Is Quantum Consciousness Necessary For Full Artificial Intelligence?

In the fullness of time, classical computers are more than stupid: they follow decision trees anticipated previously. In the fullness of time, they run out of anticipation…. They can adapt to new circumstances, thanks to neural networks, but not much. Full, real neural networks as found in real brains are nonlinear. However, even if one duplicated those, and one will, it remains that real creative intelligence requires consciousness.

We have seen the situation: a supposedly autonomous vehicle drives down a double lane road, the lanes being separated by a dotted line, as usual. However, at some point bright orange plastic cones have been added on top of the dotted line.The addition of cones has no meaning whatsoever. A human driver would slow down, inspect and proceed. The autonomous vehicle stops, because the situation has not been anticipated by its elaborate programmation. There the autonomous vehicle is, in the middle of the road, blocking two lanes of traffic. Engineers are called, they come, fix the vehicle, which starts, makes a full three meters and then stops again, in a concert of furious horns.

This lack of creativity can only be remedied, I claim, by what we call consciousness.

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WHERE DOES CONSCIOUSNESS COME FROM? QUANTUM PHYSICS:

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and flies like a duck, it is probably a duck. Quantum physics is this set of behaviors, and descriptions, and the essence of consciousness is what it looks like… Should it be called the Quantum of consciousness? When one lists the most mysterious features of Quantum Physics and the most mysterious features of consciousness, one gets a one to one correspondence. A reasonable inference is that consciousness is a Quantum phenomenon.

 

Human beings operate using their own thoroughly trained neural networks, what is called “expertise” [1]. So a human driver is on automatic, using previously constructed neural networks, until an unanticipated, never seen before event occurs. Then alert systems notify human consciousness that something is amiss…human consciousness then does what consciousness does, which is exactly what the Quantum does, namely consider the implicated whole: look all around, to anything and everything whatsoever, to find out of the box perspectives.

This is how electrons miraculously find lower energy solutions, the core of Quantum magic [2]. The Quantum, and that’s the essence of the Double Slit Experiment, can tell where the solutions are (the Quantum computes and finds those solutions with Quantum Waves). Thus, when unanticipated cones in an unanticipated position show up, human consciousness inspects the entire situation, and finds them nonsensical, thus proceeding with caution. Maybe new paint on the centerline?

How do we engineer ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUSNESS? Well, by computing with Quantum Waves, also known as the Quantum Computer. So a scientific-technological remedy, to speak like tyrant Putin, is at hand…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Except in the case of the CDC, which has none. 

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[2] Quantum all-seeing eye is crucial to the functioning of the chlorophyll molecule. Or seeing the magnetic field, etc. No Quantum, no biology.

QBism Dismissed; Wigner’s Friend Elucidated?

QBism, a fashionable interpretation of Quantum Physics, as a big subjectivity, is amusing, and much ado about nothing. It’s in the air of the times. People making different Quantum experiments see different results. Right. So what? They can call these results “reality”. But that’s abusing language. In truth, what they found were different REALITIES. Nothing surprising there.

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According to the QBism point of view, many, but not all, aspects of the quantum formalism are subjective in nature. For example, QBism says a quantum state (or more exactly its eigenvalue), is not an element of reality—instead it represents the degrees of belief an agent has about the possible outcomes of measurements. For this reason, some philosophers of science, including yours truly, have deemed QBism a form of anti-realism. The originators of the interpretation disagree with this characterization, proposing instead that the theory more properly aligns with a kind of realism they call “participatory realism”, wherein reality consists of more than can be captured by any putative third-person account of it.

Whatever. 

It all originated with Wigner’s friend. A cat with a soul.

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Nobel Prize–winning mathematical physicist Eugene Wigner captured one of the many oddities of quantum mechanics in a thought experiment (in 1961). Wigner imagined a friend of his, sealed in a lab, measuring a particle such as an atom while Wigner stood outside. Quantum mechanics famously allows particles to occupy many locations at once—a so-called superposition—but the friend’s observation “collapses” the particle to just one spot. Yet for Wigner, the superposition remains: The collapse occurs only when he makes a measurement sometime later. Worse, Wigner also sees the friend in a superposition. Their experiences directly conflict. 

It’s exactly a souled up version of the Schrodinger cat. 

So was there a collapse, or was there not? The thought experiment seems to make the objective collpase of the wave function impossible.

That reminds me of Relativity. Is there an absolute motion, or is there not? (In truth the class of motions which are not accelerated relative to the appearances of distant galaxies is special… This is what drove Einstein towards General Relativity… And only the mouse called the Theory of Gravitation came out…)

So how to find the class of special observations?

Clearly, the friend has a fuller description of reality than Wigner… One can order reality thanks to more or less full descriptions.

So that’s what I propose: use the concept of “ultrafilter” as found in General Topology. Those ultrafilaters are the privileged class of observations (not “observers”, observations…)

Patrice Ayme

Like Cubism, QBism deliberately omits much of (Quantum) reality, by rejeting the possibility of an objective Sub Quantum Physical Reality.

Dark Matter Proves Quantum Mechanics Wrong, SQPR Right

We live in barbarian times when oligarchs block intelligent discourse to the masses. As in the past, even intelligent physics gets blocked. The NYT has 6 million subscribers (including me, and blocked the following comment to an article on the foundations of Quantum Mechanics)

What if the proof of SQPR (Sub Quantum Physical Reality) was already cosmically in full sight? Let me explain. Each Quantum process comes with a (Hilbert) space. Within it, the wave one computes probability with, the Quantum Wave, evolves with time as a one parameter group. Time is not treated like space [1]. The Quantum Wave collapses suddenly, all over, when a probability is extracted from it. Multiverse theory claims that each outcome is its own universe (that means zillions of universes inside a proton). A potential way out is instead to assign a reality to the Quantum Wave. That means attributing to the QW some mass-energy (however minute), wherever it is to be found, and an objective collapse propagation speed to the QW (it has to be greater than 10^23 c).

Rotation of curve of Spiral galaxy Messier 33 (Triangulum, the third largest galaxy of the local group after Andromeda and the Milky Way). The galaxy rotates as if it were an increasingly denser plate the more one gets away from the center…

The full SQPR is nonlocal (in the sense of that experimentally demonstrated superluminal entanglement). An immediate consequence of this picture is that, in some large geometrical situation, a mass-energy residue will form …which will behave exactly like Dark Matter; so Dark Matter would be a proof of the objective collapse theories! The difference between this and the De Broglie guiding wave theories is that the assignment of (minute) mass energy to the guiding linear wave… and making the “particle” into the central nonlinear part of the QW. 

