Von Neumann not QBist

Blake C. Stacey has a new article on Von Neumann Was Not a Quantum Bayesian:

Wikipedia has claimed for over two years now that John von Neumann was the "first quantum Bayesian." In context, this reads as stating that von Neumann inaugurated QBism, the approach to quantum theory promoted by Fuchs, Mermin and Schack. This essay explores how such a claim is, historically speaking, unsupported.

This paper takes Wikipedia way too seriously.

Quantum Bayesianism, or QBism, is a modern defense of the Copenhagen interpretation, which was the mainstay of the XX century, but is often attack by popularist writers. Mermin advocates QBism partially by arguing that it is a modern new interpretation to compete with other modern interpretations, and partially by arguing that it is the same as what Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schroedinger promoted all along. In spite of his objections, articles on interpretations of quantum mechanics treat Copenhagen and QBism as essentially the same thing.

Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation is also a variant of Coperhagen defined by:

also described as "consciousness causes collapse [of the wave function]", is an interpretation of quantum mechanics in which consciousness is postulated to be necessary for the completion of the process of quantum measurement.

This is a useful term, because a lot of people hate Copenhagen because of the role of consciousness. In this Wikipedia terminology, the von Neumann interpretation depends on consciousness, and the Copenhagen interpretation is the same thing with the consciousness stripped out.

Stacey refuses to say von Neumann was a QBist because he was not a Bayesian. There are multiple probability interpretations, and von Neumann was more of a frequentist.

At this point, you may wonder what the relation to physics is. Quantum mechanics successfully predicts atomic phenomena. What difference does it make how it is interpreted? The Feynman "shut up and calculate" school of thought says that interpretations are unnecessary distractions. When interpretations posit proliferating parallel unobservable universes, it is hard to see why there is any point to talking about such nonsense. If two interpretations have the same physical outcomes, it is hard to see how science can say one is better than the other.

Feynman did not actually say "shut up and calculate", but he did advocate having multiple theories for getting the same results, and criticize philosophical arguments about interpretations.

The metaphysical problem is weirder in the above paper, as the von Neumann and QBism interpretations are essentially the same physically and mathematically, but differ only in the interpretation of what a mathematical probability means. And that difference hinges on consciousness, whatever that is. Supposedly Wigner once remarked that a dog was probably sufficiently conscious to cause the collapse of a wave function (and kill Schroedinger's cat), but a rat was not. He must have realized that he was on thin ice with that.

I think that these interpretations add some clarity to quantum mechanics, but it is a mistake to take them too seriously. Some people think that quantum mechanics is a flawed theory, and it needs a new interpretation to save it. Or we need to get everyone on board some version of many-worlds. I disagree. The interesting questions are the scientific ones, and these interpretational issues barely qualify. We cannot use them in experiments, such as asking a dog to watch Schroedinger's cat and checking to see if the wave function collapses. An interpretation is just a way of thinking about the theory.

Poe foresaw the Big Bang in 1848

The current NY Review of Books has an article on Edgar Allan Poe:

Poe’s mind was by no means commonplace. In the last year of his life he wrote a prose poem, Eureka, which would have established this fact beyond doubt—if it had not been so full of intuitive insight that neither his contemporaries nor subsequent generations, at least until the late twentieth century, could make any sense of it. Its very brilliance made it an object of ridicule, an instance of affectation and delusion, and so it is regarded to this day among readers and critics who are not at all abreast of contemporary physics. Eureka describes the origins of the universe in a single particle, from which “radiated” the atoms of which all matter is made. Minute dissimilarities of size and distribution among these atoms meant that the effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter, forming the physical universe.

This by itself would be a startling anticipation of modern cosmology, if Poe had not also drawn striking conclusions from it, for example that space and “duration” are one thing, that there might be stars that emit no light, that there is a repulsive force that in some degree counteracts the force of gravity, that there could be any number of universes with different laws simultaneous with ours, that our universe might collapse to its original state and another universe erupt from the particle it would have become, that our present universe may be one in a series.

All this is perfectly sound as observation, hypothesis, or speculation by the lights of science in the twenty-first century. And of course Poe had neither evidence nor authority for any of it. It was the product, he said, of a kind of aesthetic reasoning—therefore, he insisted, a poem. He was absolutely sincere about the truth of the account he had made of cosmic origins, and he was ridiculed for his sincerity. Eureka is important because it indicates the scale and the seriousness of Poe’s thinking, and its remarkable integrity. It demonstrates his use of his aesthetic sense as a particularly rigorous method of inquiry.

