Bogus quantum teleportation claims

John Markoff reports in the NY Times:

Scientists in the Netherlands have moved a step closer to overriding one of Albert Einstein’s most famous objections to the implications of quantum mechanics, which he described as “spooky action at a distance.”

In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Science, physicists at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology reported that they were able to reliably teleport information between two quantum bits separated by three meters, or about 10 feet.

This just means that an electron state was copied 10 feet away.

Classical bits, the basic units of information in computing, can have only one of two values — either 0 or 1. But quantum bits, or qubits, can simultaneously describe many values. They hold out both the possibility of a new generation of faster computing systems and the ability to create completely secure communication networks.

Moreover, the scientists are now closer to definitively proving Einstein wrong in his early disbelief in the notion of entanglement, in which particles separated by light-years can still appear to remain connected, with the state of one particle instantaneously affecting the state of another. ...

Succeeding at greater distances will offer an affirmative solution to a thought experiment known as Bell’s theorem, proposed in 1964 by the Irish physicist John Stewart Bell as a method for determining whether particles connected via quantum entanglement communicate information faster than the speed of light.

“There is a big race going on between five or six groups to prove Einstein wrong,” said Ronald Hanson, a physicist who leads the group at Delft. “There is one very big fish.” ...

To date, practical quantum computers, which could solve certain classes of problems far more quickly than even the most powerful computers now in use, remain a distant goal. A functional quantum computer would need to entangle a large number of qubits and maintain that entangled state for relatively long periods, something that has so far not been achieved.

A distributed quantum network might also offer new forms of privacy, Dr. Hanson suggested. Such a network would make it possible for a remote user to perform a quantum calculation on a server, while at the same time making it impossible for the operator of the server to determine the nature of the calculation.

This is craziness. Proving Einstein wrong is not a big deal, as all of the textbooks have said that he was wrong about quantum mechanics for 80 years.

Bell's theorem has been affirmed many times.

No faster computing or secure communication is going to come out of this work. This is just replicating an electron state. That's all.

Update: Lubos Motl has a rant about Brian Greene and other physicists and philosophers spreading confusion about quantum mechanics, and comments on the above experiment.

Andromeda to collide with us

Dennis Overbye writes in the NY Times:

The Milky Way and Andromeda are the dominant members of a small family of galaxies known as the Local Group. Whereas the universe is expanding and galaxies are generally getting farther and farther away from one another with time, the galaxies in the Local Group are bound together by family ties in the form of their mutual gravity. Our relatives aren’t going anywhere.

And there is the problem. Andromeda and the Milky Way are actually heading toward each other in the do-si-do that constitutes life in a galaxy cluster. Recent measurements with the Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed that they will hit head on in about two billion years. Since galaxies, like atoms, are mostly empty space, they will pass through each other like ghosts, but gravity will disrupt the stars and strew them across space in gigantic spectacular streamers. Eventually they will merge into a single giant galaxy.

Does this make any sense to you? Atoms are not mostly empty space. Solids certainly do not pass thru other solids like ghosts.

If Andromeda passes thru us like a ghost, then it would not merge with us. It would continue for at least another 2 billion years, and maybe 20B years. If Andromeda is really gravitationally bound to the Milky Way, then it would eventually slow down, reverse, and collide with us again. But then it would just pass thru like a ghost again. That could continue millions of times, unless dark energy drives the galaxies permanently apart.

I am guessing that the galaxies will not really pass as ghosts, and maybe millions of stars get knocked out of position. That could dissipate some energy and make is possible for the galaxies to merge, but surely the merger would take many billions of years, and most of the stars would probably burn out first.

Overbye probably called some expert who has all this figured out. We should have gotten a better explanation.

The Myth of Einstein’s Brain

From a new paper on the myth of Einstein's brain:

In summary the three histological studies of Einstein’s brain have, in spite of claims to the contrary, found essentially no differences between his brain and that of controls. This should not come as any great surprise. The brain is obviously an extremely complex structure… to believe that the analyses of one or a few tiny slices of a single brain could reveal anything related to the specific cognitive abilities of that brain is naïve.

