Perverse Logic: Saving the Multiverse with Unhinged Cosmic Inflation!

When The Unobservable Universe Is Used To Justify Various Follies, Such As The Multiverse, Civilization Is In A Bad Way:

Physics is the laboratory of reason. This where the most advanced, most subtle logics are forged (even more so than in pure mathematics, where the navel’s importance is too great). So what physicists ponder, matters to the entire civilization which nurtures them. When physics goes to the dogs, so does civilization. The follies of state of the art theoretical physics, reflect an ambient madness which pervades civilization. (If you don’t believe this, may I sell you some imaginary bitcoins for millions of dollars?)

Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel, a continual source of excellent articles in physics, wrote an interesting essay which I disagree with. His reasons are interesting, and have the merit of honesty. My answers are even more striking, and I bring the full weight of 24 centuries of history as meta-evidence for crushing the feeble, pathetic, short-sighted considerations of my fellow physicists. Ethan’s essay is entitled: “Yes, The Multiverse Is Real, But It Won’t Fix Physics
Surprisingly, the evidence points towards the existence of the unobservable multiverse. But it isn’t the answer you’re looking for. “

Ethan proposes to use cosmic inflation to provide for the proliferation of Schrödinger cats and Wigner’s friends. One folly would thus provide for the other, and they would thus stay up, like two drunks falling into each other’s arms. I will instead humbly suggest to do away with madness altogether. But first a little recap.

The universe is expanding. This experimental evidence was established around 1920, by a number of astronomers in Europe and the USA, the most famous of whom was lawyer turned astronomer, Edwin Hubble. Hubble had the biggest telescope. The expansion is presumed to be looking everywhere the same, and this is what seems to be observed. That also means that, if one looks far away, galaxies will seem to be receding from us at speed ever closer to the speed of light. As the apparent speed of these galaxies approach c, their light gets shifted to lower and lower frequencies, until they become invisible (same reason as why Black Holes are blacker than black).

Where the transition to invisibility occurs is called the “event horizon”. Beyond the event horizon is the unobservable universe (we can’t detect it gravitationally, as gravity goes at the speed of light, a theoretical prediction now experimentally verified).

The observed universe is “flat” (namely there is no detected distortion in the distribution of clouds, filaments and superclusters of galaxies). That sounds unlikely, and indicates that the observed universe is a tiny portion of a much larger whole.

This unobservable universe has nothing to do with the “Multiverse” brandished recently by many theoretical physicists who have apparently run out of imagination for something more plausible. Eighty years ago, Schrödinger pointed out that Quantum Mechanics, as formalized then (and now!) was observer dependent, and filled up the universe with waves of dead and live cats (when applied to macroscopic objects). That’s called the Schrödinger Cat Paradox. Instead of calling for a re-thinking of Quantum Mechanics (as I do!), Ethan Siegel (and many other physicists and astrophysicists) embrace the dead and alive cats, settling them in “parallel universes”. So basically they reenact Solomon Judgment: instead of cutting the baby in two, they cut the universe in two. Zillions of time per second, in zillions of smaller places than you can possibly imagine… Here is a picture of Schrödinger cat: as the branches separate in that movie, two universes are created. This is what Ethan Siegel wants to justify, thanks to cosmic inflation…

Ethan’s revealing comment: “The idea of parallel Universes, as applied to Schrödinger’s cat. As fun and compelling as this idea is, without an infinitely large region of space to hold these possibilities in, even inflation won’t create enough Universes to contain all the possibilities that 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution have brought us. Image credit: Christian Schirm.”
To explain crazy, we will go more crazy, thus making the previous crazy sound more rational, relatively speaking…

The Multiverse”, with baby universes all over the universe, has more to do with the “Many Worlds Interpretation” of Quantum Mechanics, a theory so absurd that the great popes of physics ruling around 1960 rejected it outright. Wheeler was ashamed of himself for having had a PhD student, Everett, who suggested this folly(Everett couldn’t get an academic job, at a time when academic employment in physics was booming!)

Ethan wrote: “In the region that became our Universe, which may encompass a large region that goes far beyond what we can observe, inflation ended all-at-once. But beyond that region, there are even more regions where it didn’t end.”