We need a SQPR (Sub Quantum Physical Reality). Yale’s Devoret and Minev found that some Quantum Jumps are preceded by a preparation phase which can be reversed, thus demonstrating SQPR [2]. 

Patrice Ayme

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The New York Times censored the preceding comment (while accepting six hundred eighty-five other comments). 

Probably checking out with Harvard, Columbia and Princeton, all plutocratic universities, to see if somebody there can get the Nobel for the idea, instead of yours truly.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/magazine/angelo-bassi-quantum-mechanic.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=The%20New%20York%20Times%20Magazine

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[1] Time and space are not treated the same in Relativity either (their signature is different). However, in Quantum Mechanical formalism, the situation is worse; time is a one parameter group, not at all like space…

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[2] That is if the “Quantum Trajectories” approach is fully validated…

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PP/S: oops, immediately after this was published, New York Times published my comment.

FREE WILL NEEDS The QUANTUM, To CREATE ORDER OUT OF CHAOS

Abstract: Quantum Physics generates both order and chaos . Quantum Physics is NECESSARY, and sufficient, to generate Free Will (this is a new argument). Reciprocally, we can will the will we want, to some extent, by setting up new Quantum Hilbert spaces inside our minds, according to our will to will whatever we will (new argument too). These new arguments roll both over the dishonest multiverse and traditional lusty, weak willed philosophers such as Schopenhauer.

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Wherever we look at the universe, we see order. For example galactic clusters and white granite splashed by spectacularly blue azurite at the foot of K2, the second tallest mountain on Earth. Yet, (standard) cosmologists claim it all started with chaos. Life is also exquisitely ordered: look at a Scorpion Fish, it’s ready to kill any adversary. Yet its ancestor is supposedly molecular chaos.

At some point, say around 1800 CE, some colossally naive scientists thought enough physics was known to predict everything. (A few years later, between the rise of evolution theory of Lamarck and Cuvier, and the resurfacing of the wave theory of light, and the evidence of the electric and magnetic forces, that naivety discreetly dissipated…) 

Those silly physicists had discovered the following. Given a simple second order differential equation, F = ma, and appropriate initial conditions, one could predict the evolution of some system perfectly, if one supposed it was submitted to just one force, gravity.  Some saw in this physics illustrating the problem of “grace” as in the Christian religion: perfect predestination. 

Henri Poincaré showed that mechanical determinism failed if one considered more than two bodies. In the 1880s, while studying the three-body problem, Henri found that there can be orbits that are nonperiodic, and yet not forever increasing nor approaching a fixed point. And then two other forces (weak and strong) were discovered, and bodies also disappeared, becoming “fields”.

In a fundamentally similar fashion, it has been found that “Three neurons, Free Will“. Moreover, as a single neuron is made of many semi-independent entities, it’s likely that this single neuron itself exhibits what looks like “Free Will”, or, at least, unpredictability.

Quantum Uncertainty makes the detailed evolution of the universe unpredictable: maybe one can predict that strings of super clusters of galaxies will be created, but the quantum molecular chemistry in the brain is unknowable and unpredictable, even if it were known at some point [multiversalism is a infinitely silly theory designed specifically to save determinism in spite of the Quantum; 1]. 

Even if the initial conditions of a Quantum System are fully known, its evolution is unpredictable (see 2-slit). Yet, run through enough times, it generates obvious order! See 2-slit again! Run once, it also generates order, just, it’s less obvious.

Ligand-gated ion channel function. This is how messenger molecules control physical outcomes inside the cell. From Membrane Receptors. My point is that the molecular environment can be changed, at will… And said will is deterministically isolated, to a great extent, thanks to Quantum Uncertainty, a fundamental consequence of the wave nature of reality.

This way we can steer free will, by setting up the nature of the Quantum system. Indeed, we can order around the Quantum ordering mechanisms! We can decide to set-up a 2-slit, or not. We want to will what we want to will, and we can make it so (this is confirmed by the entire story of civilizational progress, and this is the secret of why it happened, even if some hypocrites doubt it ever did) .

Quantum Physics gives Quantum Systems the all-knowing ability to select optimal solutions: an electron will for example find the one and only way to sneak through a potential barrier (as with the chlorophyll molecule). Thus Quantum Systems act in a micro-divine way (this is the deepest secret Quantum). Nobody knows how this works, but it’s a fact (and it’s nonlocal!) For example, entanglement makes it so that a measurement in one locale corresponds to the one then made at a (potentially arbitrarily large) distance (found long after the fact; this has been checked experimentally). 

This magical all-knowing Quantum physics brings the ability to generate large scale order (already obvious in the simplest Quantum Systems, such as the 2-slit), including in biology. Psychological inversion, by setting up the Hilbert Spaces in which Quantum Physics happens, is all we need to go back from those micro-divine Quantum acts to butterflies flapping their wings, causing hurricanes. 

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Let’s be more specific: a monk (say) in Tibet could learn to control (some of) his neurohormones, and thus set-up different Quantum Hilbert Spaces in his brain. This is basically what all specifically trained brains achieve (for example growing their hippocampus). This way consciousness can down-influence Quantum events by changing its ways. 

Any serious, out-of-the-ordinary experience, will change the brain environment, including at the Quantum level, be it only by changing much of the molecular environment. So, by consciously engaging in such brain change, we can change the Quantum Physics in the brain (and often get somewhat predictable effects!)

Ultra-Determinists will object that one’s psychology, my alleged partly free agent, is not really free, but fully predetermined… But there is no full-predetermination, because of Quantum local uncertainty [2]

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OK, let’s dare to flap our wings a bit more. Quantum Physics computes with waves, which use, per their nature, arithmetic advanced enough to be subject to the Incompleteness Theorems of metamathematical logic. In other words, choices are being made, continuously, as required by the Godel Incompleteness construction… Choices correspond to Quantum Collapses (aka “Decoherence”) Are these Quantum events qualia?

Final point: even if one had some sort of Sub Quantum Physics Reality, it would have to be nonlocal… thus non-locally predictable. But, once again, we can consciously organize this whole order-generating casino. So we are on the borderline between free to will the will, and having to suffer the consequences.

