Trying to apply entanglement to humanism

Marilynne Robinson writes in The Nation, an extreme left-wing magazine:

Humanism, Science, and the Radical Expansion of the Possible
Why we shouldn’t let neuroscience banish mystery from human life.

Humanism was the particular glory of the Renaissance. ...

The antidote to our gloom is to be found in contemporary science. ...

The phenomenon called quantum entanglement, relatively old as theory and thoroughly demonstrated as fact, raises fundamental questions about time and space, and therefore about causality.

Particles that are “entangled,” however distant from one another, undergo the same changes simultaneously. This fact challenges our most deeply embedded habits of thought. To try to imagine any event occurring outside the constraints of locality and sequence is difficult enough. Then there is the problem of conceiving of a universe in which the old rituals of cause and effect seem a gross inefficiency beside the elegance and sleight of hand that operate discreetly beyond the reach of all but the most rarefied scientific inference and observation. However pervasive and robust entanglement is or is not, it implies a cosmos that unfolds or emerges on principles that bear scant analogy to the universe of common sense. It is abetted in this by string theory, which adds seven unexpressed dimensions to our familiar four. And, of course, those four seem suddenly tenuous when the fundamental character of time and space is being called into question. Mathematics, ontology, and metaphysics have become one thing. Einstein’s universe seems mechanistic in comparison. Newton’s, the work of a tinkerer. If Galileo shocked the world by removing the sun from its place, so to speak, then this polyglot army of mathematicians and cosmologists who offer always new grounds for new conceptions of absolute reality should dazzle us all, freeing us at last from the circle of old Urizen’s compass. But we are not free. ...

I find the soul a valuable concept, a statement of the dignity of a human life and of the unutterable gravity of human action and experience. ...

I am content to place humankind at the center of Creation. ...

I am a theist, so my habits of mind have a particular character.

I am not trying to summarize this, or even to comment on the merits of her arguments. I just want to point out how bad physics makes its way into humanities essays.

Krauss against philosophers

Physicist Lawrence Krauss says in a interview:

Freeman Dyson, who is a brilliant physicist and a contrarian, he had pointed out based on some research — he’s 90 years old, but he had done some research over the years — I was in a meeting in Singapore with him when he pointed out that we really don’t know if gravity is a quantum theory. Electromagnetism is a quantum theory because we know there are quanta of electromagnetism called photons. Right now they’re coming, shining in my face and they’re going into the camera that’s being used to record this and we can measure photons. There are quanta associated with all of the forces of nature. If gravity is a quantum theory, then there must be quanta that are exchanged, that convey the gravitational force; we call those gravitons. They’re the quantum version of gravitational waves, the same way photons are the quantum version of electromagnetic waves. But what Freeman pointed out is that there’s no terrestrial experiment that could ever measure a single graviton. He could show that in order to build an experiment that would do that, you’d have to make the experiment so massive that it would actually collapse to form a black hole before you could make the measurement. So he said there’s no way we’re ever going to measure gravitons; there’s no way that we’ll know whether gravity is a quantum theory.

This is correct. The whole subject of quantum gravity should be considered part of theology or something else, because it is not science.

He notes that the BICEP2 tried (unsuccessfully) to find evidence of quantization of an inflaton field, a related issue.

Does physics need philosophy?

We all do philosophy and of course, scientists do philosophy. Philosophy is critical reasoning, logical reasoning, and analysis—so in that sense, of course physics needs philosophy. But does it need philosophers? That’s the question. And the answer is not so much anymore. I mean it did early on. The earlier physicists were philosophers. When the questions weren’t well defined, that’s when philosophy becomes critically important and so physics grew out of natural philosophy, but it’s grown out of it, and now there’s very little relationship between what physicists do and what even philosophers of science do. So of course physics needs philosophy; it just doesn’t need philosophers.