Einstein was smart, but not unusually so compared to his colleagues. It would be more interesting to study the brains of those with objectively superior mental skills, such as memorizing a million digits of pi or being able to solve hard math problems.

Lawrence Krauss book disputed

A new paper claims:

Abstract. We study some claims in Krauss’ recent book, A Universe from Nothing: Why there is something rather than nothing, that are employed to show that a universe can come from “nothing”. In this brief paper, we show that many of the claims are not supported in full by modern general relativity theory or quantum field theory in curved spacetime.

Claim 1: “General Relativity tells us unambiguously that a closed universe whose energy density is dominated by matter like starts and galaxies, and even more exotic dark matter, must one day recollapse in a process like the reverse of a Big Bang - a Big Crunch”

Claim 2: “Considering the geometry of the universe is like imagining a pencil balancing vertically on its point on a table. The slightest imbalance one way or the other and it will quickly topple. So it is for a flat universe. The slightest departure from flatness quickly grows. Thus, how could the universe be so close to being flat today if it were not exactly flat.”

Claim 3: Krauss claims on several occasions in the book that the total energy of a closed universe is zero

Claim 4: Krauss claims that “in quantum gravity, universes can, and indeed always will, spontaneously appear from nothing”

Claim 5: Krauss clams that ”the structures we can see, like stars and galaxies, were all created by quantum fluctuations from nothing”

Failing to defend philosophy for science students

Neil deGrasse Tyson advised ambitious science students to avoid the distractions of philosophy, and philospher Massimo Pigliucci responds:

Contra popular perception, philosophy makes progress, though it does so in a different sense from progress in science. You can think of philosophy as an exploration of conceptual, as opposed to empirical, space, concerning all sorts of questions ranging from ethics to politics, from epistemology to the nature of science. ...

Another popular myth is that philosophy keeps dwelling on the same questions, the implication being that, again, it doesn’t settle anything and consequently cannot move on to something else. ...

You and a number of your colleagues keep asking what philosophy (of science, in particular) has done for science, lately. ... I suggest you actually look up some technical papers in philosophy of science [12] to see how a number of philosophers, scientists and mathematicians actually do collaborate to elucidate the conceptual and theoretical aspects of research on everything from evolutionary theory and species concepts to interpretations of quantum mechanics and the structure of superstring theory. ...

A common refrain I’ve heard from you (see direct quotes above) and others, is that scientific progress cannot be achieved by “mere armchair speculation.” And yet we give a whole category of Nobels to theoretical physicists, who use the deductive power of mathematics (yes, of course, informed by previously available empirical evidence) to do just that. ...

Finally, Neil, please have some respect for your mother. I don’t mean your biological one (though that too, of course!), I am referring to the intellectual mother of all science, i.e., philosophy.

None of this addresses Tyson's point -- philosophy may be intellectually worthwhile, but modern philosophy classes are a distraction to budding scientists. Pigliucci offers no example of worthwhile philosophy, and most of those articles on quantum mechanics and string theory are crap.

The dominant philosophy of science for the last 50 years says that science in not the pursuit of truth. My FQXi essay says:

We are at the precipice of what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm shift. The crucial defining features for such a change in view are what he called incommensurable and arational. That is, there must be no metrics for comparing the old view to the new one, and there must be no rational preference for the new view. As he described scientific revolutions, these shifts are largely cultural, as elite scientists switch to the new view and everyone follows like sheep.

A science student is better off not wasting his time being told that all the great advances in sciences were really just irrational fads.

As long as philosophers say stuff like that, they should be regarded as the enemies of science. A scientist would be better off studying theology.

I am not saying that all philosophy is worthless. I am just saying modern university philosophy of science classes are antagonistic to a career in science.

Tyson declined to respond, apparently because Pigliucci does not really rebut anything Tyson said.

Lubos Motl posted rants against recent papers by Gerard 't Hooft and Steven Weinberg that try to find more classical interpretations. These are two of our most distinguished theoretical physicists, and yet they have wandered off into the weeds of philosophical nonsense. Imagine how much worse the philosophy papers must be!

