will turn around and—without the slightest acknowledgment of error on their part—declare that the entire field of quantum computing has now been unmasked as a mirage, a scam, and a chimera.  The same pointy-haired bosses who now flock toward quantum computing, will flock away from it just as quickly and as uncomprehendingly.  Academic QC programs will be decimated, despite the slow but genuine progress that they’d been making the entire time in a “parallel universe” from D-Wave.  People’s contempt for academia is such that, while a D-Wave success would be trumpeted as its alone, a D-Wave failure would be blamed on the entire QC community.

I get the impression that there is some resentment of D-Wave's private funding. It is okay if university quantum computer researcher make wild claims, because they don't have to deliver a product. D-Wave promises a product that can be benchmarked, and subject to failure in the marketplace.

There is, unfortunately, no proof that quantum computing is possible. And it may never be. Peer-reviewed professors can live in an academic bubble, and pretend that it is possible.

The NY Times reports:

In tests last September, an independent researcher found that for some types of problems the quantum computer was 3,600 times faster than traditional supercomputers. According to a D-Wave official, the machine performed even better in Google’s tests, which involved 500 variables with different constraints.

“The tougher, more complex ones had better performance,” said Colin Williams, D-Wave’s director of business development. “For most problems, it was 11,000 times faster, but in the more difficult 50 percent, it was 33,000 times faster. In the top 25 percent, it was 50,000 times faster.” Google declined to comment, aside from the blog post.

The machine Google and NASA will use makes use of the interactions of 512 quantum bits, or qubits, to determine optimization. They plan to upgrade the machine to 2,048 qubits when this becomes available, probably within the next year or two. That machine could be exponentially more powerful.

It sounds great, but apparently there is some dispute about whether there is really some sort of magical quantum speedup.

Update: Peter Shor writes:

This [argument that an off-the-shelf classical can solve the D-Wave problem many times faster] is exactly like arguing that if you look at the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, they could have gone farther, faster, and much more cheaply if they had just used an automobile. It’s just not the right comparison. D-Wave’s money was not spent only to build this current device; you have to consider that from their viewpoint, it’s just one step on the pathway to a much more complicated and useful device.

SciAm explains:

I began by explaining the theory behind quantum computing and why they hold the promise of significantly faster processing. In essence, it relies upon the fact that whilst conventional “bits” can be 0 or 1, quantum bits (so called qubits) can be both 0 and 1 at the same time (known as superposition). If you can combine qubits (known as entanglement) you can have a system that can process values that expand exponentially with the number of qubits you entangle. As with conventional programming, these qubits are passed through various logic gates to achieve the desired results. Hence, this is known as the “gate theory” of quantum computing.

This is a convenient explanation of quantum computers, but is one that Aaronson denounces as incorrect:

I agree that thinking about the wavefunction “realistically” (as an exponentially-large classical object) seems to be a mistake that countless popular writers make, which then leads them to believe that quantum computers can solve black-box search problems instantaneously, store exponentially-many classical bits, and do other things that they’re known not to be able to do.

Atheists trashing other religious influence

Caltech cosmologist Sean M. Carroll writes Science and Religion Can’t Be Reconciled:

Why I won’t take money from the Templeton Foundation. ...

And if anyone is tempted to award me the Templeton Prize, I will totally accept it! And use the funds to loudly evangelize for naturalism and atheism. (After I pay off the mortgage.)

So he will take Templeton money if they offer him enough. Everyone has his price, I guess.

I don't care if he wants to promote his atheist beliefs, but his attitude is not that of a cold scientist. He regularly promotes unscientific physics philosophies such as many-worlds,
string theory, and the arrow of time. That stuff is no more scientific than most of the stuff that Templeton promotes.

Another Templeton critic complains:

Tim Maudlin asks for evidence of the distorting effect of Templeton funding.

It seems to me that the enormity of Templeton funding means that religious epistemology and religious perspectives on knowledge, understanding, etc., take a very large position in analytic epistemology overall. (According to Chalmers & Bourget, over 72% of philosophers are atheists; the number of projects in religious epistemology and religiously-motivated epistemology would seem outsized, given that percentage.)

So if 72% of phulosophers are atheists, then no private foundation should do anything to decrease that percentage?

I am all in favor of separating science and religion, but I put many-world and string theory on the side of religion. There is no more evidence for those concepts than there is for astrology.

(I am not quarrelling with old understandings about he second law of thermodynamics. But Carroll goes beyond that, and speculates about time running backwards in other universes. He also says that The past and future are equally real.)