Death is the ultimate equilibrium

Philip Ball writes in Quanta mag:

Once we regard living things as agents performing a computation — collecting and storing information about an unpredictable environment — capacities and considerations such as replication, adaptation, agency, purpose and meaning can be understood as arising not from evolutionary improvisation, but as inevitable corollaries of physical laws. In other words, there appears to be a kind of physics of things doing stuff, and evolving to do stuff. Meaning and intention — thought to be the defining characteristics of living systems — may then emerge naturally through the laws of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.

I wonder if this inspired the current FQXi essay contest.

Biological systems don’t defy physical laws, of course — but neither do they seem to be predicted by them. In contrast, they are goal-directed: survive and reproduce. We can say that they have a purpose — or what philosophers have traditionally called a teleology — that guides their behavior.

By the same token, physics now lets us predict, starting from the state of the universe a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, what it looks like today. But no one imagines that the appearance of the first primitive cells on Earth led predictably to the human race. Laws do not, it seems, dictate the course of evolution.

The teleology and historical contingency of biology, said the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, make it unique among the sciences. Both of these features stem from perhaps biology’s only general guiding principle: evolution. It depends on chance and randomness, but natural selection gives it the appearance of intention and purpose. Animals are drawn to water not by some magnetic attraction, but because of their instinct, their intention, to survive. Legs serve the purpose of, among other things, taking us to the water.

Mayr claimed that these features make biology exceptional — a law unto itself. But recent developments in nonequilibrium physics, complex systems science and information theory are challenging that view. ...

So living organisms can be regarded as entities that attune to their environment by using information to harvest energy and evade equilibrium. Sure, it’s a bit of a mouthful.

Lumo says string theory can explain everything but the purpose of life, so there cannot be any scientific theory for that. But he is intrigued by some of the quotes:

Death is the ultimate equilibrium. Life is the effort to escape this equilibrium. ...

Organisms want to maximize their distance from the equilibrium which is equivalent to maximizing their freedom in the future.

Meanwhile, I see that Peter Woit has gone full Nazi:

While the US has never seen the likes of this situation, Europe has, with Trump following a playbook familiar from the history of the 1930s. At this point the US may be one terrorist attack away from full-blown Fascism, this time with nuclear weapons. This needs to be stopped, now.

The Constitution does provide two ways to deal with something like this: either the impeachment process or removal under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment as “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Many of Trump’s recent statements are clearly the product of delusional mind that is incapable of dealing with reality, and these delusions are now reflected in his actions.

And Lumo calls out him and other Trump-haters.

I don't want to get too political here, but this Trump hatred is bizarre. Supposedly smart ppl in universities and Si Valley are ranting against him, but their arguments are at about a 5-year-old level. Surely they could find some coherent argument if Trump were only 1% as bad as they say he is.

If Trump were really Hitler, then why do so many refugees and immigrants want to come here?

New D-Wave computer sold

ExtremeTech reports:

The D-Wave 2000Q has 2,048 qubits; a substantial increase over the 1,000-qubit D-Wave 2X. Equally important, the $15 million-dollar computer has a first customer — Temporal Defense Systems, which will use the machine “to solve some of the most critical and complex cyber security problems impacting governments and commercial enterprises.” The terms of the deal also give TDS an upgrade path to future “QPUs” (quantum processing units, natch).

“The combined power of the TDS / D-Wave quantum cyber solution will revolutionize secure communications, protect against insider threats, and assist in the identification of cyber adversaries and attack patterns,” said James Burrell, TDS Chief Technology Officer and former FBI Deputy Assistant Director. “Combining the unique computational capabilities of a quantum computer with the most advanced cyber security technologies will deliver the highest level of security, focused on both prevention and attribution of cyber attacks.”

Somebody has been conned. I don't know whether Burrell believes what he is saying, but there is no way this D-Wave machine can do what he says.

The D-Wave machine may be able to solve certain problems, but it does not really have 2048 qubits. Nobody has been able to make true qubits yet.

