Philosopher Promotes Determinism

I mentioned Dr. Bee promoting superdeteriminism, and philospher Stephen Maitzen also promotes determinism.

Here is his core argument:

You decided to read this post. Suppose your decision wasn’t necessitated by the prior conditions: you might have decided not to read this post despite everything being exactly as it was. If we delve into the question “Why did you decide to read this post rather than not ‒ what made the difference?”, at some stage in our ever-deeper inquiry the answer is nothing. That seems to me a perfect example of magic: there was a difference (you decided one way rather than another), but literally nothing made the difference.

If you reject magical thinking, then you ought to accept determinism.

In other words, he just declares non-determinism to be magic.

Einstein believed in determinism, but most physicists do not. Certainly nothing in textbook physics requires determinism, and many believe it is incompatible with quantum mechanics. But Maitzen argues:

Contrary to what you may have heard, determinism does not conflict with current physics. ...

One such deterministic theory is Bohmian mechanics, named for the physicist David Bohm. ...

Misinformed people say that the experimental violations of Bell’s Theorem rule out deterministic physics. Bell himself knew better: what they rule out is physics that’s both deterministic and local. Bohmian mechanics survives because it’s nonlocal, but (as Bell showed) so is quantum mechanics itself.

No, this is misinformed. Nearly all physicists reject Bohmian mechanics because it is nonlocal, and I would call it magic.

Quantum mechanics is local as far as we know. Quantum field theory is local.

Some people interpret Bell's inequality as saying quantum mechanics must be indeterministic. That appears to be the case, but there is always the possibility of some underlying deterministic theory.

Any indeterministic theory could have an underlying deterministic theory.

There is no hope of science proving determinism, so why would anyone believe in it? If you accept determinism, then you are just a cog in a machine, with no free will or any purpose to life. People make choices all the time, and it is almost impossible to live life as if all those choices are determined. I doubt that anyone can do it, except maybe for babies, comatose patients, and schizophrenics.

Dr. Bee Pushes Superdeterminism Again

I have defended Dr. Bee, as she often gives nice summaries of science outside her expertise. But not when she gets Physics in her own expertise wrong. She explains:

7:20 And then let me finally say some words about how superdeterminism 7:24 explains the quantum mechanical result. Superdeterminism is an unfortunate 7:29 term that John Bell used to describe what he thought was an implausible explanation. What 7:36 it really means is just that the probability of a measurement outcome depends on what you 7:41 measure. In the GHZ table this means that for example the result for the side of the second 7:48 coin in the third measurement can differ from the one in the first measurement, 7:53 because the measurements on the other coins are different. The result depends on the context. 7:59 The benefit of superdeterminism, and the reason why I am convinced it’s the correct explanation, 8:06 is that it is local and therefore compatible with Einstein’s theory. Superdeterminism has 8:13 no “spooky action at a distance.” Indeed, we know from Bell’s theorem that it’s 8:18 the *only way to make the results of quantum mechanics compatible with Einstein’s locality. 8:25 People don’t like this explanation because they think it’s constraining 8:29 their free will or something. But the way that I think about it is just that it’s 8:35 a consistency requirement. And yes I am working on a few more papers about this,

She is writing wrong papers. In quantum mechanics, the measurement outcome depends on what you measure. That has been accepted wisdom for a century. It is not superdeterminism, which nearly everyone rejects as not only implausible, but crazy.

Bell's theorem says that superdeterminism is the only way to make a local hidden variable theory compatible with known Physics. But again, mainstream physicists and textbooks have rejected hidden variable theories for a century.

Textbook quantum field theory is local, and compatible with relativity.

People do not like superdeterminism not just because it eliminates free will, but that it any possibility of doing a scientific experiment. It is part of The Existential Crisis Iceberg. If you accept it, there is no returning to rational thought.

Microsoft Claims a Topological Qubit

Microsoft brags in a new video:

Hear from the Microsoft team behind the recent breakthrough in physics and quantum computing demonstrated by the new Majorana 1 chip, engineered from an entirely new material that has the potential to scale to millions of qubits on a single chip.

Bloomberg piles on:

So it's an accelerator and it's very 13:52 complementary that some investors would say that this 13:55 artificial intelligence hype cycle has produced more hype than actual reality, 14:01 at least at the stage that we are Now. Is quantum computing going to be 14:04 different or follow a similar pattern?