Philosophers have rejected XX century science, and have become more anti-science than most creationists. So asking whether physics needs philosophers is like asking whether biology needs creationists or whether astronomy needs astrologers.

Krauss was burned by a philosopher of physics who wrote a NY Times book review trashing Krauss's title, and without addressing the content of the book. Yeah, the title was overstated, but the reviewer should have been able to get past the title.

Foundation of probability theory

When physicists talk about chance, probability, and determinism, they are nearly always hopelessly confused. See, for example, the recent Delft experiment claiming to prove that nature is random.

Whether electron have some truly random behavior is a bit like talking about whether humans have free will. It certainly appears so, and there is even a relation between the concepts, and quantum mechanics leaves the possibilities open.

Randomness is tricky to define. Mathematicians have thought very carefully about the issues, and reached a XXc consensus on how to formulate it. So it is best to look at what they say.

UCLA math professor Terry Tao is teaching a class on probability theory, and this is from his introductory notes:

By default, mathematical reasoning is understood to take place in a deterministic mathematical universe. In such a universe, any given mathematical statement S (that is to say, a sentence with no free variables) is either true or false, with no intermediate truth value available. Similarly, any deterministic variable x can take on only one specific value at a time.

However, for a variety of reasons, both within pure mathematics and in the applications of mathematics to other disciplines, it is often desirable to have a rigorous mathematical framework in which one can discuss non-deterministic statements and variables – that is to say, statements which are not always true or always false, but in some intermediate state, or variables that do not take one particular value or another with definite certainty, but are again in some intermediate state. In probability theory, which is by far the most widely adopted mathematical framework to formally capture the concept of non-determinism, non-deterministic statements are referred to as events, and non-deterministic variables are referred to as random variables. In the standard foundations of probability theory, as laid out by Kolmogorov, we can then model these events and random variables by introducing a sample space (which will be given the structure of a probability space) to capture all the ambient sources of randomness; events are then modeled as measurable subsets of this sample space, and random variables are modeled as measurable functions on this sample space. (We will briefly discuss a more abstract way to set up probability theory, as well as other frameworks to capture non-determinism than classical probability theory, at the end of this set of notes; however, the rest of the course will be concerned exclusively with classical probability theory using the orthodox Kolmogorov models.)

Note carefully that sample spaces (and their attendant structures) will be used to model probabilistic concepts, rather than to actually be the concepts themselves. This distinction (a mathematical analogue of the map-territory distinction in philosophy) actually is implicit in much of modern mathematics, when we make a distinction between an abstract version of a mathematical object, and a concrete representation (or model) of that object.

Note his mention of the map-territory distinction, that I have emphasized here many times. Randomness is described by ordinary mathematical construction that look non-random. All of the formulas and theorems about randomness can be derived without any belief in true randomness. It is not clear that there is any such thing as true randomness. Randomness is a matter of interpretation.

Quantum mechanics often predicts probabilities, and physicists often say that this means that nature is random. But as you can see, mathematicians deal with probability and random variables in completely deterministic models, so probability formulas do not imply true randomness.

The Schroedinger equation is deterministic and time-reversible. And yet quantum mechanics is usually understood as indeterministic and irreversible. Is this a problem? No, not really. As you can see, mathematicians are always using deterministic formulas to model probability. These issues drive physicists like Sean M. Carroll to believe in the many-worlds interpretation (MWI), but that conclusion is entirely mistaken.

Delft experiment did not prove randomness

I posted about the Delft quantum experiment, but I skipped the randomness news. Here is ScienceDaily's description:

The experiment gives the strongest refutation to date of Albert Einstein's principle of "local realism," which says that the universe obeys laws, not chance, and that there is no communication faster than light.

As described in Hanson's group web the Delft experiment first "entangled" two electrons trapped inside two different diamond crystals, and then measured the electrons' orientations. In quantum theory entanglement is powerful and mysterious: mathematically the two electrons are described by a single "wave-function" that only specifies whether they agree or disagree, not which direction either spin points. In a mathematical sense, they lose their identities. "Local realism" attempts to explain the same phenomena with less mystery, saying that the particles must be pointing somewhere, we just don't know their directions until we measure them.