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And now, to change my brain’s molecular Quantum Environment, I will go do a hard run in the wild woods, among cliffs, snakes, poison plants, and searing heat… The brutish, but very effective way, to enforced wisdom, and advanced Quantum plenitude…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The Multiverse was created to save micro determinism in the cheapest way: each time something happens, claim the other thing happened too… In another universe. Thus the general Quantum Process generates an infinity of universes, and, at the smallest nanometer scale an uncountable number of universes would be generated at any picosecond… This is of course ridiculous, as much less grotesque avenues (De Broglie-Bohm, SQPR, Quantum Trajectories) are disponible to understand Quantum Physics by explaining “collapse”.

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[2] Multiversists are careful to avoid the question of entanglement at-a-distance… Because it denies local determinism (from their point of view). Unfortunately for them, the experience of entanglement at a distance has been run without human choice, by letting choices be made by distant light fluctuations… 

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P/S1: The awareness argument can be inverted to “prove” (make plausible) the existence of nonlocal Sub Quantum theories, namely, SQPR, De Broglie-Bohm, Quantum Trajectories… See:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2020/02/15/free-will-shows-quantum-physics-is-incomplete/

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P/S2: The essay above was partly inspired by an excellent article of Mr. Ellis:

https://aeon.co/essays/heres-why-so-many-physicists-are-wrong-about-free-will

But the arguments used by yours truly are much more direct (for example I am not afraid of Quantum Uncertainty; Ellis avoids it, because he says he is scared of the multiversists, who dominate physics presently, and deny uncertainty… Silly ones…)

George Ellis, Templeton Prize, 2004, is the Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Complex Systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He co-authored a very famous book, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time (1973) with Stephen Hawking.

 

Is All Motion Relative? No!

Some Motions Are Relative… Most Are Not.

Fundamental ideas can be simple, yet subtle. Take the “Higgs” Field idea. Dirac’s simple first order PDE for the electron (QED, Quantum ElectroDynamic) had to be modified to incorporate the “weak” nuclear force. But that worked with massless particles. Yet, particles had mass. What to do? The solution was to make the equations even more complicated by introducing a “Higgs” field, which, once it is non-zero on average, can give the electron a mass by interacting with the electron field without messing up the workings of the “electroweak” force. Basically the interaction with the Higgs Field acts like a glue, giving an inertial mass.

Complications on top of complications… Not necessarily a bad thing: after all we got away from the magical world by introducing extremely complex explanations elaborating from a few concepts, sort of all biology from DNA and RNA… A danger, though, is to start from erroneous concepts. As Henri Poincaré put it:

C’est même des hypothèses simples qu’il faut le plus se défier, parce que ce sont celles qui ont le plus de chances de passer inaperçues. It is the simple hypotheses of which one must be most wary; because these are the ones that have the most chances of passing unnoticed. (Thermodynamique: Leçons professées pendant le premier semestre 1888–1889 (1892), Preface)

The principle of relativity, first proposed by Galileo, was stated thus by Newton:

“The motions of bodies included in a given space are

the same among themselves, whether that space is at

rest or moving uniformly forward in a straight line.”

That says nothing about how to define “uniform”, except circularly. Nor does it says all inertial frames are equivalent, just that they “are the same among themselves”…

Quantum Vacuum Fields Radiate Under Acceleration (Un. Chicago 2019 picture).

A great progress attributed to Einstein was the disappearance of any absolute motion. The irony, hidden to the profane, was that Einstein set on developing General Relativity (GR) precisely to explain the “Mach Principle” that he was obsessed with… That thing of Mach was actually discovered by Newton. Put water in a pail hanging from a rope, said Isaac. Twist the rope slowly, rotation after rotation. Release. Pail starts to rotate, water climbs on the side of the pail. Why a rotation relative to the fixed stars would have such an effect is a mystery (Mach observed, Einstein tried to elucidate with GR).  

So the idea of GR, as far as Einstein was concerned, was to find a mechanism to explain absolute motion! Indeed the standard Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) Big Bang model defines, de facto, an absolute state of motion… the one relative to which the Cosmic Background Radiation looks isotropic… Except, oops, it’s not (latest news).

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But let’s go back to Relativity. It was named thus by Henri Poincaré, and rested on the notion of LOCAL TIME. In Fast Moving frames, time runs slow. That immediately led to the so-called “Twin Paradox” launched by Paul Langevin in 1911 (Einstein had mentioned the slowing of the moving clock in his 1905 paper). Langevin describes the story of a traveler making a trip at a Lorentz factor of γ = 100 (99.995% the speed of light). The traveler remains in a projectile for one year of his time, and then reverses direction. Upon return, the traveler will find that he has aged two years, while 200 years have passed on Earth. Langevin attributed the effect to ABSOLUTE acceleration (that’s reproduced by Richard Feynman, in his Lectures on Physics, but it’s not correct, I feel).

However, looking at the math more carefully, what really matters is how long the world-lines are, not how bent they are. The bending (acceleration) enables the length. The length referred to here is the Lorentz-invariant length or “proper time interval” of a trajectory which corresponds to the elapsed time measured by a clock following that trajectory. Basically the fast frame exchanges time for space: it covers lots of space, thus leaving little energy to spend on time: one can literally see the effect by looking at light wiggling back and forth between two mirrors. If the two mirror assembly goes fast, the wiggling is slow.

A related question is mass (like in “proper mass”). I have argued that it is time which slows down, not mass which goes up (as some texts have it, erroneously). Related to this is the Force-Acceleration law which involves now a (gamma)^3 factor… from multiple divisions by slow infinitesimal time…

All of this will leave some scratching their heads. Am I saying there is a notion of absolute motion? Well, the evidence is overwhelming. It’s time to remember the philosophy of  Henri Poincaré: if it looks like a duck in all ways, it’s a duck. Poincaré was actually saying that if all experiments give a speed of light equal to c then the speed of light c is a constant of nature (ironically, that’s true only locally… that is “infinitesimally”. In GR the speed of light is all over the space and, although locally constant, certainly not nonlocally constant… you see physics can be more subtle than basic logic…)

A notion not usually considered is that any manifold, or pseudomanifold, of dimension n can be embedded in manifold or pseudo manifold, of dimension (2n+1)… If one applies that to the curved spacetime of the LCDM, one gets an absolute reference frame… As de facto observed: the tapestry of galactic clusters is pretty much static…

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Where am I drifting with these pseudo-idle considerations? Well, I am reinstating in catimini the honorability of space and time absolutism… Comrade Poincaré, a colossal topologist, seems to have been aware of much of this… but he died at 58 in 1912, before GR was finished (Henri had introduced gravitational waves in 1905), and long before De Broglie came up with his ubiquitous Matter Waves. Matter Waves necessitate derivation relative to time… Which local time is that? Differently from Relativity, which starts with a non-accelerated frame, the class of uniformly moving ones, Quantum Physics is indifferent: any time will do. How could that be? Accelerated time is slow time, says General Relativity (this is actually an independent, most simple piece, a building block of GR, which doesn’t require the full theory). Quantum Physics doesn’t care about time as defined by light. It differentiates as if there was one and only one time, as In Newton’s time.