This sort of statement, and I say this with all due respect to the divine, is equivalent to saying:”Me, Ethan, having checked all that exists, observable by simple humans, or not, thereby informs you that I am either God, or that She is an interlocutor of mine. We checked that cosmic inflation thing, and saw it all over all the possible universes. Don’t talk, just learn.”

There is no way for us humans to know, for sure, or not, what is going on beyond the observable universe (aside from having no gravitational field distortions when approaching the event horizon, as I said above when considering “flatness”).

Ethan notices that Many Worlds fanatics have tried to use cosmic inflation to save their (ridiculous) theory. (“Many Worlds” is ridiculous, as Schrödinger tried to show, long ago, because there would be as many ways to cut the universes into “Many Worlds” as there are observers. So, so to speak, the “Many World Interpretation”, call it MWI, is actually MWI ^ {Observers} (MWI to the power of the set of all possible Observers, the latter set being itself something of an uncountably infinite function of MWI.)

Ethan says: “But just because variants of the Multiverse are falsifiable, and just because the consequences of its existence are unobservable, doesn’t mean that the Multiverse isn’t real. If cosmic inflation, General Relativity, and quantum field theory are all correct, the Multiverse likely is real, and we’re living in it.”

What Ethan is saying is that if a number of crazy (cosmic inflation), or incomplete (Quantum Field Theory), ideas are “all correct”, then something as useful as angels on pin heads is real.Yes, indeed, if one believes that Muhammad flew to Jerusalem on a winged horse (!), one may as well believe all the rest of the Qur’an. That is a proof by crystal balls. After Ptolemy and company had established their (half correctly) predicting “epicycles” theory, one could have used it in turn to “prove” Aristotle ridiculous theory of motion.

23 centuries ago a much saner theory existed, that of Aristarchus. It was rejected at the time, precisely because it was not insane, and even though it was used to make a nearly correct prediction of the distance of the Moon. Aristarchus underestimated the distance of the Sun, but a telescope could have changed this (by showing more precisely the angle of the terminus on the Moon). If astronomers had the time had accepted heliocentrism as a possibility, it would have led them to invent the telescope. Similarly, right now, rejecting Many Worlds and Multiverse will lead to develop instruments which don’t exist yet (I have proposed at least one).

Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel suggests that: “The Multiverse is real, but provides the answer to absolutely nothing.” My opinion is that the Multiverse is worse than useless: the unhinged mood it provides prevents to develop more fruitful avenues of research, both theoretically and experimentally.

Insanity is the rule in crowds (Nietzsche). Thus follies are the truths crowds love, at first sight, before being corrected by higher minds. Why? Follies bind, because they are so special.

Mass DELUSIONS: FOLLIES BIND MINDS. Example: Will To Infanticide: ABRAHAMISM.

In Aristarchus’ times, heliocentrism, the fact Earth and its Moon rotate around the Sun, should have been obvious. Indeed, people, let’s think for a moment: where was the Sun supposed to be, considering the phases of the Moon? If the Sun turned around Earth, the Moon’s illumination should have changed all day long! It didn’t require much geometrical analysis to discover that this source of light could only be where Aristarchus computed it to be, far away from the Earth-Moon system.

It took 19 centuries to correct that (obvious!) mistake. Interestingly, Jean Buridan, circa 1350 CE, did it in the most theoretical fashion.

BURIDAN: MOMENTUM, FORCE, INERTIA, MIDDLE AGES…

Buridan first showed that Aristotle’s ridiculous theory of motion made no sense, and had to be replaced by inertia and momentum (what Buridan called “impetus”). Having done this, the motion of the planets in a heliocentric system could be explained by “circular impetus”, Buridan pointed out (then he observed sardonically that we couldn’t observe the difference between epicycles and heliocentrism, so may as well go for “Scripture”).

Similarly, nowadays, instead of arguing with the “angels on a multiverse pinhead” authorities, we better point out to the glaring inconsistencies of Quantum Mechanics.

Civilization without reason is like a chicken without a head: it can run, but not forever.

Patrice Aymé

Crazy Physics Helps With Overall Madness?

