Economist cites Schroedinger's immigrant

Here is a foolish non-physics reference to quantum mechanics.

Economist David Henderson writes in favor of open borders:

In a post this morning, Cafe Hayek’s Don Boudreaux points out the contradiction in opposing immigrants because they work and opposing them because they go on welfare, that is, don’t work.

Jon Murphy, a Ph.D. student at George Mason University, where Don teaches, and a frequent commenter on this site (as well as an Econlib Feature Article author) sums it up beautifully:

Schrodinger’s Immigrant: simultaneously stealing jobs and too lazy to work.

Of course, Jon’s reference is to Schrodinger’s cat.

If Schroedinger's immigrant is like the cat, then you have to look at the immigrant too see if he is stealing jobs or too lazy to work.

Or as a comment explains:

It is completely possible for immigrants to be a problem for both working and not working. An example — If 10 million immigrants suddenly find a home in the US, the economy cannot instantly absorb them. Therefore some will find work and others will not, thereby making the double whammy that some are competing for jobs with citizens, and others are sucking dollars out of the welfare system.

Henderson ignores this, and just lets others take the libertarian view that the immigrants should be able to do whatever they want.

Letting quasars substitute for free will

SciAm has an article on Photons, Quasars and the Possibility of Free Will:

The nature of free will has long inspired philosophical debates, but it also raises a central question about the fundamental nature of the universe. Is the cosmos governed by strict physical laws that determine its fate from the big bang until the end of time? Or do the laws of nature sometimes allow for things to happen at random? A century-old series of physics experiments still hasn’t been able to settle the question, but a new experiment has tilted the odds toward the latter by performing a quantum experiment across billions of light-years. ...

Rather than using a random number generator in the lab to decide which photon measurement to make, the experimenters used quasars.

Quasars are brilliant beacons of light powered by supermassive black holes in the centers of distant galaxies. The team used random fluctuations in the light from quasars to determine how the photons were measured. Since the light from a quasar has to travel for billions of years to reach us, the fluctuations in brightness happened billions of years before the experiment was done—billions of years before humans even walked the Earth. So, there is absolutely no way for it to be entangled with the experiment.

The result was just what quantum theory predicts. Thus, it looks like there really are no deterministic hidden variables, and randomness is still possible throughout the cosmos.

This is just another Bell test experiment, confirming what has been the conventional wisdom for 90 years. There are no local hidden variables. It doesn't really have much to do with free will.

A lot of experiments use randomized inputs, and that is easy to do if the experimenter has some free will to make choices. If he doesn't, then one can question where the randomness is going to come from. You could toss coins, but then you worry that the coin tosses have some subtle correlation with the particle spins in the experiment, and that the correlation is somehow tricking us into believing in quantum mechanics.

So you can get your randomness from a distant quasar. Does that make you feel better as a result?

All this shows is that the known laws of physics are not 100% deterministic. It doesn't really show that we have free will. It does disprove arguments against free will that are based on saying that the laws of physics are deterministic. The known laws are not deterministic.

Motl complains about the end of Physics

Lubos Motl writes:

Fundamental physics refused to obey the wishes of Horgan's. In the 22 years since 1996 when Horgan declared the end of science in his book, we have seen the discovery of Matrix Theory, AdS/CFT and all of its known implications, discovery of the cosmological constant, gravitational waves, Higgs boson, plus some possible experimental anomalies suggesting physics beyond the Standard Model. Sen's tachyon minirevolution, twistor and amplituhedron uprising, landscape and its KKLT realization, Swampland, ER-EPR correspondence, and dozens of comparably similar developments in string theory.

None of these things told us anything new about fundamental physics. From about 1850 to 1980, we had fundamental physics breakthrus every 5 years or so. Since then, nothing.

Already during his lifetime, Einstein was celebrated for some well-established insights such as [relativity etc...] And despite his flawed non-quantum approach, his efforts to find the unified field theory became a template for the modern search for a theory of everything.

Yes, that sums up a lot of what is wrong with theoretical physicists. They follow Einstein's flawed approach.