This is a pretty good description. The so-called (and misnamed) "local realism" seemed less mysterious to Einstein and others by assuming that electrons are little spinning particles with definite positions, momenta, and spins, even when we cannot see them. Quantum mechanics could then be seen as describing our uncertainty about reality.

We have known since about 1930 that this Einstein local realism is wrong. Quantum mechanics teaches that electrons have wave-like properties that prohibit such definiteness.

The Delft experiment is just the latest in 90 years of work supporting quantum principles. Part of the acclaim for this experiment is in its approach to randomness:

This amazing experiment called for extremely fast, unpredictable decisions about how to measure the electron orientations. If the measurements had been predictable, the electrons could have agreed in advance which way to point, simulating communications where there wasn't really any, a gap in the experimental proof known as a "loophole." To close this loophole, the Delft team turned to ICFO, who hold the record for the fastest quantum random number generators. ICFO designed a pair of "quantum dice" for the experiment: a special version of their patented random number generation technology, including very fast "randomness extraction" electronics. This produced one extremely pure random bit for each measurement made in the Delft experiment. The bits were produced in about 100 ns, the time it takes light to travel just 30 meters, not nearly enough time for the electrons to communicate. "Delft asked us to go beyond the state of the art in random number generation. Never before has an experiment required such good random numbers in such a short time." Says Carlos Abellán, a PhD student at ICFO and a co-author of the Delft study.

This is quackery, as there is no proof that there is any such thing as randomness. I have explained it on this blog many times, such as here and in my 2015 FQXi essay.

For the ICFO team, the participation in the Delft experiment was more than a chance to contribute to fundamental physics. Prof. Morgan Mitchell comments: "Working on this experiment pushed us to develop technologies that we can now apply to improve communications security and high-performance computing, other areas that require high-speed and high-quality random numbers."

If you want high-speed and high-quality random numbers, just toss a coin 512 times, and apply SHA-512 repeatedly. There is no known way to do better than that.

With the help of ICFO's quantum random number generators, the Delft experiment gives a nearly perfect disproof of Einstein's world-view, in which "nothing travels faster than light" and "God does not play dice." At least one of these statements must be wrong. The laws that govern the Universe may indeed be a throw of the dice.

This is confusing. They have disproved Einstein's view of local realism being hidden variables. They certainly have not found anything going faster than light, and they have not proved that God plays dice. They used a random number generator to get results that look random. Such an experiment cannot possible prove the existence of random numbers.

No-loophole Bell experiment hits newspapers

I discussed the latest Bell test experiment in August, and now it has hit the NY Times:

In a landmark study, scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands reported that they had conducted an experiment that they say proved one of the most fundamental claims of quantum theory — that objects separated by great distance can instantaneously affect each other’s behavior.

The finding is another blow to one of the bedrock principles of standard physics known as “locality,” which states that an object is directly influenced only by its immediate surroundings.

No, this is not a blow to locality at all. It does confirm quantum mechanics, and close some loopholes in previous experiments, but that is all.

The Delft study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, lends further credence to an idea that Einstein famously rejected. He said quantum theory necessitated “spooky action at a distance,” and he refused to accept the notion that the universe could behave in such a strange and apparently random fashion.

In particular, Einstein derided the idea that separate particles could be “entangled” so completely that measuring one particle would instantaneously influence the other, regardless of the distance separating them.

Einstein was deeply unhappy with the uncertainty introduced by quantum theory and described its implications as akin to God’s playing dice.

This is hopelessly confused. Randomness and action-at-a-distance are two separate issues.

Two distant particles can be entangled in the sense that their states are related, and measuring one gives info about the other. But there has never been an experiment showing that an action on one particle has an effect on a particle outside its light cone.

