Strange Hypotheticals: "Quantum Physics, Mini Black Holes, and the Multiverse: Debunking Common Misconceptions in Theoretical Physics" by Bill Poirier, John Terning, Yasunori Nomura

“What kind of a perverse world is this? What creator would conjure up such a thing? The more we are told to pay attention to the man behind the curtain, the more we have to look. Since the Magician will never allow us to sneak a peek backstage, however, all we can do is content ourselves with  ‘conspiracy theories’. Such conspiracy theories about quantum mechanics are more typically referred to as interpretations.”

In “Quantum Physics, Mini Black Holes, and the Multiverse: Debunking Common Misconceptions in Theoretical Physics” by Yasunori Nomura,  John Terning, Bill Poirier

This book was a nice counter punch and complement to Smolin’s Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution. How many misconceptions can we detect in our science?

While the deterministic unitary evolution of isolated quantum systems is well-understood, according to the Born rule which is used to make all predictions, measurement is apparently non-deterministic and irreversible. This singles out measurement as being somehow special. This is an unsatisfactory state of affairs, because obviously, the people doing the measurement are made out of quantum systems too. It is not known how to resolve the problem and put measurement on the same footing as everything else in the universe, where it belongs. This is called the measurement problem. The Measurement Problem does not render measurement impossible, but rather sets an absolute limit on accuracy of measurement, based on the physical properties of what we are trying to observe. No more, no less. That's fascinating, but it is not a "closely guarded secret"!

I absolutely agree that Physics has to face philosophical issues, and that "Shut up and Calculate" is perhaps the most dangerous thing Feynman ever said. Of course there are philosophical implications to our work. take, for example, Mixing angles in particle physics, whether involved in Neutrino oscillations or in the existence of the Z boson as a superposition of the W and unobserved B. To what extent are these mathematical descriptions, to what extent do they correspond to a physical behaviour?

Smolin outlines how our current theoretical model of universal expansion is deeply in trouble, in a way that is both mathematical and philosophical; it becomes impossible to test. This is a job for Philosophy AND Science, but it cannot be achieved if one party is coming to the table derisive or indeed entirely ignorant of what the other does.

The Realists take on it is that in many interpretations (*) of QM, we describe physical systems as behaving in "coherent superpositions" of states (e.g. the cat being both alive and dead) which evolve coherently under physical operations (i.e. the cat stays both alive and dead even as other physical things happen to it over time), until we do a "measurement" (check the state of the cat) which destroys the coherence and "collapses" the system (forces it at that point into being alive or dead).

The "measurement problem" exemplified by Poirier’s quote above is to say: wait a minute, what's so special about this "measurement" versus any other kind of interaction? We claim everything's coherent as we interact the physical system with other physical systems, but that's really all we're doing when we make a measurement: interacting the physical system with, say, a box with a needle on it that we call a "detector", but it still follows the same laws of physics as everything else. So why the collapse? This is a genuine issue with talking about measurement-induced collapse (although it works fine practically, so many physicists are happy to do so anyway). Addressing this has been one motivation for interpretations such as many-worlds which don't talk about "collapse", although I'd say all interpretations are rather weird and unsatisfying in one way or another.

I think there is lots of good and insightful work done around interpretations of QM (look up, say, Rob Spekkens), and I think it's fair to describe it as containing a healthy dose of philosophy, even as it's done by people who also know the physics very well. Whether that's the kind of thing the article is talking about is much less clear, and I don't think it does a good job of either explaining what the issues are or what philosophy has to offer.

Smolin states in his latest: “So I have no better answer than to face the blank notebook. We do have role models. Einstein did it. Bohr did it. De Broglie, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg did it, as did Bohm and Bell. They each found a path from that blank page to a foundational discovery that enlarged our understanding of how nature works. Start by writing down what you are confident we know for sure. Ask yourself which of the fundamental principles of the present canon must survive the coming revolution. That’s the first page. Then turn again to a blank page and start thinking.” The outer reaches of any science is philosophical. Theoretical physicists are doing philosophy, though they are vastly better trained in their branch than most philosophers are in whatever their specialty is. I thought that since Russell, no philosophy was ignorant of higher mathematics. Hume's Dialogues on Natural Religion and his work on causation and on the problem of induction, as well as Plato's Parmenides, or even a careful review of the paradoxes of Zeno (some of which are not so well known) cannot help but inform the theoretical physicist. Einstein did some of his best thinking by visualizing strange hypotheticals, then working out rigorously what they meant. Flexible thinking is the key, and philosophy, if done correctly, can inspire that.