Why? An obvious explanation could be that the architecture of Quantum Physics implicates a much higher speed, the collapse/entanglement/Quantum Interaction speed…  In any case, to go from our class of uniformly moving frames to any others implicates Quantum fireworks, as pictured above… No uniformities are accessible, but for the one we enjoy…

Patrice Ayme

What’s Wrong With All Too Particular Particle Physics Vs Doing Foundations Right

What’s Wrong With All Too Particular Particle Physics, What’s Right With Foundations

A famous particle physicist was particularly proud of this statement, which she impregnated her students with: “to be happy as a model builder in particle physics, I had to be O.K. with something like mounting a moose head on a wall and putting a purple scarf on it and not worrying about why it was wearing a purple scarf.” Yeap! 

She fell to her death on a hiking trail in August 2019! Of course she was the moderator of a gigantic group of hikers, more than 100, 000 of them. Not that I would make fun of people who fall off cliffs, as it happened to me more than once, and I was saved by the rope or a miracle… Simply, some people are born leaders, born to “moderate” others. And I hate “moderators”: the truth is always viewed as immoderate as some point, especially when it starts to emerge, like a fragile bud. “Moderators” have always been anxious to crush me. I still remember a long exchange with an electronic magazine publisher, who explained to me that he absolutely agreed with me, and that truth always win, so I didn’t have to worry, in the long run. But those European bankers who were so respected absolutely wanted me removed for suggesting bankers had helped Hitler… That was a bit more than a decade ago…

Lots of vegetables in that soup

So the moderating super genius physicist lady fell off her trail. Do we need high energy “modellers”, are they essential workers? Yes they are (but they can work from home). They are certainly more essential than plain old fashion models… But they shouldn’t have become that fashionable… Nor should they have been allowed to fashion physics into generalized modelling (presumably to look pretty to scientific advisors who are themselves advised to develop preferably science which can turn into death rays of some sort; the Pentagon is deploying combat lasers… Table top accelerators of fermions would be most welcome…)

Physics, and thinking in general, should be about brains, deepest and most immoderate. Fortunately, the COVID crisis is showing that thinking at warp speed is not just useful: there is nothing like it.

Instead, modelling physics has turned into a morass of moose heads with pretty bows of different flavors, colors, and, let’s say it outright, smells. And it smells funny, indeed. The “Standard Model” (SM) groups together fifteen or so “elementary particles”. To make it work, it needs something called the Higgs field. It’s a field which permeates space and “gives mass” to the otherwise massless particles of the SM. That’s all fine, except for one fact. We already have E = mcc… Poincare’ s energy has inertial mass observation. So one can generate mass from just energy… And this is what is happening with nucleons, inside which gluons and quarks zoom around. The zooming around of the putative gluons and quarks generate most of the mass.

So here we have the same philosophical problem as with the Big Bang and “cosmic inflation”: one effect, two independent causes. Let me repeat slowly: we have a way to generate mass, from energy directly. Why do we need another effect to generate mass? Oh, because it’s a consequence of the Standard Model, which otherwise would give no mass to particles. Besides the “Higgs” boson (so-called “Higgs”, from one of seven discoverers, not all Anglo-Saxon, of the idea… but it’s a good Anglo-Saxon sound: Higgsss…) was “found”.

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And therein another question: what is an elementary particle? A bump on a graph. Which is bumpy enough. In the eye of the beholder. Smaller than that, and it’s “virtual”. Actually the computations mostly involve “fields”, which are like fields of wheat, except the individual plants are continually shimmering in and out of existence and prominence… That’s why it’s called “Quantum Field Theory” (QFT)… What does “Quantum” means? It means energy is transferred “particle” to “particle” in lumps (Hertz-Planck-Einstein)… But also, everything, during transfers, is about waves (Wave theory of light, Huyghens-Young-Arago-Faraday-Maxwell and “Matter Waves”, De Broglie). Waves of what? We don’t know, we have to do with… waves of probability said Born (he got the Nobel for this interpretation). Waves of probability makes reality tears its hair, full of dead live cats…

One would think that physics, properly done, would consist into finding out what the “particles” and “waves’ and all the metaphysics around both… as the main field of inquiry. But not really, for most physicists. better to decorate moose heads to impress the Beotians. The head of CERN’s theoretical physics division in the 1960s, begged to differ and derived the Bell Inequalities (named after himself, but here deserved). That showed Quantum Physics, in some circumstances, was NONLOCAL. 

The simplest argument for nonlocality is philosophical: Quantum Physics is about waves, waves are intrinsically non local. 

Now nature is also about points; the “particles”. Energy may transfer as waves, it ends up at points. How to go from the wave to the point? That’s called the collapse, the famous Quantum Collapse. Related to the collapse, and a simpler example, are Quantum Jumps. 

One would guess that physics, at its best, would inquire about those notions… And that means not just through thought experiments, but actually experiments. 

Research from Yale University, led by Michel Devoret, a senior french physicist, newly published in Annals of Physics, established that we can reconcile how we describe measurements in classical physics and what is really going on in quantum physics. This has opened a new world: Quantum Jumps go through a preparation period, and such preparation can be inverted, it seems. 

Revealingly, Devoret is from the APPLIED physics department… Although what he does is most fundamental![1]

In SQPR, Sub Quantum Physical Reality, the obvious is proposed: the waves are “real” (not just knowledge waves as in the cat paradox). Although extremely fast, the transition from extended wave to point is progressive, it involves a Quantum Field. And such transitions could be reverted. The general picture also fosters an understanding of what is really going with QFT…    

Physics, and thinking in general, should be about brains, deepest and most immoderate. Fortunately, the COVID crisis is showing that thinking at warp speed is not just useful: there is nothing like it.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] It is revealing that Devoret research is implicitly looked down by the Optimates of theoretical physics. It should not be the high energy particle zoo which should be the first focus of research, because it uses and takes for granted Quantum Physics notions which have not been as examined as they deserve.