The new experiment, conducted by a group led by Ronald Hanson, a physicist at the Dutch university’s Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, and joined by scientists from Spain and England, is the strongest evidence yet to support the most fundamental claims of the theory of quantum mechanics about the existence of an odd world formed by a fabric of subatomic particles, where matter does not take form until it is observed and time runs backward as well as forward.

The researchers describe their experiment as a “loophole-free Bell test” in a reference to an experiment proposed in 1964 by the physicist John Stewart Bell as a way of proving that “spooky action at a distance” is real.

“These tests have been done since the late ’70s but always in the way that additional assumptions were needed,” Dr. Hanson said. “Now we have confirmed that there is spooky action at distance.”

I guess I cannot blame John Markoff, the NY Times reporter, because the physicists themselves are reciting this mystical nonsense.

No, this does not confirm that matter is not real until it is observed, or that time runs backwards, or that there is any action at a distane.

According to the scientists, they have now ruled out all possible so-called hidden variables that would offer explanations of long-distance entanglement based on the laws of classical physics.

Finally, in the 9th paragraph, we have a correct statement. John von Neumann considered and rejected hidden variable theories in a 1930 textbook, and that has been the mainstream view ever since. Some fringe physicists, plus Einstein, have claimed that von Neumann's argument was wrong, but all attempts to revive hidden variables have been decisively rejected for an assortment of reasons.

The Delft researchers were able to entangle two electrons separated by a distance of 1.3 kilometers, slightly less than a mile, and then share information between them. Physicists use the term “entanglement” to refer to pairs of particles that are generated in such a way that they cannot be described independently. The scientists placed two diamonds on opposite sides of the Delft University campus, 1.3 kilometers apart.

Each diamond contained a tiny trap for single electrons, which have a magnetic property called a “spin.” Pulses of microwave and laser energy are then used to entangle and measure the “spin” of the electrons.

The distance — with detectors set on opposite sides of the campus — ensured that information could not be exchanged by conventional means within the time it takes to do the measurement.

This is a decent description of the experiment. Yes, the photon pair is entangled in the sense that it is generated in such a way that it cannot be described as independent photons.

The failure of hidden variable theories also shows that the pair cannot be described by some sort of joint probability distribution on classical particles.

But that still leaves the possibility that the pair can be physically separated so that one has no effect on the other, but there is no mathematical description of that individual photon without being tied to the other. Measuring one photon affects our best mathematical description of the pair, but has no causal physical effect on the other photon.

That last possibility is what the quantum textbooks have said for 85 years, more or less.

As I keep saying on this blog, you need to get out of your head the idea that physics and math are the same thing. We have physical phenomena, and mathematical models and representations. Physics is all about finding mathematical models for what we observe, but there is no reason to believe that there is some underlying unobservable physical reality that is perfectly identical to some mathematically exact formulas. Einstein, Bohm, Bell, Tegmark, and others have gone down that path, and just come up with nonsense. Only by making such hidden variable assumptions does this experiment lead you to question locality.

Locality is not wrong. Hidden variables are wrong.

The tests take place in a mind-bending and peculiar world. According to quantum mechanics, particles do not take on formal properties until they are measured or observed in some way. Until then, they can exist simultaneously in two or more places. Once measured, however, they snap into a more classical reality, existing in only one place.

Back to nonsense. Quantum mechanics is all about what can be observed. If you talk about what is not observed, such as saying that particles can be in two places at once, you have left quantum mechanics and entered the subject of interpretations. Some interpretations say that a particle can be in two places at once, and some do not. Some say that there is no such thing as a particle.

Indeed, the experiment is not merely a vindication for the exotic theory of quantum mechanics, it is a step toward a practical application known as a “quantum Internet.” Currently, the security of the Internet and the electronic commerce infrastructure is fraying in the face of powerful computers that pose a challenge to encryption technologies based on the ability to factor large numbers and other related strategies.