And besides all that lofty stuff, every scientific theory is under-determined. Why prefer one over another? Only the philosophy of science can address a "meta-question" like this one. Strawman argument alert. Hawking was not saying philosophers should abandon metaphysics or leave it to the physicists. He was saying metaphysics can no longer operate in a rarefied bubble as though Science is a gadfly and they needn't pay attention to it. By ignoring the lessons science had learned philosophers risk turning into theologists.  

Just look at the contributions to thinking about consciousness and Free Will that Dennett has made by informing himself about Neuroscience and Evolution. Why aren't more metaphysicians engaging with the equivalent in Physics? is it because the math is hard? Well then wise up or if the kitchen is too hot for you, get out of it and do something else. Continuing to do metaphysics while ignorant about physics is dangerously close to being akin to Intelligent Design in Biology which ignores everything that doesn't fit with their preconceived notions and distorts the science they do note.

We just need an approach from left field when it comes to the measurement problem. Is it hokum science? Imagine this story:Scientist applies for funding:

Q: Can I have money to fund my research into populations of ruby throated hummingbirds in the Americas?

A: No, sorry, we cannot prioritise that as we have more pressing issues (climate change).

Scientist goes away for a good think..... tries again.....

Q: Can I have money to fund my research into how climate change is having an impact on populations of ruby throated hummingbirds in the Americas?

A: Yes, of course, we really need to illustrate just how terrible climate change is. here's the dosh.

Rinse and repeat.

But what I'm missing is that the scientist above isn't a weasel at all; he's just a normal person with a living to make. It's not his fault that he has to work within this climate (pardon the pun), and the work he will end up doing is not necessarily of no worth. It's just that this mechanism drives a trend.   You can even go to The Economist, they published several articles (e.g. "Trouble at the Lab", many more), a long time ago. This article concentrates on only one concrete example that it explores like a tabloid, not exactly a thorough basis.

Whenever there are discussions on Hacker News (Y Combinator forum) or in reddit's /r/science - a very heavily moderated science community very different from the mainstream reddit forums - scientists from all fields, not just psychology! - come out with example after example of problems in how science is conducted these days. Too much relies on an almost priest status. All you have to do is use the magic word "science", especially non-scientists who don't have even the trace of a clue like to do that (you can tell an actual scientist by how much more nuanced and un-excited they write, and by "actual" I don't mean "by self-reported job title").

I'd say scientists have some very rational reasons to be nervous about more observation (I don’t know how Stringers make a living...). One being the the threat of funding being pulled; an ever increasing likelihood in the growing political climate. The other being vested interests and the moron brigade latching onto any mistakes or fraudulent data and using it to discredit people, areas of study and perhaps even entire fields.

Loved  Bill Poirier (QM), and John Terning's (Particle Physics; his derivation of the Special Relativity Lorentz Transformations was pretty interesting because he didn't use any kind of higher math) math annexes in the book. It automatically put the book on another level for me.

NB (*): An "interpretation" being a sort of description about what's "really going on" as opposed to what equations to use to predict the data - everyone agrees what the mathematics are and that they work, but not how we should think about the underlying behaviour. Of course, some interpretations would say that it's meaningless to do the latter.

Follow-up on ∂S/∂t + H = 0: "Reality Is Not What It Seems" by Carlo Rovelli

"The world of quantum mechanics is not a world of objects: it is a world of events".

In "Reality Is Not What It Seems" by Carlo Rovelli

"Experimentation and transformation in both art and science spring from the same root - to understand, to encapsulate the world. This is why I've ever found reductionism (and scientism) drearily limiting and worthily pompous - that utilitarian speculation over what art 'is for', that misapprehension of art as a kind of elaborate trickery, only readable in the light of neuroscience or physics. The best writers of fiction, artists, composers and scientists are, I've long felt, the ones who see the 'divide' as porous, and are open to findings in both great spheres of endeavour and experimentation."

In "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain" by David Eagleman

Rovelli is more than right to rail against the schism of art and science. Theoretical physics in some sense is the poetry of science; and science in its great evolution from the classical era on was intertwined with art (Galileo was a musician, Leonardo an anatomist and technological innovator; Piero was a geometer, while painters have ever worked at the edge of physics (light properties) and materials science (pigments and chemical properties), and so on). I have come across this author's work before and have found him to possess a really enlightening, critical yet accessible style. The work of his that I read and still stays with me is his "The First Scientist: Anaximander". It is a brilliant evaluation of the 'Earth as floating stone' thesis of the Greeks.