It is also telling that Frenchmen working in top US universities are not financed in France: the French establishment , the government, the Deep State, the higher spheres of conniving academia and the increasingly unsophisticated population, product of this miasma, does not view ultimate research as crucial to the survival of civilization. They learned nothing most important from French history.        

LIGHT AS A BLACK HOLE: PLANCK LENGTH, Or How To Find What Matters In Physics

The following show what is important in physics, and what is not. Some may object to the following: how come I don’t use Quantum Field Theory (QFT) and General Relativity? Well first, nobody knows how to use QFT (except in reduced and admirable circumstances which brought zillions of Nobel Prizes). 

However the two most basic axioms of QFT will be used. They are the basic Quantum of Energy axiom: E = hf, which is tied in with the Quantum Wave axiom. What does that represent? h is Planck constant, and “f” the frequency of the “particle”… Here a photon [1]. Frequency? To all particles is associated a wave [2]. Here that’s the plain old electromagnetic wave. So we have: rf = c… where “r” is just the photon wavelength, and c the speed of light. We will use “r’ to squeeze the photon inside itself.

NAIVE COMPUTATION  OF SIZE OF LIGHT INCAPABLE OF ESCAPING ITS OWN MASS-ENERGY:

 

(1) Gravitation law. (2) Energy as the integration of Force over Distance. (3) Quantum Energy. (4) Definition of Speed of Light. (5) Mass = Energy. End Result: PLANCK LENGTH = square root of (Gh/ccc)

Another ingredient is the old F = G m M/ rr, the universal attraction law, older than Newton.

Here we will use it as self gravitation: m = M = “mass” of photon. Self gravitation is nothing surprising: that’s what holds all celestial bodies together, and not just stars and planets, but also galaxies and clusters of galaxies (so-called “virial” theorem). So here I just apply it to light. 

 

Another possible controversy is whether a photon has “mass”. That was demonstrated by the French Henri Poincare (and stolen by Einstein). The root of the proof is as old as Buridan (and the big difference with Aristotle ridiculous physics). What Buridan said was that force = change of impetus. This is the so-called Second Law of Newton, F = ma… except in the slightly more general notion F = m dp/dt… where p is the “impetus” aka ‘momentum… [3]

Thus, according to Buridan, whatever exerts a force has an impetus, and the instantaneous force is the quotient of the infinitesimal change of impetus by the infinitesimal change of time. As electromagnetic radiation (“light”) exerts a pressure (Poynting vector, light sails), thus a force, it has impetus, thus mass… “inertial” mass. But then observations tell us inertial and gravitational masses are the same (“Principle of Equivalence”). So photons have gravitational mass m, given by E = mcc. Hence m = E/cc = hf/cc.   

Now we squeeze the photon inside its own wave. So “r” will be both the scale at which the gravity is used and from which distance one had to make light work against itself to expand to infinity (so we expand from a particular r, R(index zero in the drawing). So “r” is a variable, gives rise to an infinitesimal, dr, and we have

F = F(r) = G mm/rr.

So the total energy to escape to infinity from R is the integral of   (Gmm/rr) dr = Gmm/R = G hhff/cccc R =

Ghhcc/ccccRRR

and that has to be less than the energy contained in the light to start with, namely: hf = hc/R. 

So we get: G h/(c^3) (R^2) < 1, or: R = square root of (Gh/c^3).  

Notice I used no fancy General Relativity, no Schwarzschild Radius…. And still I get the same result as if I had! It is as if General Relativity didn’t matter! How come?  Because, in truth it doesn’t indeed matter very much.
In a full relativistic treatment, the force-acceleration relationship is different from the classical one. Full relativity shows: Force = m ((GAMMA)^3) a… [3]… However, this Relativistic Force is irrelevant here, as the Force used is the gravitational force… which is, in General Relativity, the same good old one used by Newton.

Also I didn’t use the Uncertainty Relationship(s)… as some treatment of the Planck Length do. But there again, this is because the Quantum Wave Principle contains it already (QWP –> UR).  hence we can see what principles are important, and which ones are less so. General Relativity is not a deep theory, just a slight modification of Classical Mechanics: time slows down near large masses, so forces are exerted longer. That force = curvature is an idea from Riemann, already nearly explicit in Buridan (who said planets were inertial on their circular orbits around the Sun).

Now the Planck Length tells us that gravity and the inner geometry of elementary particles are intimately tied in. Also there should be an absolute energy transfer limit…

Reconstructing basic physics from basic principles is a valuable exercise…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The remarkable idea of E = hf came from Planck, and then was used spectacularly, but very simply, by Einstein to explain the photoelectric effect… to Planck’s anger (!), and was then expanded by De Broglie to all particles… As a Principle.

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[2] what I call a QUANTUM wave. Traditional names are “matter waves”, or “De Broglie waves”… because De Broglie invented the idea, beyond light. Here of course the Quantum wave is just the plain old electromagnetic wave. 

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[3] The difference between F = ma and F = m dp/dt is inexistent in classical physics… but NOT in Relativistic Physics… In relativistic physics, the momentum p, the impetus, is not just (mv), momentum multiplied by speed, as Buridan had it, but (GAMMA) mv. Where GAMMA is the usual inverse square root of (1-vv/cc).

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P/S: Virtual particles, that is, roughly the corrections QFT does to Field Theory, rests on time energy uncertainty (DeltaE)(Delta t) > h      

 

FTL: Faster Than Light Communications Don’t Violate Causality

Many physicists take for granted that if Faster Than Light (FTL) communications were possible some signals could be received earlier than they have been emitted. That’s not correct. “Proofs” that Faster Than Light would demolish causality rest on a confusion between causality and temporality. Time is affected by motion, causality isn’t.

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LIGHT/GRAVITY OBSERVED SIMULTANEOUSNESS OF EVENTS IS SPEED DEPENDENT:

Let’s call the Fast Frame FF and the Inertial Frame IF. The great result of Poincaré is that if a clock in Inertial Frame is accelerated to Fast Frame, once it sits still in FF, it will run slow (it’s called the “Twin Paradox”). 

Henri Poincaré pointed out as early as 1898 (Einstein was 19), events which are VIEWED AS simultaneous in the Fast Frame FF may not be VIEWED AS so in the Inertial Frame IF  depending on the exact motion of FF. (If light behaved as sound, it would be obvious why: sometimes sound takes longer to catch up. It’s basically the same mathematical idea.)