Quantum Physics has long been a circus. When De Broglie proposed his thesis, his  thesis jury (which comprised top physicists, including a Nobel Laureate) did not know what to make of it, and consulted Einstein. Einstein was enthusiastic, saying de Broglie “lifted a piece of the veil”. Three years later, de Broglie got the Nobel and proposed his pilot wave theory. Pauli made an objection, de Broglie replied to it with the consummate politeness of the Prince he was, and thus the reply was not noticed. Five years after, the great mathematician Von Neumann asserted a “proof” that there was no Quantum Mechanics but for the one elaborated in Copenhagen. De Broglie’s objections were not listened to. Another two decades later, David Bohm presented de Broglie theory at the Institute for Advanced Physics in Princeton. But Bohm was drowned by question about why he had refused to testify at the Committee on Anti-American Activities in Congress (the American born Bohm promptly lost his job at Princeton University and his US passport, and would leave the US forever).

The usual interpretation of Quantum Physics consider that the De Broglie Matter Waves therein are only probability waves. This idea of Nobel Laureate Born has eschewed controversy. However Einstein sourly remarked: “God does not play with dice.” To which Nobel Laureate Bohr smartly replied:”Stop telling God what to do!”

Qubits Are Real. But The Multiverse Is Madness. And Madness Is Contagious.

De Broglie suggested a “Double Solution” theory, which was promptly forgotten as Dirac launched Quantum ElectroDynamics by starting from the simplest relativistic wave, and building the (spinor) space he needed to have said wave wave in it.  Bohm revived (some of) De Broglie’s ideas by proposing to guide an always well defined particle with a (nonlocal) “quantum potential”.

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And The Madness Set In:

Nowadays, descriptions of Quantum Physics are keen to assert that something can be in two places at the same time, that there are many worlds, or universes, created each time something happen, that cats are dead and alive, that the observer creates reality, etc…

All this derangement affecting physicists has something to do with a collective madness similar to the pseudo-scientific theories behind the Slave Trade, Stalinism, or Nazism.

No, I am not exaggerating. The theory behind enslaving Black Africans (going all the way back to the Middle Ages) was that Black Africans were, somehow, the missing link between man and ape. That’s why the Pope allowed the slave trade.

Neither am I exaggerating about fascism: the Nazis were actually obsessed by the new physics, a world where everything seemed possible. They called it “Jewish Physics”, and several Nobel laureates (Lenard, etc.), top mathematicians (say Teichmuller, who died on the Eastern Front in combat) were its opponents.

It contributed to suggest an overall mood:’if anything is possible, why not surrealism, fascism, Stalinism, Nazism?’

Germany has long led, intellectually (not to say France did not lead too, but it was the great opponent). Thus when top physicists became Nazis even before Hitler did, they no doubt impressed the latter by their attacks on “Jewish Science”.

The madness was not confined to the Nazis, stricto sensu. An excellent example is Max Planck, discoverer of the Quantum.

Planck accepted Einstein’s paper on “The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” without references… When it was sure that Planck knew about the work of Poincare’, Lorentz, Fitzgerald, Michelson-Morley, etc. on Relativity. Poincaré  was a star, and had toured the USA, delivering lectures on “Relativity” the year prior.

So what was Planck up to? Promoting the German arriviste to the cost of the most accomplished mathematician and physicist, because the latter was a Frenchman. (Poincaré , who was as elevated a character as can be found, nevertheless complained about Einstein plagiarism later.) Not only was  Poincaré French, but his family was refugee from the occupation of Lorraine by the Prussians. Raymond Poincaré, who was prime minister of France several times and president of the French Republic during World War I, was Henri’s cousin.

This is of some import, in the understanding of ideas, to this day: Poincaré  discovered the idea of gravitational waves, and explained why all interactions should go at the speed of light. Scientists who published (stole) the same ideas later could not copy all of  Poincaré ’s arguments, it would have been too obvious (that they stole the ideas), so those important details of  Poincaré  have been forgotten… And this haunts physics to this day

I believe that this is how the extremely all too relative, theory of Relativity a la Einstein appeared: Einstein could not duplicate all of  Poincaré’s details, so he omitted (some of) them… Resulting in a (slick) theory with a glaring defect: all classes of frames in uniform motion are supposed to be equivalent, a blatant absurdity (as even the Big Bang theory imposes a unique class of comoving frames). This brought a lot of (on-going) confusion (say about “rest” mass).

Planck did not stop with stealing Relativity from  Poincaré, and offering it to the Great German empire.