I think it's a right decision to surrender in this media war against the anti-physics morons. They have won and taken over almost all the media. The number of imbeciles and liars is just way too high and I have been tilting at windmills for way too long. A vast majority of newspaper articles about theoretical physics – and tons of other topics – spread "stories" and "narratives" that have virtually no basis in the truth whatsoever. Serious physicists have been too passive for too long and they have allowed the situation to deteriorate this much.

Yes, the media promotes all sorts of kooky ideas about physics.

Schroedinger grandson plugs quantum computers

Scott Aaronson posts:

And that’s why, today, I’m delighted to have a special guest post by my good friend Terry Rudolph.  Terry, who happens to be Erwin Schrödinger’s grandson, has done lots of fascinating work over the years in quantum computing and the foundations of quantum mechanics, and previously came up on this blog in the context of the PBR (Pusey-Barrett-Rudolph) Theorem.  Today, he’s a cofounder and chief architect at PsiQuantum, a startup in Palo Alto that’s trying to build silicon-photonic quantum computers. ...

Can we/should we teach Quantum Theory in Junior High?
by Terry Rudolph

Should we?

Reasons which suggest the answer is “yes” include:

Economic: We are apparently into a labor market shortage in quantum engineers. 

The link is to a NY Times article a month ago:

The Next Tech Talent Shortage: Quantum Computing Researchers

Christopher Savoie, founder and chief executive of a start-up called Zapata, offered jobs this year to three scientists who specialize in an increasingly important technology called quantum computing. They accepted.

Several months later, the Cambridge, Mass., company was still waiting for the State Department to approve visas for the specialists. All three are foreigners, born in Europe and Asia.

Whether the delays were the result of tougher immigration policy or just red tape, Mr. Savoie’s predicament was typical of a growing concern among American businesses and universities: Unless policies and priorities change, they will have trouble attracting the talent needed to build quantum technology, which could make today’s computers look like toys. ...

If a quantum computer can be built, it will be exponentially more powerful than even today’s supercomputers.

No, it will not be exponentially more powerful, as Scott Aaronson is fond of pointing out.

And there is considerable doubt about whether quantum computers can be built at all.

The whole field is a gigantic scam.

There are no overseas scientists in quantum computing that have anything to offer the USA. There is no good reason to grant them visas.

Rudolph's new book, and his proposed Junior High course, consist mostly in lessons in programming hypothetical qubits that no one has successfully constructed. This makes about as much sense as teaching kids to play the Harry Potter sport of Quidditch, which exists only the imagination of J.K. Rowling and her readers.

Glashow defends textbook quantum mechanics

I sometimes complain that crackpot ideas have taken over the popularizations of physics, in part because the professors who know better have been silent. But I am happy to say that a distinguished physicist has spoken up to criticize a popular quantum mechanics book.

Sheldon Lee Glashow reviews a book to criticize these ideas:

Schroedinger's cat is simultaneously alive and dead.
We should accept non-falsifiable theories, because no theory is really falsifiable anyway.
Theories cannot be verified either.
Copenhagen interpretation has clouded the minds of physicists.

Glashow is right about these points. Attacking Copenhagen because of Schroedinger's cat is foolishness. The cat is only half-dead in the sense that our knowledge is imperfect, and not because of some fundamental shortcoming of quantum mechanics.

The Becker book attacks Copenhagen because it says that the underlying philosophy of logical positivism is faulty. I do believe it is correct to say that quantum mechanics was founded on a logical positivist philosophy. I think that is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Unfortunately, logical positivism has fallen out of favor among philosophers, and so has the Copenhagen interpretation. Was one shift a consequence of the other? I don't know.

The situation is muddied by the fact that no one defends logical positivism anymore. Copenhagen and positivism seem to have a lot of believers among physicists, but not so many expressing public opinions. Many physicists defend variants of Copenhagen, but prefer to call it consistent histories or QBism.

Einstein's unified field theory dream is dead

Dennis Overbye writes in the NY Times:

Is Albert Einstein finally dead?

Yes. The old sage took his last breath and muttered his last indecipherable words, in German, on April 18, 1955. But lately he has been dying a second death, if one believes a new spate of articles and papers bemoaning the state of contemporary physics.

Never mind the recent, staggering discovery of gravitational waves: ripples in space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago, and which indicate the universe is peppered with black holes that shred and swallow stars.

