Friday, November 30, 2012

Physics claimed to be irreducibly continuous

SciAm now has a podcast on a previously mentioned essay:
Tong's essay is quite sensible, but I do not believe his claim that "certain asymmetries in particle physics cannot be discretized". I had thought that lattice gauge theories had advanced to where they could approximate experiments. I would be amazed if someone has actually proved that convergence is impossible.

Here is the audio download.

Update: Tong's references are A Method for Simulating Chiral Fermions on the Lattice, Chiral Symmetry and Lattice Fermions, and Chiral gauge theories revisited. I don't see where any of these papers say that chiral fermion lattice gauge theories are impossible.

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Boson of the Year

Time magazine has announced its nominations
Take a moment to thank this little particle for all the work it does, because without it, you'd be just inchoate energy without so much as a bit of mass. What's more, the same would be true for the entire universe. It was in the 1960s that Scottish physicist Peter Higgs first posited the existence of a particle that causes energy to make the jump to matter. But it was not until last summer that a team of researchers at Europe's Large Hadron Collider — Rolf Heuer, Joseph Incandela and Fabiola Gianotti — at last sealed the deal and in so doing finally fully confirmed Einstein's general theory of relativity. The Higgs — as particles do — immediately decayed to more-fundamental particles, but the scientists would surely be happy to collect any honors or awards in its stead.
Einstein was Time's Man of the Century, and he always has to credited somehow. For nearly a century they've been saying that something finally confirmed Einstein's general theory of relativity, but this time the Higgs boson has nothing to do with it.

Update: Lumo later finds some other errors in the Time announcement, following Strassler.

Monday, November 26, 2012

Many worlds contrary to positivism










Update: Lumo is enraged by this comment:

Sunday, November 25, 2012

Looking for discrete space and tiny black holes

I have argued that quantum gravity in unobservable, but now there is a proposal in Nature magazine:


Inconclusive? There is no evidence of any kind that space is grainy. It is wildly speculative and implausible to say that space is composed of indivisible subunits, and that tiny black holes continuously pop in and out of existence.

The current SciAm has an essay on that subject:
It was from last year's essay contest. You can get the original essay free on the 2011 winner page. It is a sensible essay.

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Entropic gravity and dying SUSY

Peter Woit reports:


NewScientist reports:




Friday, November 23, 2012

No mental picture without irrelevancies

I remarked that physicists keep looking for hidden variables, in spite of an 80-year consensus that such theories contradict quantum mechanics. Satyajit Das writes in response to the annual question:
In 1927, Heisenberg showed that uncertainty is inherent in quantum mechanics. ...


Dirac was right. It is very hard to form a mental picture of the atom without introducing irrelevant hidden variables.

I think that today's search for hidden variables is a misguided attempt to validate some flawed mental picture. They are usually not explicit about their faulty assumptions.

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Many-worlds not conservative

The UK Guardian Science Weekly podcast recommends these books as the best science books of the year (
The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker
The Information by James Gleick
My Beautiful Genome by Lone Frank
Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene
The Viral Storm by Nathan Wolfe
Brian Greene is interviewed (at 35:30 to 38:30), and makes three points: (1)the new idea of quantum mechanics is that you cannot predict with certainty; (2) the weirdness is that the other possible outcomes occur in parallel universes; and (3) this is the most conservative way of interpreting the mathematics.

All three points are false. Greene is treated as if he were some sort of physics genius, but what he says is as nutty as that of New Age spiritualists like Deepak Chopra.

As I have written, quantum mechanics needs no probabilities, and the multiverse is philosophy. And the Many-worlds interpretation is not any simpler or more conservative than other interpretations.

If the theory predicts that two alternatives are possible, such as a cat being alive or dead, and then one of those is observed, then MWI says that the other one happens in a parallel universe. That is supposed to be mathematically "conservative" because then you do not have to adjust your formulas to say that the unseen alternative is no longer possible. That is not being simple or conservative. That is just refusing to accept what you have observed.

The Guardian reporters go on to credit Greene with expanding our notion of science by speculating about ideas that can never be settled by observation. No, Greene is giving physics a bad name.

I found this image on an atheist site. If I accept this analogy, where is Greene's flashlight? He has no better way of illuminating anything that the philosophers and theologians.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

New quantum crypto work

Some new quantum crypto research was announced: Quantum Cryptography Conquers Noise Problem, and Quantum Cryptography At The End Of Your Road.

None of this has any practical utility. The whole subject is based on misunderstandings of both cryptography and quantum mechanics.