The book was written in 1848. Just glancing at it, it looks like nonsense to me, but I did not read enuf to judge.

SciAm's John Horgan is also excited by Poe's book, and says it reminds him of a drug trip.

It’s like a 19^th-century version of the many manuscripts I have received over the decades from brilliant but deranged autodidacts who have solved the secrets of the universe. Imagine what you might get if you toss Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Newton’s Principia in a blender along with scoops of gothic rhetoric and romantic philosophy. Eureka does indeed evoke some modern scientific ideas, but in the same blurry way that Christian or Eastern theologies do.

Tracing Einstein's sources

Einstein fanboi John D. Norton wrote in a 2003 paper:

Modern readers turning to Einstein’s famous 1905 paper on special relativity may not find what they expect. Its title, “On the electrodynamics of moving bodies,” gives no inkling that it will develop an account of space and time that will topple Newton’s system. Even its first paragraph just calls to mind an elementary experimental result due to Faraday concerning the interaction of a magnet and conductor. ...

It has also received considerable attention outside physics. It is the first port of call for philosophers and other thinkers, seeking to understand what Einstein did and why it changed everything. It is often also their last port. ...

It contains Einstein’s analysis of simultaneity, probably the most celebrated conceptual analysis of the century.

Many have tried to emulate Einstein and do in their fields just what Einstein did for simultaneity, space and time. For these reasons, many have sought to understand how Einstein worked his magic and came to special relativity. These efforts were long misled by an exaggeration of the importance of one experiment, the Michelson-Morley experiment, even though Einstein later had trouble recalling if he even knew of the experiment prior to his 1905 paper. ...

Why did special relativity emerge when it did? The answer is already given in Einstein’s 1905 paper. It is the fruit of 19th century electrodynamics. It is as much the theory that perfects 19th century electrodynamics as it is the first theory of modern physics. 4 Until this electrodynamics emerged, special relativity could not arise; once it had emerged, special relativity could not be stopped. Its basic equations and notions were already emerging in the writings of H. A. Lorentz and Henri Poincaré on electrodynamics. ...

All efforts to recount Einstein’s path face one profound obstacle, the near complete lack of primary source materials. ...

To demonstrate this result, Einstein imagined two places A and B, each equipped with identically constructed clocks, and a simple protocol to synchronize them using light signals

That protocol is known as Poincaré–Einstein synchronization, as Poincare published it in 1898, 1900, and 1904.

We actually have all Einstein's source materials. Besides the Poincare synchronization, Einstein is known to have gotten the electrodymanics, space-time transformations, postulates, and everything else from Lorentz and Poincare.

Einstein himself agreed that Michelson-Morley was crucial to the development of relativity, as he explains in a 1909 paper:

The Michelson and Morley interference experiment showed that, in a special case, second-order terms also cannot be detected, although they were expected from the standpoint of the ether-at-rest theory. To include this experiment in the theory, Lorentz and FitzGerald introduced the postulate that all objects, including the parts of Michelson and Morley's experimental set-up, changed their form in a certain way, if they moved relative to the ether. ...

Michelson's experiment suggests the axiom that all phenomena obey the same laws relative to the Earth's reference frame or, more generally, relative to any reference frame in unaccelerated motion. For brevity, let us call this postulate the relativity principle.

Einstein was unsure about Michelson-Morley in 1905 because he did not realize the experiment's importance at the time. Lorentz and Poincare emphasized that the experiment was crucial to their reasoning, but Einstein was just giving an expository account of their conclusions, not their reasoning. So as Einstein explained in 1909 how Michelson-Morley was crucial to the development of relativity, it was crucial to Lorentz and Poincare, but not to Einstein's 1905 paper.

I just discovered the Marauders of the Lost Sciences blog, that regularly posts excerpts of old math and physics papers that are particularly interesting, such as anticipating later results. A recent one is Poincaré discussing relativity a year before Einstein. Poincare traveled to the 1904 St. Louis Missouri World's Fair, and gave a lecture about relativity and other topics. He speaks of a "wholly new mechanics which would be characterized above all by this fact, that there could be no velocity greater than that of light, any more than a temperature below that of absolute zero."