Philosophy professors hate Trump

Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci likes to write about pseudoscience, but also tells us:

I’ve been giving a lot of thought about the rise of Trump, and even though I rarely write about explicitly political matters on this blog, this will be one of the exceptions. I think it is necessary. WARNING: unusually strong language ahead, ...

The guy is not a political ideologue, ... He is simply a narcissistic and pampered bully, ignorant to the point of ridiculousness. ... Republican takeover ... is an unqualified disaster. ...

Please, don’t tell me I’m “biased.” If by that you mean I have reasoned, empirically informed opinions about values and politics that are different from yours, sure, I’m biased. And proud of it.

Then what follows is a lot of name-calling and obscenities.

No, I would not say he has reasoned, empirically informed opinions on Trump. I could not find any.

He is from another country, and does not appear to know much about American politics or Trump. He has probably never even met a Trump supporter, so I do not expect much from him.

Nevertheless he writes with the same over-opinionated certainty with which he writes about the philosophy of science.

Just think about that when you read philosophers of science like him. I don't say that he has to agree with Trump, but if he understands Trump less than 50 million voters and still has extremely strong opinions, then he is someone whose opinions should be disregarded.

I have criticized Pigliucci before for having anti-science and leftist-biased opinions. He is worse than I thought.

Here is an ex-philosopher ranting against Trump. I am sure that there are many others.

Update: Texas professor Scott Aaronson also suggests that Trump is another Hitler, and complains:

Today, we learned that Trump is suspending the issuance of US visas to people from seven majority-Islamic countries, including Iran ...

To the Trump regime, I make one request: if you ever decide that it’s the policy of the US government to deport my PhD students, then deport me first. I’m practically begging you: come to my house, arrest me, revoke my citizenship, and tear up the awards I’ve accepted at the White House and the State Department. I’d consider that to be the greatest honor of my career.

He is an American citizen, married to an Israeli. No one is threatening him or his students. He and Pigliucci do not have much loyalty to the USA.

Aaronson is essentially arguing that the USA should let in any quantum complexity theorist who wants to come here and pursue his useless research program. The comments are moderated, and they are all Trump-haters praising Aaronson.

Update: I am informed that Aaronson deleted this comment:

Quantum complexity is an almost entirely useless field. It would have some minor theoretical interest if quantum supremacy were demonstrated, but that is speculative and we do not need very many people in the field. We train too many students for the available jobs.

Trump was elected President of the USA. Every postdoc job given to an Iranian takes one away from an American. Trump's policies favor Americans, not countries that breed terrorism. We do not need any more Iranians in the USA.

Scott, you are pursuing your personal interests, against those of American students, against those of Amerian voters, and against those who are trying to limit the expansion of Islamic terrorism.

That must have hit a sensitive spot.

Where are the professors who are willing to stick up for the Americans who have their careers derailed by these anti-American leftists like Pigliucci and Aaronson?

Update: LuMo has a more detailed criticism of Aaronson:

Most importantly, there just isn't any "universal human right" to work as a postdoc in the U.S. – for anyone, even members of nations that are much more friendly towards America than Iran. Whoever is acting as if he were assuming that such a right exists may get rightfully burned because his assumption is idiotic. The inability to get the postdoc visa may be a personal inconvenience for the Iranian student – and indirectly for his adviser Aaronson – but it's just complete rubbish when this personal inconvenience is presented as a flaw in the new system of policies. Aaronson is pretending that he is defending some deep values but in reality, he's only defending his personal interests.

And the problem isn't really serious, anyway. There are other places outside the U.S. where one may be hired as a postdoc in similar fields.

Motl himself is an ex American postdoc who now lives in Czechia, I think.