Planck endorsed the general excitement of the German public, when Germany attacked the world on August 1, 1914. He wrote that, “Besides much that is horrible, there is also much that is unexpectedly great and beautiful: the smooth solution of the most difficult domestic political problems by the unification of all parties (and) … the extolling of everything good and noble.”

Planck also signed the infamous “Manifesto of the 93 intellectuals“, a pamphlet of war propaganda (while Einstein at the academy in Berlin, retained a pacifistic attitude which almost led to his imprisonment, although he was saved by his Swiss citizenship). The Manifesto, ironically enough, enumerated German war crimes, while denying (‘not true’) that they had happened. It did not occur to the idiots who had signed it, that just denying this long litany of crimes was itself a proof that they had occurred… And it’s telling they had to deny them: the German population obviously was debating whether those crimes had happened, now that the war was not doing well.

Planck got punished for his nationalism: his second son Erwin was taken prisoner by the French in 1914. His eldest son Karl died at Verdun (along with another 305,000 soldiers). When he saw Hitler was destroying Germany, Planck went to see the dictator, to try to change his mind, bringing to his attention that he was demolishing German universities. But to no avail. In January 1945, Erwin, to whom he had been particularly close, was sentenced to death by the obscene and delirious Nazi “people” court, the Volksgerichtshof. Because Erwin participated in the failed attempt to make a coup against the criminal Hitler in July 1944. Erwin was executed on 23 January 1945 (along with around 5,000 German army officers, all the way to Feldmarshal).

So what to think of the “Multiverse”, “Dead and Alive Cats”, Things which are in different places at the same time, etc.? Do they have to do with suggesting, even promoting, a global reign of unreason?

I think they do. I think the top mood contaminate lesser  intellectuals, political advisers, even politicians themselves. Thus political and social leaders feel anything goes, so, next thing you know, they suggest crazy things, like self-regulating finance, trade treaties where plutocrats can sue states (apparently one of the features of TPP and TTIP), or a world which keeps on piling CO2, because everything is relative, dead, thus alive, and everywhere is the same, here, there and everywhere, since at the same place, in space, time, or whatever.

Physics, historically, was not just a model of knowledge, but of rational rectitude. This has been lost. And it was lost from technical reasons, discarding other approaches, in part because of sheer nationalism.

In the 1960s John Bell, the Irishman who was director of theory at CERN, published a book with his famous theorem on nonlocality inside:”Speakables and Unspeakables in Quantum Mechanics”. A title full of hidden sense.

Patrice Ayme

Points Against Multiverses

Physics, the study of nature, is grounded not just in precise facts, but also a loose form of logic called mathematics, and in even more general reasonings we know as “philosophy”. For example, the rise of Quantum Field Theory required massive Effective Ontology: define things by their effects. The reigning philosophy of physics became “shut-up and calculate”. But it’s not that simple. Even the simplest Quantum Mechanics, although computable, is rife with mind numbing mysteries (about the nature of matter, time and non-locality).

Recently the (increasing) wild wackiness of the Foundations of Physics, combined with the fact that physics, as it presently officially exists, cannot under-stand Dark Energy and Dark Matter, most of the mass-energy out there, has led some Europeans to organize conferences where physicists meet with reputable  philosophers.

Einstein Was Classical, The World Is Not. It’s Weirder Than We Have Imagined. So Far.

[Bell, CERN theory director, discovered a now famous inequality expressing locality, which Quantum physics violate. Unfortunately he died of a heart attack thereafter.]

Something funny happened in these conferences: many physicists came out of them, persuaded, more than ever, or so they claimed, that they were on the right track. Like little rodents scampering out in the daylight,  now sure that there was nothing like a big philosophical eagle to swoop down on them. They made many of these little reasonings in the back of their minds official (thus offering now juicy targets).

Coel Hellier below thus wrote clearly what has been in the back of the minds of the Multiverse Partisans. I show “his” argument in full below. Coel’s (rehashing of what has become the conventional Multiverse) argument is neat, cogent, powerful.

However I claim that it is not as plausible, not as likely, as the alternative, which I will present. Coel’s argument rests on a view of cosmology which I claim is neither mathematically necessary, nor physically tenable (in light of the physics we know).

To understand what I say, it’s better to read Coel first. Especially as I believe famous partisans of the Multiverse have been thinking along the same lines (maybe not as clearly). However, to make it fast, those interested by my demolition of it can jump directly to my counter, at the end: NO POINTS, And Thus No Multiverse.