Just remembered the Hamilton-Jacobi equation ∂S/∂t + H = 0 is another way of describing a classical system. From which you can wiggle your way to the Schrodinger equation. I think particularly interesting is in a paper by Hiley, and de Gosson where they say, Schrodinger was led to his equation from his knowledge of the classical Hamilton-Jacobi approach which has a close connection with the eikonal of classical wave theory. They go on to derive the Schrodinger equation from classical mechanics using a very deep group and operator approach. The Hamilton-Jacobi equation is indeed a good motivation to get to the Schrödinger equation (and is already very similar to it).  Whichever way, you are motivated by classical mechanics, but you can't avoid the mathematical complexity of quantum mechanics. Classical mechanics is a good approximation in some regimes, but overall it's wrong and there's no "going back to classical" in physics.

This time around, I'm also struck that superdeterminist physicists think of correlations between widely separated points as "vacuum correlations", which are well-known to decay faster than exponentially at space-like separation. It seems better to consider correlations that are observed in experiments at widely separated points to be a consequence of experimenters taking months or years to set up and debug and tune their state preparation and measurement apparatus (which, moreover, is often constrained to an effectively 1-dimensional space of light guides or collimated matter or laser beams, so that the 3+1-dimensional vacuum is kept as far away as possible). Full of nonsense as usual, I am. Hey ho.

I think about the work of people like Einstein, Maxwell, Dirac, Heisenberg, Pauli, Fermi. The list is very long. Such as those could pull the physics right out of the math and make either predictions that can be measured or better yet people used the principles to make things like AM/FM radio, transistors, and more recently GPS from good old Einstein; the list is almost endless as I said. But some theoretical work seems very difficult to solidify. Maybe a 1927 style Solvay conference is needed to help the general audience understand where the focus is going on Quantum Mechanics, cosmology, particle physics, the hunt for dark matter, etc. Lots of great work is being done right now in condensed matter physics that may bring great practical applications but the money spent on the LHC thus far seems to be a dud. Other than the technology that went into it is remarkable but nothing truly remarkable came out yet (the Higgs boson; bah!).

I think Rovelli is closer than t'Hooft as Rovelli focuses on something that seems philosophically important to me. He talked about velocity as though it is meaningless to a particle unless it is measured in relation to another object. It implies that motion isn't a property as much as an observation. Space is relational and not substantival according to what I understood from Rovelli. I would argue that it is neither, but that might seem to "unscientific" to some, I'd imagine.

All Much Ado about Nothing: “The Trouble with Physics” by Lee Smolin

“The Weinberg-Salam model requires that the Higgs field exist and that it manifest itself as the new elementary particle called the Higgs boson, which carries the force associated with the Higgs field. Of all the predictions required by the unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces, only this one has not yet been verified.”

In “The Trouble with Physics” by Lee Smolin

Hello physicists and Lee Smolin in particular,

I can't say I agree with such a hard stance against string theory personally like Smolin does, but I’m what’s known as a stupid person, so it doesn’t really matter what I think. However, I do feel it is healthy for science to have people that challenge ideas from all sides. All this will do is galvanise people to work harder to provide evidence to prove or disprove any theory that tries to describe reality. Science thrives in areas of confliction.