Update: John Markoff of the NY Times reports:


No, there is no value in using this technology for the internet. (I do not capitalize "internet" because it is a generic term, not a trademark or brand name.)


This is confused. Quantum key distribution is no substitute for public key cryptography because public key cryptography allows messages to be signed and authenticated.

Again, this is badly confused. A one-time pad requires a secret key as long as the message. The whole point of using secret keys is to have keys much shorter than the message. It is only secure in a technical mathematical sense, but not secure in the ordinary sense of the word because it has no way of detecting data corruption errors. So no one ever uses a one-time pad, even if they can reliably exchange secret keys.

Markoff is a smart guy who has been covering cryptology issues for many years, but he has been conned with this story.

Update: As of Friday Nov. 23, this Markoff article is the most emailed article on the NY Times site. That is what happens when research is overhyped.

Monday, November 19, 2012

New kinds of proofs


MIT Computer Scientist Scott Aaronson writes on Nov. 17:


Sunday, November 18, 2012

Watson still bragging about stealing credit

I just listened to Jim Watson, scifri201211162.mp3. The first caller chewed him out for being a jerk, and I agree.

Watson is famous for his 1953 work with Crick where they proposed a modification of Linus Pauling's helix model of DNA. Their basis was some unpublished experimental work taken from Rosalind Franklin at a rival lab. When Pauling saw their papers, he corrected their modification and found the chemical structure of DNA.

Lynne Osman Elkin says:
One of the things I proposed last year at AAAS [the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting] is that I think it should be called the Watson-Crick-Franklin structure. As far as I'm concerned, she was a de facto collaborator. Maybe she didn't give them her information directly. But every time they hit a stumbling point, it was her information that they got from Wilkins that straightened it out.
Watson was promoting a new edition of his 1968 book that brags about stealing Franklin's data and unpublished theories, and then tricking her into publishing her paper after the famous Watson-Crick paper. The public was thereby fooled into thinking that her work was done to confirm the Watson-Crick model, when it was actually the chief inspiration for the model.

In the Friday interview, Watson continued to badmouth her, and to refuse to give her credit for what she did. He even boasted that she died without knowing how he and Crick had cheated her.

Watson also claimed to not remember saying that Africans are stupid, and then mumbled something about not wanting to be quoted. His answers to other questions, such as about what defines good science, were surprisingly lame.

I have written extensively about how Einstein has been over-credited for relativity, thereby fueling speculation about how credit relates to his Jewishness. In the case of DNA, Watson, Crick, and Franklin were all atheists, and only Franklin was of Jewish descent. If there is a Jewish conspiracy to credit Jews, then Franklin should have been credited. It has been alleged that sexism was at work, but I do not see any evidence that she was mistreated because she was a woman or a Jew. It appears to me that Watson and Crick were just dishonest and greedy for the credit, and others failed to stick up for her.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Dissecting Einstein's brain

A SciAm blog reports:

Were there other things that were also unusual?



This is silly. The comparison should be to other physicists, and I doubt that anyone would find anything unusual. I would be more interested in studying the brains of people with unusual talents, such as calculating prodigies.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Impossible to observe a graviton

Nearly everyone says that there is a contradiction between quantum mechanics and gravity, and hence we need a theory of quantum gravity to unify all the forces. But no one has ever been able to demonstrate any such contradiction.

Famous mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson writes:


There is no problem quantizing weak gravitational fields, or linear approximations. That is good enough for all conceivable observations. But the theoretical research puzzles have to do with gravitons and absurd black hole scenarios that will never be observed.

Raphael Bousso argues in his explanation:
It has played out. There is no trouble.

As I explain in my book, How Einstein Ruined Physics, theoretical physics has gone down a bad path of arguing about things that can never be observed. Most physicists will say that quantum gravity is one of the biggest problems in physics, but it is not a scientific problem at all.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

The silly Everettian revolution

Frank Tipler writes:





Here is one explanation that is falling out of favor:



Czech string theorist Lubos Motl wrote:
String theory is dead. Links to other views are here.

Sunday, November 11, 2012 essays on explanations





For an example of someone who expects mathematics to explain everything, Antony Garrett Lisi writes:
Yes, we have geometric description of the known forces and particles, but I am not so sure that the our universe is fundamentally geometric.

Eric R. Weinstein also promotes the geometrical theory of everything:
Lisa Randall writes:
The Standard Model's success nonetheless illustrates another beautiful idea essential to all of physics, which is the concept of an "effective theory." The idea is simply that you can focus on measurable quantities when making predictions and leave understanding the source of those quantities to later research when you have better precision.
Not only physics. This idea has been essential to all of science for millennia. She is just describing a theory that has been stripped of its pretentions of being some sort of perfect knowledge.