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Multiverses Everywhere: Coel Hellier’s Argument:

Coel Hellier, a professional astrophysicist of repute, wrote :  “How many Big Bangs? A philosophical argument for a multiverse”:

“Prompted by reading about the recent Munich conference on the philosophy of science, I am reminded that many people regard the idea of a multiverse as so wild and wacky that talking about it brings science into disrepute.”

Well, being guided by non-thinking physicists will do that. As fundamental physicist Mermin put it, decades ago:

The Philosophy “Shut Up And Calculate” Is A Neat Example Of Intellectual Fascism. It Is Increasingly Undermined By The Effort Toward Quantum Computing, Where Non-Locality Reigns.

Coel, claiming to have invented something which has been around for quite a while, probably decades: “My argument here is the reverse: that the idea of multiple Big Bangs, and thus of a multiverse, is actually more mundane and prosaic than the suggestion that there has only ever been one Big Bang. I’m calling this a “philosophical” argument since I’m going to argue on very general grounds rather than get into the details of particular cosmological models.

First, let me clarify that several different ideas can be called a “multiverse”, and here I am concerned with only one. That “cosmological multiverse” is the idea that our Big Bang was not unique, but rather is one of many, and that the different “universes” created by each Big Bang are simply separated by vast amounts of space.

Should we regard our Big Bang as a normal, physical event, being the result of physical processes, or was it a one-off event unlike anything else, perhaps the origin of all things? It is tempting to regard it as the latter, but there is no evidence for that idea. The Big Bang might be the furthest back thing we have evidence of, but there will always be a furthest-back thing we have evidence of. That doesn’t mean its occurrence was anything other than a normal physical process.

If you want to regard it as a one-off special event, unlike any other physical event, then ok. But that seems to me a rather outlandish idea. When physics encounters a phenomenon, the normal reaction is to try to understand it in terms of physical processes.”

Then Coel exposes some of the basic conclusions of the Standard Big Bang model:

“So what does the evidence say? We know that our “observable” universe is a region of roughly 13.8 billion light years in radius, that being the distance light can have traveled since our Big Bang. (Actually, that’s how we see it, but it is now bigger than that, at about 90 billion light years across, since the distant parts have moved away since they emitted the light we now see.) We also know that over that time our observable universe has been steadily expanding.”

Then astrophysicist Coel start to consider necessary something about the geometry of the universe which is not so, in my opinion. Coel:

“At about 1 second after the Big Bang, what is now our observable universe was only a few light years across, and so would have fitted into (what is now) the space between us and the nearest star beyond our Sun. Before that it would have been yet smaller.”

What’s wrong? Coel assumes implicitly that the universe started from a POINT. But that does not have to be the case. Suppose the universe started as an elastic table. As we go back in time, the table shrinks, distances diminish. Coel:

“We can have good confidence in our models back to the first seconds and minutes, since the physics at that time led to consequences that are directly observable in the universe today, such as the abundance of helium-4 relative to hydrogen, and of trace elements such as helium-3, deuterium, and lithium-7.[1] Before that time, though, our knowledge gets increasingly uncertain and speculative the further back we push.”

These arguments about how elements were generated, have a long history. They could actually be generated in stars (I guess, following Hoyle and company). Star physics is not that well-known that we can be sure they can’t (stars as massive as 600 Suns seem to have been discovered; usual astrophysics says they are impossible; such stars would be hotter than the hottest stars known for sure).

Big Bangists insist that there would have been no time to generate these elements in stars, because the universe is 13.8 billion years old. But that 13.8 billion is from their Big Bang model. So their argument is circular: it explodes if the universe is, actually 100 billion years old.

But back to Coel’s Multiverses All Over. At that point, Coel makes a serious mistake, the one he was drifting towards above:

“One could, if one likes, try to extrapolate backwards to a “time = zero” event at which all scales go to zero and everything is thus in the same place. But trying to consider that is not very sensible since we have no evidence that such an event occurred (from any finite time or length scale, extrapolating back to exactly zero is an infinite extrapolation in logarithmic space, and making an infinite extrapolation guided by zero data is not sensible). Further, we have no physics that would be remotely workable or reliable if applied to such a scenario.[2] “

…”all scales go to zero and everything is thus in the same place.” is not true, in the sense that it does not have to be. Never mind, Coel excludes it, although he claims “extrapolating back in time” leads there. It does not.