Post-WWII philosophers have lost it

Scientia Salon has another article on scientific realism. This one is on the attempts, by philosophers and physicists, to make quantum mechanics are more "realistic" theory by adding interpretations with hidden variables, Bohmian pilot waves, and parallel universes. At least this article tacitly admits that all such attempts have been colossal failures, altho philosophers cling to a notion of realism that requires such nonsense.

As usual, the moderator says that I am wrong. He defends philosophers believing in scientific realism, even tho it leads them to say nonsense about quantum mechanics.

Lubos Motl attacks a Tom Siegfried essay in ScienceNews, and makes points that apply to the Scientia Salon philosophers as well:

Only armchair physicists, third-class physicists, and "philosophers" may consider these foundational debates about quantum mechanics to be a part of the actual research in 2015. Physicists know that all these questions have been settled since the middle or late 1920s.

I agree with that, altho I would say that they were settled in the 1930s. Here was my response to Scientia Salon:

Summary: Bohr was right in the Bohr-Einstein debates. 80 years of attempts at philosophical realism have just layered conjectures on top of the theory. Those conjectures have either been proven false, become unworkable dead-ends, or imagined outlandish untestable fantasies.

The philosophical realists mock Ernst Mach for skepticism about atoms, but Motl defends his philosophy:

Positivism states that all of our trustworthy knowledge about Nature comes exclusively from sensory experience – from observations, if we use a little bit more physical jargon. In the context of physical theories, it means that a physical theory a priori declares "all objects in the world around us" and words describing them as meaningless. Every physical theory has the right to do so. Every physical theory may work with its own fundamental and auxiliary concepts to describe our experience. The experience is the only "provably real" thing. But the point is that every question about Nature that can't be reduced to our experiences is considered physically meaningless or unphysical.

(The Vienna Circle elaborated upon these important positivist observations and probably was the culmination of philosophers' understanding of the essence of modern science. When other philosophers such as Thomas Kuhn or Karl Popper began to be popular, the degeneration and putrification of philosophy of science was already underway. To return to Mach and his positivist predecessors, they generally erred by forecasting that "something would remain unobservable forever". For example, the founder of positivism Auguste Comte would predict that the chemical composition of stars would remain a mystery forever – just years before spectroscopy answered all those questions. But this error must be seen as a side effect of their important and right understanding that certain questions and claims are physically meaningless.)

That is right, and this form of positivism is entirely rejected by philosophers today.

With a grain of salt, we could argue that about 100 years ago, the philosophers were actually useful for the progress in physics. That's also why most of the greatest theoretical physicists of that time considered themselves part-time philosophers. After the Second World War, the philosophers had largely lost it. The greatest physicists of the post-war generation, the likes of Feynman and Schwinger, to mention two, were no longer admiring philosophy in the usual sense. They diverged. The propagation of the anti-quantum delusions by the contemporary philosophers may be viewed as a revenge against physics – revenge for the fact that science had to completely escape away from philosophy and the best physicists no longer have any intellectual respect towards the contemporary philosophers.

That is correct, as I have also argued that Philosophy became useless in 1950. Nearly every post-WWII philosopher is rabidly anti-science. They refuse to accept XX century physics, and they deny that scientists discover truth. They have diverged from science like astrology.

Ivan Deutsch says no true qubit yet

Quanta magazine has an interview:

For more than 20 years, Ivan H. Deutsch has struggled to design the guts of a working quantum computer. He has not been alone. The quest to harness the computational might of quantum weirdness continues to occupy hundreds of researchers around the world. Why hasn’t there been more to show for their work? As physicists have known since quantum computing’s beginnings, the same characteristics that make quantum computing exponentially powerful also make it devilishly difficult to control. The quantum computing “nightmare” has always been that a quantum computer’s advantages in speed would be wiped out by the machine’s complexity.

I do not know whether he is related to David Deutsch, another quantum computing pioneer. Ivan's big hope:

Before I die, I would love to see just one universal logical qubit that can be indefinitely error corrected. It would instantly be classified by the government, of course. But I dream on, regardless.

Remember that, next time you read that someone has achieve 10 qubits, or 20 qubits, or whatever. No one has truly made a single qubit.