Quantum computing is 1000x more over-hyped than AI. AI has already produced beyond what the hype was promising. Quantum computing has not delivered anything of use.

Dr. Quantum Computing notes:

Commenters point out to me that buried in Nature‘s review materials is the following striking passage: “The editorial team wishes to point out that the results in this manuscript do not represent evidence for the presence of Majorana zero modes in the reported devices. The work is published for introducing a device architecture that might enable fusion experiments using future Majorana zero modes.” So, the situation is that Microsoft is unambiguously claiming to have created a topological qubit, and they just published a relevant paper in Nature, but their claim to have created a topological qubit has not yet been accepted by Nature‘s peer review. ...

Q5. Didn’t Microsoft claim the experimental creation of Majorana zero modes — a building block of topological qubits—back in 2018, and didn’t they then need to retract their claim?

A. Yep. Certainly that history is making some experts cautious about the new claim. When I asked Chetan Nayak how confident I should be, his response was basically “look, we now have a topological qubit that’s behaving fully as a qubit; how much more do people want?”

Q6. Is this a big deal?

A. If the claim stands, I’d say it would be a scientific milestone for the field of topological quantum computing and physics beyond.

Yes, very interesting, if the claim stands.

Update: Dr. Bee adds her opinion.

Update: The WSJ published some skepticism about Microsoft's claims, which go beyond what has been published.

Many-Worlds Leaves Basic Questions Unresolved

Many-worlds theory is nonsense from beginning to end. Here is an illustration.

Here is a new paper, from China:

Does the Universe Split Everywhere at Once? Rethinking Branching and Nonlocality in the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics, first pro- posed by Hugh Everett III in 1957, offers a radical solution to the measure- ment problem by positing that all possible outcomes of a quantum measure- ment occur in different worlds (Everett, 1957; Vaidman, 2021).

No, it does nothing to solve the measurement problem.

In quantum mechanics, the measurement problem is the problem of definite outcomes: quantum systems have superpositions but quantum measurements only give one definite result.[1][2]

The supposed solution is to say that all the other possibilities happen in unseen parallel worlds. But that does nothing to explain why we only see one definite result in our world.

While this interpretation avoids the need for wavefunction collapse, it introduces the contentious concept of branching — a process where the universe splits into multiple worlds whenever a quantum event occurs.

No, the wavefunction still collapses in our world. The rest of the wavefunction becomes inaccessible in our world, and related to only other worlds.

Over the past decades, the modern formulation of MWI has refined this idea, grounding branching in environmental-induced decoherence, a process that explains the emer- gence of stable, quasi-classical worlds (Wallace, 2012). However, critical questions remain unresolved: Is branching global, happening throughout the entire universe instantaneously (Sebens and Carroll, 2018; Ney, 2024), or is it local, propagating at finite speeds? (Wallace, 2012; McQueen and Vaid- man, 2019) How does nonlocality in entangled systems influence branching? Most importantly, can MWI reconcile its branching mechanism with the principles of special relativity?

With those questions unresolved, nothing is resolved. The theory has no substance.

It is amazing that trained physicists can promote this nonsense. And they complain that Pres. Trump might cut funding for it.

This paper draws its own goofy conclusions.

This paper aims to resolve key tensions by demonstrating that branching is neither strictly global nor purely local, but nonlocal for entangled systems. ... Crucially, this non- locality is apparent rather than fundamental. The multiverse as a whole retains a Lorentz-invariant structure, with no preferred Lorentz frame or superluminal influence across all worlds. This reconciles MWI with special relativity while preserving its capacity to explain quantum nonlocality.

Many-worlds is an esoteric subject, but even if you know nothing about it, it should be clear that physicists have been writing about it since 1957, and they have gotten nowhere. Nobody knows what the theory means, on any level. There is no agreement on anything. And no way to test the theory. It is nothing but an undefined fantasy.

In 1957, Everett said that if the whole universe is described by QM, then there should be a wavefunction for the universe. In particular, an observer would be included. So when an observer sees one outcome out of several possibilities, and it seems like a collapse of some local wavefunction, then presumably there is some way to interpret that collapse in the wavefunction of the universe. All that is clear enough. The weird part is making the leap to saying that the collapse is the creation of parallel universes.