Life is the memory of what happened before you died, i.e. we cannot extricate ourselves from the universe in any way shape or form, including our "objective," apparently repeatable theoretical notions. By definition, there is only one UNI-verse. If you want to call it a universe of multiverses or a multiverse of universes, or balls of string with no limits, no problem, but there is only one of everything that is and isn't. This assemblage of atoms, no different from any other atoms, called the human body, has a life and death, as do the stars; it also has an internal resonance we like to call the consciousness of self-awareness of existence. We all too often, de facto, accept that there is a universe outside our "selfs", our bodies, i.e. it’s just me, my-self, and I, and the universe that surrounds my body, as if there were a molecular separation of some sort. This starting point for science, i.e., this assumed separation from a universe that surrounds our (apparent) bodies is the first thing that has to go. By definition there is only one UNI-verse that includes Heisenberg, I, the photos and videos of flying objects that make apparently perfect right angle turns at thousands of miles per hour, which we casual observers are not able to identify, black holes, white holes, pink holes, blue holes, our memories, our records, not to mention everything else. It's all much ado about nothing. As someone else used to say, "This IS the cosmic drama," we are living at the interface of the Sun's outgoing light and the apparent incoming light from the universe that appears to surround the Sun. Ah, but, what if we live in a black hole and don't realize it? That would mean the night sky, which most of us consider to exist outside the sun would actually be all the light of the sun after doing a 180, except, and here's the kicker, daylight, i.e., the light of the sun that we experience as sunshine. Maybe we need to revise the old coin that says yin and yang, black holes and white holes, matter and anti-matter, light energy and dark energy, night and day, black and white, etc. ad nauseum, are two APPARENT sides of the same coin as perceived by bunches of atoms they (we) are observing other atoms in a universe that is completely outside their (our) own "personal universe" as defined by their (our) sensory input. In other words, the interface between black and white colors our apparent existence. That sophistry and $2.25 will get you a ride on the tube.

I am not a string theorist but back in the day I considered myself a physicist who knew a few physicists doing physics for a living. Something that might surprise people to hear is that many (perhaps the majority?) of string theorists did not spend any time thinking of ways the idea could make observable predictions. The reason for this was that the typical energy scale of string theory is much higher than even scales we try to probe in the early universe in cosmology. They argue that getting string theory to say something specific about physics 'beyond the standard model' would be like trying to describe friction of a carpet in terms of quarks and leptons i.e. theoretically conceivable but practically impossible. Seen in these terms though, string theory itself is a generalization of the 'theory of carpets' i.e., it is built as an extension of ideas we know are very successful at familiar energy scales: quantum mechanics and relativity.  Indeed, the reason the 'typical' energy scales of stringy stuff are thought to be so "unreachably" high is due to an extrapolation about the strength of gravity based on the value of Newton's gravitational constant you can measure on a table-top on earth.

In my opinion this huge extrapolation is a dangerous one as there are reasons to believe that they are things going on in physics before this high-energy scale which may change our understanding of things very much (e.g. the observed value of the 'cosmological constant'). These things could render any of the assumptions about string theory invalid. This represents a rather peculiar situation. Due to their assumptions, the string theory community is likely incapable of making any predictions about anything in our universe. Progress regarding the 'truth' of string theory therefore will not come from string theorists doing string theory calculations but from other physicists experimentally probing the assumptions that string theory relies on.

The question remains whether string theory has advanced understanding of the physical world. They had like one vague prediction for the LHC and when it didn't come true there were all like "ah, it only emerges at much higher energies!". LMAO! String theory is religion at this point. On the other hand, I side with Smolin when he says he’s interested in a testable theory. It just so goes that Smolin's ideas are not fatalist, which turns many militant atheist types off because it means life is not an accident; what that says about God, his position is completely agnostic. Considering the symbiosis we find in nature, his views make a lot of sense and unify well with a lot of biology and ecology.

I'm told string theory is great mathematics though, so great one String Theorist ended up winning the highest price in mathematics, the Fields Medal. I’m talking about Edward Witten who has also lots of references in Smolin’s book.

Between 2006 (when this book came out; see quote above regarding the yet still to be discovered Higgs’ particle), 2012 (when the Higgs boson was “discovered”), and 2017 (when I’m writing this review), what have we to show for String Theory? Not much. And since physicists have spent a lifetime ignoring observational data, they don't feel in the least bit accountable for (1) the plain truth (2) being wrong or (3) all the lives that they destroyed along the way when they mocked the people who were trying to tell them that they were wrong. Over the next few years you will see them lay claim to a beautiful theory of Quantum Gravity, even capable of making contact with experiment. They will even tell themselves that they were really working on this theory of Quantum Gravity all along.

Well, bottom-line: I hope someone kills String Theory, it's getting to the stage where physics is starting to resemble pseudoscience, and lots of pretty and convoluted theories that are essentially untestable.

NB: I don’t care about String Theory; what I really want is FTL travel. I want what the Tomorrow’s People had: flicking long distances in time and space in the blink of an eye; I want the Star Trek replicator that makes my dinner when I want it and how I like it; I want my phaser at stun; I want all of this. If the String Theory gets me there asap then spend, spend, spend...

Theatre and Physics: "Copenhagen" by Michael Frayn

Published August 8th 2000.