QUANTA MAGAZINE: Why would a universal quantum machine be so uniquely powerful?

IVAN DEUTSCH: In a classical computer, information is stored in retrievable bits binary coded as 0 or 1. But in a quantum computer, elementary particles inhabit a probabilistic limbo called superposition where a “qubit” can be coded as 0 and 1.

Here is the magic: Each qubit can be entangled with the other qubits in the machine. The intertwining of quantum “states” exponentially increases the number of 0s and 1s that can be simultaneously processed by an array of qubits. Machines that can harness the power of quantum logic can deal with exponentially greater levels of complexity than the most powerful classical computer. Problems that would take a state-of-the-art classical computer the age of our universe to solve, can, in theory, be solved by a universal quantum computer in hours.

Yes, he is dreaming. Just because we can create states where we do not know whether a measurement will give a 0 or 1, that does not mean that the alternate possibilities of 0 and 1 can be used for exponential computational advantage.

I wonder how many years or decades the Deutsches and others will be able to get away with this. Their argument is essentially:

When you shine a laser thru a double slit, you get a diffraction pattern, just like what you get with water waves or any other waves. But with light it is different, because light is made of particles called photons, not waves, and the pattern is the result of photons being in two places at once. Quantum mechanics explains how something can be two things at once, such as putting Schroedinger's cat in a box and if you do not know whether it is alive or dead then you just say that it is in a superposition of live and dead states. The problem of quantum mechanics is the engineering problem of making devices that act like Schroedinger cat boxes, and so that the interaction between the live cat and the dead cat in the probabilistic limbo can be harnessed to do a computation.

This is a good story, if it works, but it is a fantasy. Yes, I would love to see one universal logical qubit also. There would be a Nobel Prize for that. But when is anyone besides me and a handful of others going to get skeptical? In 10 years? In 20 years? I do not see that the quantum computing failures* have caused any skepticism so far. I have listed my reasons for skepticism.

Marek Zukowski has a new paper on some quantum paradoxes, but it admits that the argument that quantum mechanics disproves "local causality" only holds if you define that term to mean a hidden variable theory that is directly contrary to quantum mechanics. Also, the paradoxes disappear if you just assume that "unperformed experiments have no results". Quantum computing is all about trying to get computational results from unperformed experiments.

* A comment below disputes the term "quantum computing failures".

Anti-Scientia Salon

A major theme of this blog is to expose anti-science ideas, especially when they come from universities and research institutions in the name of science. I do not bother with dubious religious claims or the Flat Earth Society, or even academic postmodernists. I leave them for the professional skeptics. I focus on respectable nonsense that is seriously contrary to the modern scientific pursuit of truth. For example, my last post on geocentrism focused on what scientists say, not Bible scholars.

A source of anti-science philosophy is Scientia Salon, a philosophy-driven site that claims to tell scientists what science is all about. It recently restricted its essays to academics who are more in line with the moderator's desire to promote academic philosophy. I have been allowed to post comments there, but usually with a moderator note that I am wrong or a threat to block my message or ban me from the site.

I previously posted disagreements on causality, realism, and reductionism.

Now the site has essays by Marko Vojinovic against science reductionism, in Part I and
Part II.

I left several critical comments, including this:

Here is yet another philosophical essay that claims that physicists do not know what they are doing. The core of your argument is 2 claims.

I. If you define the Second Law in a way that makes it false, then it is not reducible to things that are true.
II. If you define a theory of everything to include ZFC, then it includes well-known paradoxes of ZFC.

You blame belief in scientific reductionism on a “lack of education in mathematical logic”. The consequences of Goedel’s theorems have been well-understood for 80 years. Goedel would not agree with you, and neither would those who actually have an education in math logic, as far as I can see.

This is like complaining that the equations of general relativity cannot explain cosmology because they contain pi, and pi is irrational. Yes, the irrationality of pi may seem paradoxical to people who first learn it, but it has almost nothing to do with scientific reductionism. It will only cause a problem if you give some completely artificial requirement that pi must be reduced to rational numbers.

This is the first essay with SciSal’s new policy of restricting to academics. I expected to see philosophers explaining what they have published. Instead we have someone with training in relativity who makes an anti-science argument that has nothing to do with his training. ...