It is funny that she describes effective theory as if it were just one type of a physical theory. She also studies string theory which never makes any predictions and claims to be a theory of everything. She acts as if these are just two kinds of scientific theories. No, there is one kind of scientific theory. String theory is not science.

All of the Edge essays are on this page.

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Bad week for hidden variables

The Quantum Frontiers blog writes:
Today, it became abundantly clear that it’s been a tough week for hidden variable theories. ...


As I explained this week about a third paper against hidden variables, these theories have been dead since 1930.

So why do physicists keep disproving hidden variable theories if no one believes in them anyway? Einstein and other quantum mechanics skeptics expressed a preference for hidden variable theories.

I argued in my FQXi essay that pursuit of hidden variable theories is rooted in a false belief in that mathematization of nature. People refuse to acknowledge that they are even making the assumption.

Friday, November 9, 2012

Minkowski conclusions independent of Einstein

Galina Weinstein writes in a new paper:
In the summer of 1905, Minkowski and Hilbert led an advanced seminar on mathematical physics, on electrodynamical theory. Minkowski told Born later that it came to him as a great shock when Einstein published his paper in which the equivalence of the different local times of observers moving relative to each other was pronounced; for he had reached the same conclusions independently. He never made a priority claim and always gave Einstein his full share in the great discovery. In his famous talk, "Space and Time" Minkowski wrote that the credit of first recognizing sharply that t and t' are to be treated the same, is of A. Einstein.
In Space and Time, Minkowski does credit Einstein for observing that local time is the local time of an electron. It is the only part of relativity that Minkowski credits to Einstein. Minkowski's wrote:
This is quite similar to what Einstein had just written in his 1907 review paper:
Einstein seems to be taking credit for this idea, but Poincare clearly had this idea before Einstein and Minkowski. Lorentz may have had it also, as Poincare attributed it to Lorentz. Poincare even nominated Lorentz for a Nobel Prize in 1902 to recognize his idea of local time. Minkowski studied Poincare's papers in his seminar, and should have known that Poincare had the idea before Einstein. As Weinstein explains:
Scott Walter writes, "This story of Minkowski’s recollection of his encounter with Einstein’s paper on relativity is curious, in that the idea of the observable equivalence of clocks in uniform motion had been broached by Poincaré in one of the papers studied during the first session of the electron-theory seminar. It is possible, of course, that Poincaré’s operational definition of local time escaped Minkowski’s attention, or that Minkowski was thinking of an exact equivalence of timekeepers".25 Before 1905 Poincaré stressed the importance of the method of clocks and their synchronization by light signals. He gave a physical interpretation of Lorentz's local time in terms of clock synchronization by light signals, and formulated a principle of relativity. John Stachel explains: "Poincaré had interpreted the local time as that given by clocks at rest in a frame moving through the ether when synchronized as if – contrary to the basic assumptions of Newtonian kinematics – the speed of light were the same in all inertial frames. Einstein dropped the ether and the 'as if': one simply synchronized clocks by the Poincaré convention in each inertial frame and accepted that the speed of light really is the same in all inertial frames when measured with clocks so synchronized".26
Stachel has made a career out of editing Einstein's papers and finding ways to credit Einstein, and is correct about Poincare having the operational definition of local time that Minkowski credited to Einstein.

The only thing left for Stachel to credit Einstein is Poincare's aether and "as if". But Poincare's explanation did not involve the aether or an "as if". Stachel is quoting himself, not Poincare.

I did not know that Minkowski told Born that he reached some relativity conclusions independently of Einstein. But Minkowski appears to have gotten those conclusions from Poincare. His famous Space And Time paper does not mention Poincare, but his previous paper cites Poincare and directly follows him with the Lorentz group, four-dimensional spacetime, and electromagnetic covariance. So yes, Minkowski probably did come to all those conclusions independently of Einstein because he got them from Poincare.