Why do I go to the theatre? The question bears the same gravitas as the one regarding books. Much like books, the theatre allows me to experience something different. Not like books or movies though, the theatre often feels more real since I share the same space as the actors. While books can help me enter the world of the story, and temporarily leave my own life, being a theatre buff can also bring meaning into my life as well. Maybe the play shows me a different perspective of the world that I did not notice before. Often, plays give me that something extra, be it the love, the strength, the determination, etc. that I need to move forward in my life.

What about “Copenhagen”? Bottom-line. It’s a Hamlet play. It’s also about the fallibility of memory, human relationships, and being at a crossroad in life:

"Now we’re all dead and gone, yes, and there are only two things the world remembers about me. One is the uncertainty principle, and the other is my mysterious visit to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941. Everyone understands uncertainty. Or thinks he does. No one understands my trip to Copenhagen. Time and time again I’ve explained it. To Bohr himself, and Margrethe. To interrogators and intelligence officers, to journalists and historians. The more I’ve explained, the deeper the uncertainty has become. Well, I shall be happy to make one more attempt. Now we’re all dead and gone. Now no one can be hurt, now no one can be betrayed."

(Act One)

Occasionally, instead of a normal evening at the theatre, sometimes I get a powerful, and thought-provoking play to watch. That play was "Copenhagen". My wife and I faced the rain to go and watch it. I had not read up about the play, or had watched it before, and it came as a total surprise in 2005. Theatre and Physics. What a combination. I watched it in Portuguese at Teatro Aberto in Lisbon: starring Paulo Pires (as Niels Bohr), Carmen Dolores (as Margrethe Bohr, her last play), Luís Alberto (as Werner Heisenberg), Vera San Payo de Lemos (translator) and João Lourenço as stage director.

The most important “piece of text” in the play, and the one I tend to think as the one that most perfectly identifies the core of it, is the following (quoted verbatim from the text I just read):

Bohr: Why are you confident that it's going to be so reassuringly difficult to build a bomb with 235? Is it because you've done the calculation?

Heisenberg: The calculation?

Bohr: Of the diffusion in 235. No, it's because you haven't calculated it. You haven't considered calculating it. You hadn't consciously realized there was a calculation to be made.

Heisenberg: And of course now I have realized. In fact it wouldn't be all that difficult. Let's see … The scattering cross-section's about 6 x 10-24, so the mean free path would be … Hold on …

This is the dialogue I remember most vividly when I watched the play in 2005 (with text in Portuguese of course, but as soon as I read them in English in 2015 everything came back to me). Stage-wise what happened? At Heisenberg’s words an explosion, bright light, and a racket filled the stage, simulating the burst of a bomb.

Was this a world-changing decision as some proclaim? Did it change the outcome of the war? After reading the play (and remembering the play), I think that’s what Frayn tried to state.

Reading the play in 2015, and after watching it 10 years ago, I came to understand that the material is very rich in terms of exploring the social aspects and the ethical dilemmas in science, particularly the ones involving the two most important physicists in terms of quantum theory and nuclear fission.  The presence of the fundamental aspects of the complementary and uncertainty principles in the lines of the characters the way Frayn did, helped me understand, in a theatre play, how seamless it all can seem.  Socially speaking, the play showed me that Quantum Mechanics, and the Copenhagen Interpretation in particular, was developed in a wider context, involving ethical issues among top scientists. Although with only three characters, in a theory that had many contributors (Born, Dirac, Schrödinger, Pauli, etc.) in terms of its foundation, the play can be seen as an instrument for a more widespread discussion of the role of science and its use society-wise.

After reading the play, I just wanted to watch it again. I remember what was going through my mind when I watched it 10 years ago: did Heisenberg really dragged his ass so that the German Bomb effort would fail, allowing the allies to be able to get the bomb first? Did Heisenberg really know how to create an atomic bomb? Was he really able to perform basic mathematical calculations? Was he the genius everyone thought he was (I think he was; his approach to Quantum Mechanics using matrix algebra was nothing short of masterful)? Did he want to prevent the allies from developing the bomb? Was he an infiltrated German agent only trying to worm information out of Bohr? All of these run through my mind while watching the play in 2005 and now 10 years later the same thing happened, but the answers were nowhere to be seen, as expected. Too bad this play isn’t playing anywhere…I’m off to watch the movie version directed by Howard Davies, starring Daniel Craig and Stephen Rea. It isn’t the real McCoy, but what is?