I say anti-science because Marko’s arguments, in his own words, “stand in sharp contrast to the popular opinion among scientifically-oriented people”. I do not question his expertise in relativity, but his essay is about philosophy, emergence, and math logic, not relativity.

I do not know why you keep threatening to ban me. I am expressing mainstream science views. If an essay makes claims that are contrary to standard science textbook knowledge, then someone should call the author out on those points. What else are the comments for?

Questioning reductionism like this is a little like talking creationism. If Marko wanted to argue that dark matter might be new form of matter that only emerges at a galactic level and cannot be reduced to some microscopic theory, then I would let it pass as a legitimate intellectual possibility. But it would be a little like saying that dark matter is supernatural stuff that God put there in order for the galaxies to form. My objection is that he claims to have disproved reductionism with his examples and his Goedel argument. ...

Daniel, anyone who talks about science progressing by paradigm shifts is anti-science also. The paradigm shift is defined to be a change in views that has no rational or measurable advantages. It is an idea that is popular among philosophers, but not scientists. You only hear a scientist talking about paradigm shifts when he is promoting an idea that has no evidentiary support.

And this:

I use the term “anti-science” just to mean going against the scientific establishment, for reasons other than scientific evidence.

I agree that occasionally someone like Chomsky is right, and that his insights were valuable even if they are wrong. He would be a fine example of someone who can be brilliantly wrong.

I just heard a radio talk show caller say that he does not believe in global warming because the theory depends on computer climate models, and they are just garbage in garbage out. I regard this as an anti-science argument, because scientists nearly all believe that there is at least some validity to the data and models, and the caller has not identified any specific flaws.

Kuhn’s paradigm shift theory is similarly anti-science. It is a direct attack on what most scientists believe about science. You say that his thesis is meant to be a descriptive view, but that is a common misconception about Kuhn. He did write descriptions of science, such as a whole book on the early history of quantum theory, but he was never able to relate those descriptions to his paradigm thesis. Quantum theory had many rational and measurable advantages that everyone else recognized.

We are getting a little off-topic here, but this site seems to have a theme where scientists somehow got science all wrong on issues like reductionism, realism, free will, causality, positivism, unity, infinity, axiomatic math, paradigms, emergence, and empiricism. Maybe it should be renamed Anti-Scientia Salon. Okay, I sometimes think that the conventional wisdom is wrong also.

Vojinovic responded to some comments, but did not address any of my criticisms.

His argument is to say that popular scientist ideas about what science can do are all wrong, because he has some misunderstandings of some elementary paradoxes that are properly explained on the Wikipedia pages for Second law of thermodynamics and Goedels incompleteness theorem.

Of course there are plenty of crackpots saying stupid things about entropy and Goedel. Those two subjects are very well understood, and yet they seem to invite people to misunderstand them and say crazy things.

Moderator SciSal (aka Massimo Pigliucci) responds:

Your own example of climate change denialism is a good one: that definitely is anti-science, for the reasons you mentioned. But Marko has been engaging in a philosophical discussion based on the available science, and he has taken positions that are compatible with the established science. Nothing to do with “anti-science.” Second, Kuhn was a physicist and historian of science. He described what he saw as a historical pattern. Since scientists don’t do history of science, it is pretty much irrelevant whether what Kuhn said did or did not go along with the opinions of most scientists: even if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be anti-science.

I am going to post another essay, just on his attitude about how philosophers know what science is about better than scientists.

But no, all of that is wrong. Marko has not engaged in a philosophical discussion, because he refuses to address my points. He has taken positions on entropy and Goedel that are contrary to textbook knowledge. Kuhn never found a historical pattern to back up his paradigm shift theory. Kuhn certain was anti-science when he argued that science works by jumping on fads, without rational or measurable evidence.

What all this philosophical arguments have in common is that they are attacks on the idea that math and scientific methods can give us truth about the world.

All this academic philosophy of science is like listening to a Marxist professor. He will babble on and on about how 19th century trends prove the merits of a Marxist revolution. If you try to tell him that history does not back up his theories and his objectives are not desirable anyway, he will say that he is the professional historian and his Marxist colleagues agree with him.

Modern philosophy of science is like Marxism. It ignores history of the last century, it misunderstands history before that, it distorts everything for ideological purposes, and it is dominated by crackpots.