The fact events look simultaneous, or not, depends upon defining simultaneity with light speed, and that c is finite. The sketch above is ROUGHLY correct… But not really, because it contains implicitly a subtlety which needs to come to the fore to be fully correct: the LOCAL time inside the train is NOT the same as the LOCAL time on the platform watching the train… so the detail of the drawing is not as simple as the first sketch… But the basic concept remains: light will be seen as hitting the left side of the carriage first if the carriage is moving towards the right…

It’s very simple. Let’s visualize IF and FF the former as a train station, the second as a train, rushing by. Consider the two extremities of a carriage, A and B, call M the middle of the carriage. Then shine a light at M. From inside the carriage, one can see (say by reflecting the light on mirrors), that the light arrived at A and B simultaneously. 

However, from the outside, as seen from the Inertial Frame, the train station, as the carriage is going towards M, the light is going to hit A first, and B, later. 

The proof rests only on the speed of light being finite (something we have known since studying the moons of Jupiter in the Seventeenth Century. 

So simultaneousness of events having to do with light as defined in the Inertial Frame will be different from simultaneousness of events having to do with light in the Fast Frame… As seen with light!  The order of some events may appear one way in IF, and the opposite in FF. If one defines causality as temporal ordering, one is lost. All of this was discovered by Henri Poincaré… and probably why Henri proposed to call this “the theory of relativity”… Relativity of light events as seen by light. All very enlightening, but all too light.

Now here is a philosophical question: suppose we have an instantaneous way to communicate when things are happening. Would that redefine simultaneity? Of course. now in the real world, spacetime is curved, and light goes neither straight, nor constantly, and may even not go anywhere at all:

Spacetime is curved, and in other words, light is neither straight nor constant. More precisely this means that parallel transport along a ray of light brings a rotation of frames. Also shrinkage in various dimensions.

At first sight, physics locked the notion of time down. Indeed, at first sight…. we have only two long range interactions: gravity and electromagnetism (light). Moreover because of Energy = Mass (Henri Poincaré, 1899, La Sorbonne, Paris), they go at the same speed.

At second sight, we have Quantum Entanglement… Yes, I know, many physicists say Quantum Entanglement can’t be an interaction, because it would go faster than light, and that would violate causality. They may as well quote the Bible… It’s faith on their part, and dogma, not science…

Moreover, time, as defined by light clocks is only local, a notion living in the tangent space to spacetime. An explicit illustration of that is local time in a GPS satellite is not Earth time, and modifications to clocks have to be made constantly.

In this real world, defining time only with light is not the only problem. Wait, some will say, do you have any better than light and gravitation to tell us of distant events? Of course, we do: Quantum Entanglement. In my vision of the matter, matter, and space are literally created by Quantum Entanglement. And that goes at a faster clip than electromagnetism and gravity, or things would fall apart.

Patrice Ayme

TIME CLOSED LOOPS + QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT => Contradiction. Bonus: SQPR EXCLUDES TIME TRAVEL

In General Relativity, there are time-like curves. In Quantum Mechanics, there is Entanglement. So consider this: two particles A and B separating, while they are still entangled. Suppose A is on a time like curve. Suppose A takes 1,000 seconds in B proper time to go around its time like loop.  Suppose we activate entanglement at 999 seconds. Then, A cannot show itself exactly as if it was before, having completed its time like loop, because the entanglement with B has disappeared… No problem will the Copenhagen Interpretation fanatics sneer, we just create a new A, with a new entanglement…

Whatever. Hard to argue with the unbalanced.

Mixing time closed loops and Quantum Entanglement is a deadly mix for the conventional physics of General Relativity and the Copenhagen Interpretation….

The fact is entanglement doesn’t resist time-like loops. Ergo, those can’t happen. Or then entanglement doesn’t resist the (proper) time needed for a time-like loop: thus my own SQPR theory appears in its full glory.

Let me give another logical axis on the subject: While particle A goes along the putative closed time loop, entanglement with B, the particle A is entangled with, from an action at B, at any moment, can break the entanglement with A, breaking the time loop with an event (what I call a “Quantum Interaction”) extraneous to it.

In any case, one, or both of the two pillars of Twentieth Century physics collapses…

One may naturally ask what happened in my own Sub Quantum theory, SQPR.

In SQPR the entanglement from B to A is not instantaneous (contrarily to the usual Quantum Mechanical formalism, which has the entanglement propagating instantaneously, just as Newtonian Mechanics had gravitation instantaneously propagating… until Laplace made gravitation into a field with a finite propagation speed, 80 years later, or so (that implied gravitational waves, as Laplace pointed out in the first edition of his book).

This being said, that finite propagation speed doesn’t mean the entanglement can’t break the loop. Generally it will: entanglement moves at 10^23c, whereas a typical time loop is found around a Black Hole, over small dimensions. Hence SQPR gives a definite answer: time loops can’t exist. Indeed an object is a continual succession of delocalization-relocalization-entanglement-collapse entanglement. Hence any inchoating time loop would broken instantaneously… So the scenario pushed by some specialists of Relativity, and spread by Hollywood, that Black Holes would enable time travel is impossible.

Philosophically, the approach is interesting: generally General Relativity, Celestial Mechanics and Quantum Mechanics are viewed as having nothing to do with each other. That traditional view is well-known. A famous theoretical physicist was proclaiming it as recently as last week. As I heard it again, last week, I was pondering how can one be so famous, and so wrong in the precise field in which one is famous… (In a nutshell: General Relativity comes from Relativity, which itself comes from Photon Mechanics, also known as “Electrodynamics”, which is the simplest form of Quantum Mechanics…)

Then it dawned to me that this stupid meta-idea, that General Relativity and the Quantum have nothing to do with each other, is so well anchored that none of the fools out there may have thought to force them in the same logical box… Moreover, entanglement appeared only in 1935, with the EPR paper (and Schrodinger naming entanglement “entanglement”, directly in English), so it escaped the furious debates between De Broglie and Einstein on one side and Bohr, Heisenberg, and the entire Copenhagen school, on the other… Thus, I added entanglement to loops… No need to “shut up and calculate…”

Distant ideas gather much energy, when they are made to crash into each other…

Patrice Ayme

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Some may sneer: how likely is it that Patrice fell on a major idea in physics so obvious that even normal physicists can understand it? Well, it would not be the first time something similar happens. Actually, way worse has already happened. And no, I am not alluding once again to the discovery of E = m by Jules Henri Poincaré in 1899, and attributed to Einstein…