'tHooft has one of those very few Nobel prizes for theoretical physics, using the deductive power of mathematics. Pigliucci is wrong to say that there is a whole category of such prizes. They are very rare. Just look at last year's prize for the Higgs boson. The theory was done 50 years ago, and the mathematical deductions for the Standard Model a few years later. No prize for the Higgs was given then. They only gave a prize when there was a direct experimental result.

Pigliucci responds to a comment:

“if Pigliucci can’t point to anyone who’s done meaningful (in terms of expanding the boundaries of human knowledge) work in philosophy in the last hundred years, that is pretty strong evidence for saying “okay, philosophy is done, let’s move on to other things.””

Oh for crying out loud, you want names? Okay, here we go, just off the top of my head, in alphabetical order, and just in philosophy of science (notice how many were also scientists): David Albert, Alfred Ayer, Niels Bohr, Mario Bunge, Rudolf Carnap, Nancy Cartwright, Daniel Dennett, John Dewey, Pierre Duhem, John Dupré, Albert Einstein, Paul Feyerabend, Bas van Fraassen, Ronald Giere, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Ian Hacking, Werner Heisenberg, Carl Gustav Hempel, Philip Kitcher, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Larry Laudan, Helen Longino, Peter Medawar, Ernest Nagel, Otto Neurath, Roger Penrose, Henri Poincaré, Michael Polanyi, Karl Popper, Hilary Putnam, W.V. Quine, Frank P. Ramsey, Hans Reichenbach, Alex Rosenberg, Bertrand Russell, Wesley C. Salmon, Elliott Sober, Kim Sterelny. And these are only those I’ve read. And I bet Neil hasn’t read *any*.

Tyson has probably read Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Poincare. Ayer, Popper, and Russell said some worthwhile things, but they are mostly rejected by modern professors. The rest are mostly anti-knowledge. Pigliucci fails to name a specific work that might be useful for a science student to read.

Pigliucci recommends the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, where its special issue on T. Kuhn starts with an argument that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions "has a strong claim to be the most significant book in the philosophy of science in the twentieth century". That is the anti-science paradigm shift book.

Quantum computers may never materialize

Quanta magazine has excellent articles, and reports:

The key to building a quantum computer is increasing the number of qubits that can be linked together. Despite the investment of vast resources over the past 20 years, the extreme fragility of existing qubits has so far restricted efforts to network them and has even fueled uncertainty about whether the technology will ever materialize.

Good to see someone say the obvious -- 20 years and $100M of research fails, that is reason to doubt whether it is possible.

We have also had 20 years of quantum cryptography hype, and no useful application has come out of it. Another cryptographic technology, ECC pairings, has been hyped by the well-funded Voltage Security, and even proposed as an internet standard back in 2007. It had very little practical utility, and now new attacks have killed it. The company is still in business, fooling its customers.

Controversy about Relativity in the 1920s

A reader informs me that Einstein's Opponents: The Public Controversy about the Theory of Relativity in the 1920s, by Milena Wazeck, was recently translated into English and published.

The translator acknowledged the assistance of a software translator. At first I was surprised that a reputable translator would admit to using a dumb machine translation, but now I think that it is foolish to do it any other way.

The nearest Wikipedia article on this subject is Criticism of the theory of relativity. See also Einsteinism and Reuterdahl.

The common view is that this was some sort of anti-semitic or Nazi attack on Jewish science. That may have contributed, but I do not think that is the main story. Some of the critics were Jewish.

To your average philosopher or intellectual or layman or even non-relativity physicist, relativity must have seemed like bizarre leap from the available evidence. The Michelson-Morley experiment was just an optical diffraction pattern that did not change when the equipment was rotated. The deflection of starlight was within experimental error from a simple Newtonian model. The Mercury orbit precession was just one number, and might have other explanations. To the casual observer, it must have seemed likely that these phenomena would have less radical consequences.

From that we conclude that space and time are not what everyone thought?!

I wouldn't be too harsh on the skeptics. I think that it is amazing that relativity was so rapidly accepted. I am also surprised at how readily people accept ideas like inflation and supersymmetry today.