Update: I may post separately on how Goedel's theorem is widely misunderstood, even by academic philosophers who should know better. The theorem is well-explained on Wikipedia and elsewhere, so there is no excuse for it.

Mercury enters retrograde motion

A NY Times essay says:

On Jan. 21, at 10:54 a.m. Eastern Time, Mercury will begin its first pass by Earth of the new year. For about three weeks, it will appear to move backward across our sky and will, according to astrologers, disrupt technology, communication and human concord. ...

The astrological belief that Mercury retrograde leads to confusion and breakdown is inherited from the time before we understood that Earth is not the center of the cosmos. From our perspective, Mercury appears to move quickly and erratically, so the ancients called it a messenger and a trickster. It took three millenniums to figure out that this was an illusion. Before that, Ptolemy constructed elaborate models in which the other planets spun around us like insane tops, and the models stayed with us long after the observations stopped matching the math. Copernicus’s heliocentric theory explained retrograde motion much more elegantly, but he kept it unpublished nearly until his death. Mercury told its story, anyway: To understand the illusion of its movement means to realize that we are not at the center of things, that there is a reality beyond the one we see.

[image caption] Stuck in the Middle | A geocentric model of our universe, from James Ferguson’s 1756 “Astronomy Explained,” highlights its absurdity; the Ptolemaic system required that the planets in our solar system orbit Earth in strange, looping arcs.

You will not find anything like that 1756 diagram in Ptolemy's Almagest, because his model never said anything about those strange looping arcs. He did not attempt to model the distance from the Earth.

The Mercury retrograde motion is an illusion, but the same reasoning says that so is the rising and setting Sun, and the apparent motion of the stars in the night sky.

Ptolemy's model was in use for well over a millennium, probably longer than any other scientific model of any kind. Yes, some data needed to be updated. I think that some of it was already out of date when Ptolemy was alive, as he did not have the latest astronomical data. But his model was pretty good.

It is amazing how people get confused on this issue. I criticized Jerry Coyne, and now he has asked Sean M. Carroll to explain whether the Earth goes around the Sun or vice-versa:

The short answer would be that it is possible to choose whatever coordinate system you like, including ones centered on the Earth, and then say “in that coordinate system the Sun goes around the Earth.” Hell, it’s possible to choose coordinate systems in which neither the Earth nor the Sun move at all! But some coordinate systems are better than others, and for understanding Solar System dynamics, an Earth-centered one is particularly dumb. If some Orthodox Jews want to argue that they have the right to be dumb, who am I to stop them?

The Earth-centered coordinates may be dumb for understanding Solar System dynamics, but preferable for other purposes. So Carroll is wrong to say that they are dumb.

Somewhat more careful (dare I say “rabbinical”?) discussion by me here:
Note, however, that while you can say “I am using a coordinate system where the Earth is at the center,” you can not say “Coordinate systems where the Sun [or the Solar System’s barycenter] is at the center are wrong.” So “geocentrism” is flatly incorrect.
Also, not to belabor the obvious: early geocentrists were not relying on coordinate invariance, and attempts by modern ones to save the old ideas are kind of pitiful.

I guess he is trying to say that Ptolemy got the right answer for the wrong reason, and so he should not get any credit.

Ptolemy did not show how to convert from one coordinate system to another, or show the equivalence of coordinate systems. I do not know who first did those things. But regardless, there is nothing wrong with choosing a coordinate system and sticking to it. Maybe it is not as good for understanding dynamics, but it might be better for mapping the night sky.

This US NSFA 2012 study measured public understanding of science by asking 10 questions.

Physical science
The center of the Earth is very hot. (True)

The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move. (True)

Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth? (Earth around Sun)

All radioactivity is manmade. (False)

Electrons are smaller than atoms. (True)

Lasers work by focusing sound waves. (False)

The universe began with a huge explosion. (True)

Biological science
It is the father’s gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl. (True)

Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria. (False)

Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals. (True)

Whoever made this list does not understand that motion is relative. General relativity teaches that "Earth go around the Sun" and "Sun go around the Earth" are both correct.

I would also re-phrase "The universe began with a huge explosion." We know that the universe is expanding, and that our best model has a big bang at a finite time in the past. But it is possible to believe that the universe existed in some other form before the big bang, so that it might not have started with an explosion. A quiz like this should be based on facts we know for sure.