Researchers like Dr. Hanson envision a quantum communications network formed from a chain of entangled particles girdling the entire globe. Such a network would make it possible to securely share encryption keys, and know of eavesdropping attempts with absolute certainty.

Now they are claiming applications to quantum cryptography and quantum computers. No, quantum computers are not fraying the security of the internet and electronic commerce. No one has even made one true qubit, the smallest building block for a quantum computer. There is no security advantage to a quantum internet, and there is a long list of technical obstacles to even making an attempt. For example, it is extremely difficult to make a router to relay a single bit of info.

A potential weakness of the experiment, he suggested, is that an electronic system the researchers used to add randomness to their measurement may in fact be predetermined in some subtle way that is not easily detectable, meaning that the outcome might still be predetermined as Einstein believed.

To attempt to overcome this weakness and close what they believe is a final loophole, the National Science Foundation has financed a group of physicists led by Dr. Kaiser and Alan H. Guth, also at M.I.T., to attempt an experiment that will have a better chance of ensuring the complete independence of the measurement detectors by gathering light from distant objects on different sides of the galaxy next year, and then going a step further by capturing the light from objects known as quasars near the edge of the universe in 2017 and 2018.

No experiment can truly rule out super-determinism. This group is trying to show that superdeterminism, if it exists, would go back to the early universe. Isn't that what the super-determinists believe anyway? There are very few followers to such a bizarre theory anyway, so I would not know.

I just happened to watch this video titled Deepak Chopra destroyed by Sam Harris. Harris and Michael Shermer mock Chopra for citing quantum nonlocality, and say that none of them are competent to discuss it because none of them are physicists.

As much as Chopra might be guilty of babbling what Shermer calls "woo", I don't see how this NY Times article is any better. It is also claiming that nonlocality has been proved, and that matter doesn't really exist until you look at it. That is essentially the same as what Chopra was saying, except that he goes a step further and ties it into consciousness.

I would have thought that physicists would object to this sort of mysticism being portrayed as cutting edge physics in the NY Times. Yes, it is a good experiment, but it just confirms the theory that was developed in 1925-1930, and that received Nobel prizes in 1932-1933. My guess is that there is too much federal grant money going into quantum computing and other fanciful experiments, and no one wants to rock the boat.

Update: Lubos Motl piles on.

If you had some basic common sense and honesty, your conclusion would be to switch to abandon the classical way of thinking and switch to the quantum way of thinking. You would stop talking about "spooky" and "weird" and "nonlocal" things that may be implied by a classical model but it contradicts the insights that modern physics has actually made about the essence of the laws of Nature.

But I guess that it's more convenient for this corrupt community to keep on playing with diamonds in totally stupid ways and write nonsensical hype about these games in the newspapers.

I won't proofread this text because it makes me too angry.

I agree with him about the corrupt community. His post still says "transfer any transformation" instead of "transfer any information", soI guess he still has not proofread it.

Against labeling privilege

Scott Aaronson has stumbled into a political dispute again. These are always fun to read. His views are that of a typical academic Jewish leftist, but he has an honest streak that causes him to choke on some of the more dogmatist leftist nonsense.

This time he refuses to go along with social science attacks on white male privilege, and he even declares that Marx and Freud were wrong. More importantly, he denounces those who idolize Marx and Freud. Previously, he approved of European countries keeping out immigrants in order to maintain their cultural and demographic identities.

This time he says Marx was wrong, and this:

In any case, I don’t see any escaping the fact that, for much of the 20th century, Marx and Freud were almost universally considered by humanist intellectuals to be two of the greatest geniuses who ever lived. To whatever extent that’s no longer true today, I’d see that as an opportunity for reflection about which present-day social dogmas might fare badly under the harsh gaze of future generations. Incidentally, from Newton till today, I can’t think of a single example of a similarly-catastrophic failure in the hard sciences, except when science was overruled politically (like with Lysenkoism, or the Nazis’ “Aryan physics”). The closest I can think of (and in terms of failure, it maybe rates a few milliMarxes) is Wegener and continental drift.