Instead, Coel invites us to Voodoo (Quantum) Physics:

“So what is it sensible to consider? Well, as the length scale decreases, quantum mechanics becomes increasingly important. And quantum mechanics is all about quantum fluctuations which occur with given probabilities. In particular, we can predict that at about the Planck scale of 10−35 metres, quantum-gravity effects would have dominated.[3] We don’t yet have a working theory of quantum gravity, but our best guess would be that our Big Bang originated as a quantum-gravity fluctuation at about that Planck-length scale.”

Well, this is conventional pata-physics. Maybe it’s true, maybe not. I have an excellent reason why it should not (details another time). At this point, Coel is firmly in the conventional Multiverse argument (come to think of it, he did not invent it). The universe originated in a Quantum fluctuation at a point, thus:

“So, we can either regard our Big Bang as an un-natural and un-physical one-off event that perhaps originated absolutely everything (un-natural and un-physical because it would not have been a natural and physical process arising from a pre-existing state), or we can suppose that our Big Bang started as something like a quantum-gravity fluctuation in pre-existing stuff. Any physicist is surely going to explore the latter option (and only be forced to the former if there is no way of making the latter work).

At times in our human past we regarded our Solar System as unique, with our Earth, Sun and Moon being unique objects, perhaps uniquely created. But the scientific approach was to look for a physical process that creates stars and planets. And, given a physical process that creates stars, it creates not just one star, but oodles of them strewn across the galaxy. Similarly, given a physical process that creates Earth-like planets, we get not just one planet, but planets around nearly every star.”

Coel then gets into the famous all-is-relative mood, rendered famous by “French Theory”:

“It was quite wrong to regard the Sun and Earth as unique; they are simply mundane examples of common physical objects created by normal physical processes that occur all over the galaxy and indeed the universe.

But humans have a bias to a highly anthropocentric view, and so we tend to regard ourselves and what we see around us as special, and generally we need to be dragged kicking and screaming to the realisation that we’re normal and natural products of a universe that is much the same everywhere — and thus is strewn with stars like our Sun, with most of them being orbited by planets much like ours.

Similarly, when astronomers first realised that we are in a galaxy, they anthropocentrically assumed that there was only one galaxy. Again, it took a beating over the head with evidence to convince us that our galaxy is just one of many.”

Well, it’s not because things we thought were special turned out not to be that nothing is special. The jury is still out about how special Earth, or, for that matter, the Solar System, are. I have argued Earth is what it is, because of the Moon and the powerful nuclear fission reactor inside Earth. The special twist being that radioactive elements tend to gather close to the star, and not in the habitable zone. So Earth maybe, after all special.

At this point, Coel is on a roll: multiverses all over. Says he:

“ So, if we have a physical process that produces a Big Bang then likely we don’t get just one Big Bang, we get oodles of them. No physical process that we’re aware of happens once and only once, and any restriction to one occurrence only would be weird and unnatural. In the same way, any physical process that creates sand grains tends to create lots of them, not just one; and any physical process that creates snowflakes tends to create lots of them, not just one.

So, we have three choices: (1) regard the Big Bang as an unnatural, unphysical and unexplained event that had no cause or precursor; (2) regard the Big Bang as a natural and physical process, but add the rider that it happened only once, with absolutely no good reason for adding that rider other than human parochial insularity; or (3) regard the Big Bang as a natural and physical event, and conclude that, most likely, such events have occurred oodles of times.

Thus Big Bangs would be strewn across space just as galaxies, stars and planets are — the only difference being that the separation between Big Bangs is much greater, such that we can see only one of them within our observable horizon.

Well, I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that those opting for (3) are the ones being sensible and scientifically minded, and those going for (1) or (2) are not, and need to re-tune their intuition to make it less parochial.”

To make sure you get it, professor Coel repeats the argument in more detail, and I will quote him there, because as I say, the Multiverse partisans have exactly that argument in the back of their mind:

“So, let’s assume we have a Big Bang originating as a quantum-gravity fluctuation in a pre-existing “stuff”. That gives it a specific length scale and time scale, and presumably it would have, as all quantum fluctuations do, a particular probability of occurring. Lacking a theory of quantum gravity we can’t calculate that probability, but we can presume (on the evidence of our own Big Bang) that it is not zero.