Remember the Bohm-Aharonov effect? This says that a change of potential P will have an effect on Quantum Mechanics driven particles, even if the field F that P gives rise to (F = dP) is unchanged. That was thought of in 1959, and immediately checked experimentally on electron interference through the famous 2-slit. The idea should have been obvious. The most basic equation on Quantum Mechanics is the De Broglie-Schrodinger equation (usually attributed only, erroneously, to the latter…) This is basically: i(dwave)/dt = P. So the variation of the wave as a function of time, multiplied by the square root of (-1) is equal to… the potential. All the immense minds of QM, including Einstein, De Broglie, Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Sommerfeld, Born, Von Neumann, Ehrenfeld, Fermi, the Curies, Dirac, Feynman, Yukawa, Schwinger, Tomanaga, Wigner, Weyl, etc. look at the equation, and didn’t realize the potential mattered…

The Aharonov–Bohm effect was chosen by the New Scientist magazine as one of the “seven wonders of the quantum world… Out of vengeance, probably, the rogue David Bohm, and Aharonov, didn’t get the Nobel anymore than those who discovered the spin of the electron…

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The conclusion you escaped so far: Recently discovered (June 2019) Sub Quantum Mechanics, in conjunction with Quantum Entanglement, introduces an arrow of time at a Sub Quantum level…. making all previous considerations on the subject obsolete… 

Mathematical Beauty, Physics, And Truth

Mathematical beauty can guide physics: this is what happened for the foundation of QED by Dirac. At least, so it looks at first sight, and so he said. However, Dirac was guided by one intuition deeper than “beauty”: finding an equation of maximum simplicity to describe the electron… while knowing the Klein Gordon relativistic equation didn’t describe the electron, finding a simpler (first order) PDE that would be “relativistic” guided his search. Then see what happened. He knew that the simple wave equation are first order (although conventional strings are second order PDEs). Doing so Dirac re-invented unknowingly part of Cartan Spinor theory, a pure mathematical theory invented 15 years earlier. The Dirac equation he found led to experimental predictions, which were found to be true.

General Relativity too had a mathematical origin: Riemann, in the 1860s, got the idea that force will manifest itself as a deviation of geodesics. The idea is actually even older, in 3 dimensions, going back to Buridan (1350). That’s how Buridan superseded Aristotelian physics with his “Impetus” theory (the first order of the mechanics we have now).

Special Relativity was invented differently: a number of equations were found to explain effects observed, until Poincaré built a coherent logical whole resting on the idea that the speed of light should always be measured to be c. In particular electromagnetism was found to the essence of Relativity.

The picture is from CERN. The waves are from beaches of Western North America. Ultimately, it seems likely to me that nonlinear phenomenon are needed to understand hydraulics in full. But present day hydraulics, like Quantum Physics (away from collapse), is linear…

So the opposition is not so much between mathematics and physics, it’s between shallow ideas and deeper ideas. Physicists had no deeply new ideas, ideas which can stand-under, understand, for generations. Much of that has to do with denying that the Foundations of Quantum Physics are worthy of consideration.

Mathematical beauty can guide physics: but who guides mathematical beauty? 23 centuries ago, mathematicians then in power decided that Euclidean mathematics was beautiful, and non-Euclidean mathematics (invented prior) was ugly. Let’s not talk of the ugly anymore, or, at least, too complicated, they opined. After a few generations of pounding that notion, it became a claim that nothing existed in geometry, but for the beauty of geometry in a plane. Mathematicians got so dumb they forgot that the axiom of parallels was just an axiom, not a theorem (they tried to demonstrate it for nearly 20 centuries, whereas it would take ten seconds to explain to them what idiots they were, had they a brain in that direction…)

Indeed, never mind that Pytheas of Marseilles and his successors had, thanks to spherical geometry, computed the size of the rounded Earth most precisely. So, clearly mathematics on a sphere was extremely useful! In particular, true, and in existence!

Some say equation are beautiful. Equations themselves are subjects to interpretations. For example Henri Poincaré’s E = mcc, rolled out at the Sorbonne in 1899, is not clear. Similarly Einstein GR equation, basically: Curvature – Mass-energy, is not clear, as Einstein pointed out: right side is ill defined. After Dirac discovered his equation he realized it had to live in “Spinor Space”. So interpreting an equation gave the space where it had meaning.

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Right now the most fundamental problems in mathematics and physics are clear to yours truly:

First, mathematics use an infinity axiom, namely that there is infinity. In the formal language of the Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms, the axiom reads: There is a set I (the set which is postulated to be infinite), such that the empty set is in I, and such that whenever any x is a member of I, the set formed by taking the union of x with its singleton {x} is also a member of I. Such a set is sometimes called an inductive set.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_infinity

This, this Infinity Axiom, in my opinion supposes too much, relative to the physical and practical realms, just like Euclidean geometry supposed too much relative to the practical and physical realms. Indeed, in practice, flat geometry does not exist. Same for infinity: in practice infinity cannot exists (not enough particles to count all the numbers). The Infinity Axiom introduces infinities in physics which are a mathematical artefact. This philosophical point is too hard for most top theorists to understand, the ones the Wall Street Journal is in love with (because of there are leading minds officially sanctioned in physics, thus as higher principles, so it is in in economics, sociology, hence plutocracy is rightfully supreme; see below).

Second, Quantum Physics is about WAVES. This enormous conceptual breakthrough was from Louis de Broglie. Waves are beautiful, especially Quantum Waves. Yet, in practice, waves are NOT linear. They are often nearly linear, right, but not quite (just like Euclidean geometry doesn’t quite exist, except as a figment of the imagination, and even then… ). However, present day mathematics has not been focused on nonlinear waves, so we don’t have a notion of “mathematical beauty”of nonlinear waves.

And guess what? The formalism of quantum Physics itself says that the “collapse” it can’t do without is nonlinear.

And now for a word of wisdom from that rather tall little thief friend of ours, Richard P. Feynman: “Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation.” There has been too much self dealing in physics, too much nonsense at the highest level! Bohr’s philosophy, which underlays his satisfaction with the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Physics, is a surrealistic horror: he thought that clarity contradicted truth (or idea to this effect… actually the exact contradiction of the beautiful idea of equation).

Want new physics? Do like Buridan, Oresme, and their friends and students, seven centuries ago: invent new mathematics (they invented the second page of calculus, the first one was from Archimedes himself, 16 centuries before). That’s done by working on the axioms, introducing new ones.

So when is a system of thought X deeper than another Y? When X implies Y, by under-standing it, namely introducing deeper (“under”) reasons for its standing.