Even Lubos Motl agrees this time, altho he can resist sniping at some other things Aaronson has said.

I try to avoid talking about the social sciences here, because if I did, then it would make the physicists look too good. I would rather point out where the hard sciences are going wrong, as there is some hope of fixing them.

On another political issue, Nature News reports:

Canadian election brings hope for science

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative party is ousted by the Liberals.

Canada’s middle-left Liberal party won a stunning victory on 19 October, unseating the ruling Conservative party after a tight three-way race. Researchers are hoping that the country’s new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, will help to restore government support for basic research and the country's tradition of environmentalism.

The Liberals have promised to amend some of the damage done to science and evidence-based policymaking in Canada under the Conservative government, which came into power in 2006. Under former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, research funding shifted to focus on applied science, many jobs and research centres were cut and the nation gained an international reputation for obstructing climate-change negotiations.

This sounds more like a left-wing editorial to me. It appears that all of our leading science journals are hopelessly infected with leftists.

Update: Also, more leftist censorship:

A well-known French weatherman has been put on an indefinite “forced holiday” after writing a book criticizing climate-change research and saying that, even if it does exist, it will probably have some very positive effects, including more tourists, lower death rates, lower electricity bills in the winter, and higher-quality wine.

Philippe Verdier, famous for delivering nightly forecasts on the state-run news channel France 2, has authored a new book casting doubt on the research of world climatologists.

Philosopher complains about scientists again

Philosopher of pseudoscience Massimo Pigliucci writes:

When George Ellis and Joe Silk wrote an op-ed in the prestigious Nature magazine, dramatically entitled “Defend the integrity of physics,” cosmologist Sean Carroll responded via Twitter (not exactly a prestigious scientific journal, but much more effective in public discourse) with, and I quote: “My real problem with the falsifiability police is: we don’t get to demand ahead of time what kind of theory correctly describes the world.” The “falsifiability police”? Wow.

This is actually all very amusing from the point of view of a philosopher of science. You see, our trade is often openly despised by physicists (the list of offenders is long: Steven Weinberg, Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Neil deGrasse Tyson — see for instance this, or this), on the grounds that we are not useful to practicing scientists.

No, you don't get to be despised by being merely useless. Today's philosophers of science are despised because they are so openly anti-science, as I have documented on this blog many times.

If he thinks that his philosopher colleagues are useful to science, he should give an example. Instead he gives:

But also, there is interesting disagreement among philosophers themselves on this matter. For instance, Richard Dawid, a philosopher at the University of Vienna, has argued in favor of embracing a “post-empirical” science, where internal coherence and mathematical beauty become the major criteria for deciding whether a scientific theory is “true” or not. I, for one, object to such a view of science, both as a scientist and as a philosopher.

A better course of action would be to get both scientists and philosophers to seat at the high table and engage in constructive dialogue, each bringing their own perspective and expertise to the matter at hand. It would be helpful, however, is this happened with a bit less mud slinging and a bit more reciprocal intellectual respect.

The mud-slinging is almost entirely one-sided, with the philosophers arguing against the validity of modern science.

For the most part, today's physicists ignore philosophers as crackpots.

In the podcast, he argues that Newtonian mechanics is wrong, that there are no crucial experiments, that a science can become pseudoscience by not being progressive enuf, that philosophers need to define science in order to cut off funding for some projects, and that millions of Africans are dying because of pseudoscience.

When talking about this history of science, like others, he talks about Copernicus and Einstein. And of course the description is so over-simplified and distorted that his points are wrong.

His biggest gripe is with requiring scientific hypotheses to be falsifiable, as Karl Popper had argued. He hates the idea of science having a crisp definition, but wants philosophers to declare what is or is not science.