History of general relativity

A new paper summarizes the history of general relativity:

This short exposition starts with a brief discussion of situation before the completion of special relativity (Le Verrier's discovery of the Mercury perihelion advance anomaly, Michelson-Morley experiment, Eotvos experiment, Newcomb's improved observation of Mercury perihelion advance, the proposals of various new gravity theories and the development of tensor analysis and differential geometry) and accounts for the main conceptual developments leading to the completion of the general relativity: gravity has finite velocity of propagation; energy also gravitates; Einstein proposed his equivalence principle and deduced the gravitational redshift; Minkowski formulated the special relativity in 4-dimantional spacetime and derived the 4-dimensional electromagnetic stress-energy tensor; Einstein derived the gravitational deflection from his equivalence principle; Laue extended the Minkowski's method of constructing electromagnetic stress-energy tensor to stressed bodies, dust and relativistic fluids; Abraham, Einstein, and Nordstrom proposed their versions of scalar theories of gravity in 1911-13; Einstein and Grossmann first used metric as the basic gravitational entity and proposed a "tensor" theory of gravity (the "Entwurf" theory, 1913); Einstein proposed a theory of gravity with Ricci tensor proportional to stress-energy tensor (1915); Einstein, based on 1913 Besso-Einstein collaboration, correctly derived the relativistic perihelion advance formula of his new theory which agreed with observation (1915); Hilbert discovered the Lagrangian for electromagnetic stress-energy tensor and the Lagrangian for the gravitational field (1915), and stated the Hilbert variational principle; Einstein equation of general relativity was proposed (1915); Einstein published his foundation paper (1916).

This is a good balanced view, and informative for anyone who thinks that Einstein did it all. He made some key contributions, but a lot of the crucial work was done by others.

Finding solace in the Multiverse

A string theorist writes:

In physics we’re not supposed to talk about how we feel. We are a hard-nosed, quantitative, and empirical science. But even the best of our dispassionate analysis begins only after we have decided which avenue to pursue. When a field is nascent, there tend to be a range of options to consider, all of which have some merit, and often we are just instinctively drawn to one. This choice is guided by an emotional reasoning that transcends logic. Which position you choose to align yourself with is, as Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind says, “about more than scientific facts and philosophical principles. It is about what constitutes good taste in science. And like all arguments about taste, it involves people’s aesthetic sensibilities.” ...

Quarks are permanently bound together into protons, neutrons, and other composite particles. “They are, so to speak, hidden behind a … veil,” Susskind says, “but by now, although no single quark has ever been seen in isolation, there is no one who seriously questions the correctness of the quark theory. It is part of the bedrock foundation of modern physics.”

Notice the verbal trickery here. He does not say that no one questions single quark particles.

Susskind wants you to thing: "No one has ever seen an isolated quark but everyone believes in them anyway."

But that is not right. Lots of physicists do not even believe in particles at all. A quark is a useful fiction that helps to understand the SU(3) theory, but that's all. There is no need to believe that quark particles are real, or that they have colors.

My own research is in string theory, and one of its features is that there exist many logically consistent versions of the universe other than our own. The same process that created our universe can also bring those other possibilities to life, creating an infinity of other universes where everything that can occur, does. ...

The multiverse explains how the constants in our equations acquire the values they do, without invoking either randomness or conscious design. If there are vast numbers of universes, embodying all possible laws of physics, we measure the values we do because that’s where our universe lies on the landscape. There’s no deeper explanation. That’s it. That’s the answer.

But as much as the multiverse frees us from the old dichotomy, it leaves a profound unease. The questions we have spent so long pondering might have no deeper answer than just this: that it is the way it is. That might be the best we can do, but it’s not the kind of answer we’re used to. It doesn’t pull back the covers and explain how something works. What’s more, it dashes the theorists’ dream, with the claim that no unique solution will ever be found because no unique solution exists.

There are some who don’t like that answer, others who don’t think it even qualifies to be called an answer, and some who accept it. ...

Tasneem Zehra Husain is a theoretical physicist and the author of Only The Longest Threads. She is the first Pakistani woman string theorist.

This is the crazy world view of a string theorist. Their god is the elusive mathematical equation that is going to unify all of physics, even if it explains nothing. They believe so much that they will accept the possibility of essentially infinitely many equations driving infinitely many unobservable universes.