Update: New video on The Huge Flaw in the Many Worlds Interpretation. It explains how hard it is to make sense out of MWI. In particular, it explains that there is no way to make sense out of probability. To believe in MWI is to reject probability as a meaningful concept. The full podcast is here. But ignore the part from 1:10:00 to 1:14:00, where he claims that everybody had gotten Bell's Theorem wrong for 60 years, including the Nobel Prize committee a couple of years ago. No, the Nobel folks did not get it wrong.

Quantum Encryption Uses Light and Color

Here is some typical quantum encryption hype:

The future of internet security faces a major challenge: quantum computers could eventually break even the strongest encryption used today, making sensitive data vulnerable. To counter this threat, researchers worldwide are working on quantum networks — systems that leverage the principles of quantum mechanics to enable ultra-secure communication.

When fully developed and globally interconnected, these networks will form the quantum internet, providing encryption that cannot be intercepted or decoded.

No, quantum computers do not threaten the strongest encryption used today. They might threaten RSA, in about 50 years. Even then, I doubt it.

Regardless, no one is going to make secure networks out of this quantum encryption. They suffer a number of defects. They are slow and expensive. They cannot use routers. They are subject to hardware attacks. They cannot be authenticated. They depend on a probability of detecting an attack. They have to shut down if there is an attack.

Many-Worlds does not avoid Spookiness

Lev Vaidman writes a new paper:

It is argued that, keeping the standard paradigm of a scientific theory, the only way to avoid (spooky) action at a distance of quantum mechanics is to accept the existence of parallel worlds created at every quantum measurement. Einsten's boxes and Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger scenario are analyzed in the framework of the many-worlds interpretation, Bohmian mechanics, and Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber collapse theory.

Here is his argument. Say you have two boxes, A and B, and you put a particle randomly in one of them. Then you separate the boxes, and open box A, seeing whether the particle is in it. Then you immediate know whether the particle is in box B.

He says this is spooky because the knowledge seems to leap from box A to B.

Now you repeat the drill, but instead of just moving the boxes, you split the universe into two universes. One universe has the particle in box A only, and the other has it in box B only. THe new universes cannot communicate or interact in any way.

Now it is still the case that finding the particle in box A tells you immeediately that it is not in box B, but only in that universe, so it is not spooky.

This is so stupid that I do not know how anyone can believe such nonsense. Saying that the universe splits does nothing to solve spookiness, or anything else.

Top Ten Physics Myths

Other sites go after astrology and other pseudosciences. I go after bizarre beliefs held by respected physicists.

1. Matter is mostly empty space.
This is based on the idea that matter is made of quarks and electrons, and those are point particles, leaving a lot of space in between. But matter is made of fields, and fields take up space. Especially fermionic fields.
2. Bell proved that Quantum Mechanics is nonlocal.
He only proved that QM could not be replaced by a theory of local hidden variables. The key point is that hidden variable theories do not work.
3. The universe is deterministic.
Some say that a scientific outlook requires that the past determines the future. On the contrary, many things appear fundamentally unpredictable.
4. Einstein invented relativity.
The theory, as we know it, was developed by Lorentz, Poincare, and Minkowski. They were years ahead of Einstein in every detail.
5. Information is conserved.
No, information is nothing like conserved quantities like energy and momentum. Conservation laws come from symmetry princples, and there isn't one for information. If you burn a book, the information is gone.
6. Quantum entanglement is a resource.
Entanglement can be puzzling, but the idea that it is a resource that can be brought to do useful things, like cryptography, teleportation, and computation is yet to be proved.
7. String theory generalizes the standard model and gravity.
This is just wishful thinking. It has not found any relation to the real world.
8. Many-worlds is the minimalist QM interpretation.
It is not even an interpretation. It takes QM, with its useful predictions, and replaces it with a theory that eliminates the predictions and says that anything is possible.
9. The universe has infinities and singularities.
Mathematical models often have singularities at the center of black holes, and at the beginning of the Big Bang. Also, quantum fields have infinities before they have been renormalized. None of these are observed. And the idea that there are infinitely many copies of yourself floating around the universe is just fanciful nonsense.
10. The quantum world is discrete.
Bohr said there is no quantum world. QM uses continous variables. It only appears discrete when you take measurements, as we observe eigenvalues and they are sometimes discrete.

What did I miss? I am sure there are many others.