No, something much deeper than gravity or quantum theory, Einstein’s other misbegotten legacy, is at stake.

More than anyone, it was Einstein who set the goal for modern science: the search for a final theory of everything, a “unified theory,” he said, that would explain why there was no other way to put together the universe than the one we seem to live in.

Or, as he famously put it, “What interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.”

Roll over, Albert.

He goes on to explain how string theory, supersymmetry, landscape, multiverse, unified field theory, etc. are all dead. Work in these directions has failed, even if many don't want to admit it. Peter Woit and Sabine Hossenfelder have comments.

Einstein's goal of a unified theory was foolish anyway.

But the amount of this dark energy is smaller than the predicted value of the cosmological constant by a factor of 10⁶⁰. ...

According to them, atoms — the stuff of you, me and the stars — account for only 5 percent of the cosmos by weight. Dark matter, of which we know nothing except that its collective gravity sculpts and holds the galaxies together, amounts to 25 percent.

The remaining 70 percent is dark energy, pushing everything apart; we don’t know anything about that, either. We only know that this “dark sector” exists because of the effect of its gravity on the luminous universe, the motions of stars and galaxies.

A theory that leaves 95 percent of the universe unidentified is hardly a sign that science is over.

Wait -- there is a prediction for the density of dark energy, but we don't know anything about it? So how was the prediction made?

We actually know a lot about dark matter and dark energy, and it is possible that we now know essentially all that we will ever know.

Dark matter has gravity, but does not interact with electricity or light. Its gravitational effects are well understood. What else is there to understand?

Dark energy could be the zero point energy of the vacuum. All quantum systems have such a zero point energy. We can't derive it from first principles, or from the geometry of a Calabi-Yau space, but quantum theory suggests that we should expect it. It appears to be homogeneous, isotropic, and Lorentz invariant. It is just the energy of the vacuum. There may be no more to explain.

Maybe we don’t understand gravity after all, some astronomers say. “I worry that we deify Einstein too much,” Stacy McGaugh, an astronomer at Case Western Reserve University, told Gizmodo in June.

We definitely deify Einstein too much.

If scientists want any gift for the holidays, it’s some new physics that would break the stalemate of these “standard models” and provide new clues to our existence.

This is like a medical researcher hoping to discover some new disease, or the CIA hoping to discover some new terrorist network, or a computer scientist hoping to find flaws that destroy our information infrastructure.

If the disease is already out there killing people, then sure you want to figure out how to diagnose and treat it. But why would you hope for the disease?

Physicists have figured out the four fundamental forces. The big problems have been solved. That is a good thing, not a bad thing. Am I supposed to hope that the laws of physics are wrong just because some bored physicists don't have anything to do? That seems to be what Overbye and everyone else are saying.

Quantum computing skeptic in IEEE Spectrum

I have long been a skeptic about quantum computing. It is probably the opinion on this blog that is most attacked for being wrong.

IEEE Spectrum mag, the leading journal for electrical engineers, published an article on The Case Against Quantum Computing:

Quantum computing is all the rage. It seems like hardly a day goes by without some news outlet describing the extraordinary things this technology promises. Most commentators forget, or just gloss over, the fact that people have been working on quantum computing for decades — and without any practical results to show for it. ...

On the hardware front, advanced research is under way, with a 49-qubit chip (Intel), a 50-qubit chip (IBM), and a 72-qubit chip (Google) having recently been fabricated and studied. The eventual outcome of this activity is not entirely clear, especially because these companies have not revealed the details of their work.

While I believe that such experimental research is beneficial and may lead to a better understanding of complicated quantum systems, I’m skeptical that these efforts will ever result in a practical quantum computer. Such a computer would have to be able to manipulate — on a microscopic level and with enormous precision — a physical system characterized by an unimaginably huge set of parameters, each of which can take on a continuous range of values. Could we ever learn to control the more than 10³⁰⁰ continuously variable parameters defining the quantum state of such a system?

My answer is simple. No, never.

There are comments here.

IBM and Google were claiming in 2017 that they would have demonstrated quantum supremacy before the end of that year. Now we are almost at the end of 2018, and still no quantum supremacy.

It is rare for a mainstream publication to admit that quantum computing may be impossible. The author is a well-respected physicist.