At any rate, it was Minkowski's 1908 Space And Time article that got everyone excited about relativity and popularized the new geometrical interpretation of spacetime. Einstein's 1905 paper was considered an elaboration of Lorentz's ideas. As Weinstein documents, Minkowski wrote to Einstein in late 1907 asking for a reprint of his 1905 paper, just a couple of months before Minkowski presented his own results. So Minkowski's seminar and work were based almost entirely on Lorentz and Poincare. The supposedly original idea of the operational identification of local time had been published years earlier by Poincare.Brother HL-2270DW Laser Printer (Google Affiliate Ad)

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

New paper tries to disprove quantum mechanics

I commented in May on work supposedly Showing that the wavefunction is real. Now the theorists are trying experimental tests, and have posted this paper:

A century on from the development of quantum theory, the interpretation of a quantum state is still discussed. If a physicist claims to have produced a system with a particular wave function, does this represent directly a physical wave of some kind, or is the wave function merely a summary of knowledge, or information, about the system? A recent no-go theorem shows that models in which the wave function is not physical, but corresponds only to an experimenter's information about a hypothetical real state of the system, must make different predictions from quantum theory when a certain test is carried out. Here we report on an experimental implementation using trapped ions. Within experimental error, the results confirm quantum theory. We analyse which kinds of theories are ruled out. ...

The result of Ref. [3] can be considered as a no-go the-orem for interpretations of quantum theory, analogous to Bell's theorem. Each theorem states that a certain class of theories must make different predictions from quan-tum theory -- locally causal theories in the case of Bell's theorem and ψ-epistemic theories in the case of Ref. [3]. We have suggested that a natural threshold is defined by quantum state discrimination.
So they are claiming that they have disproved ψ-epistemic theories, just as Bell and Bell test experiments have disproved locally causal theories.

No, Bell did not disprove locally causal theories. He only disproved a type of hidden variable theories that no one believed anyway. Likewise, these guys are only trying to disprove ψ-epistemic theories that no one believes. I explain further here and here.

Quantum mechanics was discovered in the 1920s, and incorporated into physics textbooks in the 1930s. Ever since, the mainstream interpretation has been that it is a locally causal theory and a ψ-epistemic theory. So why are all these physicists, 80 years later, trying to do experiments that prove quantum mechanics correct but also disprove local causality and ψ-epistemic ontology?

Maybe this paper has some clever new way of testing quantum mechanics. I don't know. But it is not telling us anything except what was common knowledge 80 years ago.

I will be interested to see whether this paper gets publicized as some profound new result, and if the editors require that the claims be scaled back before publication. If I were the referee, I would require that the article say that it was only confirming what Bohr, Heisenberg, and the textbooks said 80 years ago. I doubt that the editor will require any such change.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Aether dominates accepted physics

Canon T3i 18.0MP Digital SLR Camera with 18-55mm IS Lens - Digital (Google Affiliate Ad)The Wikipedia article on the Relativity priority dispute says:
But they [most historians of science like Holton] argue that it was Einstein who completely eliminated the classical ether ...
Yes, most historians like Holton say that, but it is also directly contrary to what other reputable sources say. For example, a very prominent physicist says:
“Quite undeservedly, the ether has acquired a bad name. There is a myth repeated in many popular presentations and textbooks, that Albert Einstein swept it into the dustbin of history. The real story is more complicated and interesting. I argue here that the truth is more nearly the opposite: Einstein first purified, and then enthroned, the ether concept. As the 20th century has progressed, its role in fundamental physics has only expanded. At present, renamed and thinly disguised, it dominates the accepted laws of physics.” [Fantastic Realities: 49 Mind Journeys And a Trip to Stockholm, By Frank Wilczek, Betsy Devine, 2006, p.293]
Yes, Wilczek is correct. Yes, the aether is essential to modern theories of electromagnetism. The biggest physics news of the 21st century is the discovery of the Higgs boson, and that was the confirmation of a 50 year old aether theory.

It is crazy to talk of eliminating the aether as if that were some great accomplishment. Explaining the failure to detect aether velocity led to the theory of relativity, but Einstein himself said that it was a mistake to deny the aether. The aether (under various names) is essential to modern physics.

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Explaining quantum weirdness

Johannes Koelman explains some quantum paradox with analogies, and then gives a choice of interpretations of the weirdness:
1) Deny Its Existence
2) Accept Non-Local Socks
3) Embrace Precognition
4) Deny Free Will
5) Avoid The "Would Have Happened If" Fallacy
He takes the last one, of course. It is the positivist view that Bohr advocated all along. The other views cannot be ruled out, but they are pretty crazy.

Most explanations of quantum mechanics are filled with nonsense. For example, the latest Scientific American says:

No, Goedel and economists did not show that. The claim about "historians of science" seems to be a reference to Kuhnian paradigm shifts. That is where philosophers say that physicists are irrational.

Friday, November 2, 2012

Meeting on naturalism


This shows the confusion caused by physical determinism.