String theory has been the equivalent of the crystal spheres and epicycles construction which replaced the evidence all could see, that Earth, the small thing turned around the Sun, the big thing (the Greeks knew from computations, looking at the Moon, and shadows, that the Sun was millions of kilometers away…) Right now the big thing is Quantum Collapse, that’s what needs to be understood. String Theory does a few things, like cancelling some infinities as a problem (my proposal above is much more radical… also, unavoidable…)

Meanwhile, while those self-esteemed super brains make super theories of supersymmetries of super strings (their concepts involve the word”super” very much…), to make a theory of Quantum Gravity, little Patrice has noticed this: there is NO experiment, and, a fortiori theory of gravity in the double slit… Why? Because the super minds, too busy being super, have not noticed that we lack experiments there (after they read this, they will steal the idea, and run to the closest physics journal edited by their friends to publish it as their great insight).

Patrice Ayme

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Note 1: the preceding was inspired by the following WSJ article:

Einstein’s character was more like that of an artist than a scientist, his older son, Hans, said: The great physicist reserved his highest praise for theories that are beautiful, rather than ones that merely fit the facts. When, in the latter half of his career, Einstein spent most of his time trying to discover a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism, he paid little attention to new experiments and focused mainly on trying to find the best mathematical structure. Alas, the strategy got him nowhere.

According to the physicist and prolific blogger Sabine Hossenfelder, Einstein and others who work in a similar way are “lost in math,” the title of her lively and provocative book. Until the early 1970s, few theoreticians fitted such a description—most of them were taking inspiration from the results of experiments. It was this strategy that led them to the so-called Standard Model, which describes the inner workings of atoms with remarkable success. Over the past four decades, however, theoretical physics has gone astray, in Ms. Hossenfelder’s view. Part of the problem, she feels, is that so many theoreticians have allowed themselves to be seduced by the aesthetic appeal of mathematical theories that are going nowhere.

As she explains, the use of beauty as a proxy for truth has an impressive pedigree: Not only was it espoused by Einstein, it also became the obsession of the almost comparably brilliant English quantum physicist Paul Dirac. In 1975 he wrote: “If you are receptive and humble, mathematics will lead you by the hand . . . along an unexpected path, path where new vistas open up . . . from which one can survey the surroundings and plan future progress.” Toward the end of his life, he declared that any theoretical physicist who disagreed with him should give up research and do something else.

As a result of this misguided focus on beauty, Ms. Hossenfelder says, her generation of theoretical physicists has been “stunningly unsuccessful.” The multiverse—the idea that our universe is only one of a vast number—is one of the fashionable concepts that she believes is a dud… 

Ms. Hossenfelder believes string theorists are deluded. “Nature doesn’t care” about mathematical beauty, she declares. Clever physicists have been led up the garden path before, she stresses, pointing to the once-fashionable theories of the ether that Einstein later demonstrated to be redundant.

Ms. Hossenfelder has paid a high price for her counter-orthodoxy…”

And the WSJ to conclude by discreetly celebrating the Fuhrerprinzip which Hossenfelder violated:

“The best string theorists are confident that they are heading in the right direction not only because of the theory’s mathematical beauty but because of its huge potential, despite its formidable challenges.

When Ms. Hossenfelder reiterates in her final chapter that many of the world’s most accomplished theorists are “lost in math,” we cannot help wondering whether it is she who is lost. Time will tell whether many of the world’s leading theoretical physicists have spent decades barking up the wrong tree. Meanwhile, it is pleasing to read that Ms. Hossenfelder now has a research grant and has resumed work on the subject she plainly cares deeply about, no doubt steering well clear of what she regards as bandwagons. In that respect, at least, Einstein would have been proud of her.”

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After the plutocratic horror critique above, I must re-establish some justice to Sabine (and myself, indirectly). Here is Nature:

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray Sabine HossenfelderBasic (2018)

“Why should the laws of nature care about what I find beautiful?” With that statement, theoretical physicist and prolific blogger Sabine Hossenfelder sets out to tell a tale both professional and personal in her new book, Lost in Math. It explores the morass in which modern physics finds itself, thanks to the proliferation of theories devised using aesthetic criteria, rather than guidance from experiments. It also charts Hossenfelder’s own struggles with this approach.

Hossenfelder — a research fellow specializing in quantum gravity and modifications to the general theory of relativity at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany — brings a trenchant new voice to concerns that have been rumbling in physics for at least two decades. In 2006, Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics and Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong fired the first salvos at the trend of valuing mathematical elegance over empirical evidence. Both books took on string theory, a ‘theory of everything’ in which the fundamental constituents of nature are strings vibrating in many more spatial dimensions than the familiar three. Since its entry into mainstream physics in the mid-1980s, the theory has failed to make predictions that would unambiguously verify or falsify it.

Hossenfelder, too, tackles string theory, but her broadsides are more basic. She points to the paucity of experimental data, exacerbated as the machines needed to probe ever higher energies and smaller distances become more costly to build. Given that, she is worried that too many theorists are using mathematical arguments and subjective aesthetics to judge a theory’s validity.”

By the way, my own theory of Quantum Foundations predicts Dark Matter and Dark Energy… It also predicts unpredicted, in contradiction-with Einstein, mass behavior in, say the 2-slit experiment… Namely a dispersion of mass during translation…

Here is more of Nature:

For example, Hossenfelder questions the desire for naturalness — the idea that a theory should not be contrived or have parameters that have to be fine-tuned to fit observations. The standard model of particle physics feels like such a contrivance to many physicists, despite its spectacular success in predicting particles such as the Higgs boson, discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. In the theory, to prevent the mass of the Higgs from ballooning beyond reasonable bounds, certain parameters have to be set just so, rather than be derived from first principles. This smacks of unnaturalness.

To get rid of this ugliness, physicists developed supersymmetry — an elegant theory in which every known particle has a hypothetical partner particle. Supersymmetry made the Higgs mass natural. It also showed how three of the four fundamental forces of nature would have been one at energies that existed shortly after the Big Bang (an aesthetically pleasing scenario). It even unexpectedly provided a particle, the neutralino, that could explain dark matter — matter that is unseen, yet thought to exist because of its observed gravitational effect on galaxies and galactic clusters. Hossenfelder explains that in combining everything that theoretical physicists value (symmetry, naturalness, unification and unexpected insights), supersymmetry has become “what biologists fittingly call a ‘superstimulus’ — an artificial yet irresistible trigger”.