Gian Giudice, head of CERN’s theory group, speaks for most physicists when he says that one look at the sky sets us straight. We already know our scale. If the multiverse turns out to be real, he says, “the problem of me versus the vastness of the universe won’t change.” In fact, many find comfort in the cosmic perspective. Framed against the universe, all our troubles, all the drama of daily life, diminishes so dramatically that “anything that happens here is irrelevant,” says physicist and author Lawrence Krauss. “I find great solace in that.”

Great solace?

Even without the multiverse or even anything cosmological, our lives on the surface of the Earth are infinitesimal compared to just the interior of the Earth. That is already enuf to overwhelm his psychological sense of well-being, and I don't believe that anyone really finds any solace in the multiverse.

Quantum gravity from philosophy

From a new paper on Kant and Quantum Gravity:

In quantum gravity space and time lose their status as fundamental parts of the physical reality. However, according to Kant, space and time are the a priori conditions of our experience. Does Kantian characterization of these notions give constraints to quantum gravity, or does quantum gravity make Kantian characterization of space and time an invalid approach? This paper provides answers to these questions with a philosophical approach to quantum gravity.

You are probably going to say that this is self-evidently ridiculous, because physics is about the observable world, not the the prejudices of some silly German philosopher. Kant said a lot of stupid stuff about space and time before relativity, and there is no agreement over whether it can be reconciled with relativity.

But all quantum gravity is just philosophy. There is no data or experiment to guide the theory. Researchers are just looking for "a priori conditions of our experience", whatever that means.

Speaking of philosophy, Stanford philosophy professor Helen Longino said:

Sokal has this very sort of old-fashioned idea about science — that the sciences are not only aiming at discovering truths about the natural world but that their methods succeed in doing so.

Outside the hard sciences, I suspect that it is very common for academics to deny that science discovers truths.

Philosophers complain that they get no respect from the hard sciences. Of course they do not. Philosophers will never get respect as long as they deny the discovery of truths.

SciAm blogger John Horgan writes that the point of philosophy is not to discover truth or even to make progress:

What is philosophy? What is its purpose? Its point? The traditional answer is that philosophy seeks truth. But several prominent scientists, notably Stephen Hawking, have contended that philosophy has no point, because science, a far more competent truth-seeking method, has rendered it obsolete. ...

[David Chalmers] concedes that whereas scientists do converge on certain answers, “there has not been large collective convergence to the truth on the big questions of philosophy.” A survey of philosophers carried out by Chalmers and a colleague revealed divisions on big questions: What is the relationship between mind and body? How do we know about the external world? Does God exist? Do we have free will?

Philosophers’ attempts to answer such questions, Chalmers remarks, “typically lead not to agreement but to sophisticated disagreement.” That is, progress consists less in defending truth claims than in casting doubt on them. Chalmers calls this “negative progress.”

It appears that philosophers making negative progress are jealous of other fields that make positive progress.

Top modern philosophy books

Want to know what passes as a great modern philosophy book? Here are the top ones with some relation to science (and a couple of others):

Most-cited Anglophone philosophy books published since WWII (according to Google Scholar)

These are rounded to the nearest 100. I tried to find all post-WWII philosophy books with at least 5,000 citations. ...

1. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) (89,500)

2. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971) (65,000)

8. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963) (15,700)

14. Jerry Fodor, The Modularity of Mind (1983) (12,800)

16. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (1991) (11,100)

20. Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge:  An Evolutionary Approach (1972) (10,100)

21. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975) (9,900)
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) (9,500)
John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1995) (8,400)
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984) (8,200)
David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (1996) (7,400)
Jerry Fodor, The Language of Thought (1975) (7,300)
Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) (7,000)
Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development:  The Capabilities Approach (2001) (6,900)
Hubert Dreyfus, Stuart Dreyfus & T. Athanasiou, Mind over Machine (2000) (6.800)
John Searle, Intentionality (1983) (6,500)

Popper occasionally said sensible things, but those are disavowed by modern philosphers.

Where are the philosophers who have contributed to modern scientific understanding? These books have hurt the cause of science more than they are helped.