Thus the number of Big Bangs would simply be a product of that probability times the number of opportunities to occur. The likelihood is that the pre-existing “stuff” was large compared to the quantum-gravity fluctuation, and thus, if there was one fluctuation, then there would have been multiple fluctuations across that space. Hence it would likely lead to multiple Big Bangs.

The only way that would not be the case is if the size of the pre-existing “stuff” had been small enough (in both space and time) that only one quantum fluctuation could have ever occurred. Boy, talk about fine tuning! There really is no good reason to suppose that.

Any such quantum fluctuation would start as a localised event at the Planck scale, and thus have a finite — and quite small — spatial extent. Its influence on other regions would spread outwards, but that rate of spreading would be limited by the finite speed of light. Given a finite amount of time, any product of such a fluctuation must then be finite in spatial extent.

Thus our expectation would be of a pre-existing space, in which there have occurred multiple Big Bangs, separated in space and time, and with each of these leading to a spatially finite (though perhaps very large) universe.

The pre-existing space might be supposed to be infinite (since we have no evidence or reason for there being any “edge” to it), but my argument depends only on it being significantly larger than the scale of the original quantum fluctuation.

One could, of course, counter that since the initial quantum fluctuation was a quantum-gravity event, and thus involved both space and time, then space and time themselves might have originated in that fluctuation, which might then be self-contained, and not originate out of any pre-existing “stuff”.[5] Then there might not have been any pre-existing “stuff” to argue about. But if quantum-gravity fluctuations are a process that can do that, then why would it happen only once? The natural supposition would be, again, that if that can happen once, then — given the probabilistic nature of physics — it would happen many times producing multiple different universes (though these might be self-contained and entirely causally disconnected from each other).”

Then, lest you don’t feel Multiversal enough, professor Coel rolls out the famous argument which brings the Multiverse out of Cosmic Inflation. Indeed, the universe-out of nothing Quantum fluctuation is basically the same as that of Cosmic Inflation. It’s the same general mindset: I fluctuate, therefore I am (that’s close to Paris motto, Fluctuat Nec Mergitur…). Coel:

“In order to explain various aspects of our observed universe, current cosmological models suggest that the initial quantum fluctuation led — early in the first second of its existence — to an inflationary episode. As a result the “bubble” of space that arose from the original quantum-fluctuation would have grown hugely, by a factor of perhaps 1030. Indeed, one can envisage some quantum-gravity fluctuations leading to inflationary episodes, but others not doing so.

The inflationary scenario also more or less requires a multiverse, and for a similar reason to that given above. One needs the region that will become our universe to drop out of the inflationary state into the “normal” state, doing so again by a quantum fluctuation. Such a quantum fluctuation will again be localised, and so can only have a spatially finite influence in a finite time.

Yet, the inflationary-state bubble continues to expand so rapidly, much more rapidly than the pocket of normal-state stuff within it, that its extent does not decrease, but only increases further. Therefore whatever process caused our universe to drop out of the inflationary state will cause other regions of that bubble to do the same, leading to multiple different “pocket universes” within the inflationary-state bubble.

Cosmologists are finding it difficult to construct any model that successfully transitions from the inflationary state to the normal state, that does not automatically produce multiple pocket universes.[6] Again, this follows from basic principles: the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, the spatial localisation of quantum fluctuations, and the finite speed at which influence can travel from one region to another.”

The driver of the entire Multiverse thinking is alleged Quantum Fluctuations in a realm we know f anything. Those who are obsessed by fluctuations may have the wrong obsession. And professor Coel to conclude with more fluctuations:

“The dropping out of the inflationary state is what produces all of the energy and matter that we now have in our universe, and so effectively that dropping-out event is what we “see” as our Big Bang. This process therefore produces what is effectively a multiverse of Big Bangs strewn across that inflationary bubble. Thus we have a multiverse of multiverses! Each of the (very large number of?) quantum-gravity fluctuations (that undergo an inflationary state) then itself produces a whole multiverse of pocket universes.

The point I am trying to emphasize is that any process that is at all along the lines of current known physics involves the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, and that means that more or less any conceivable process for creating one Big Bang is going to produce not just a single event, but almost inevitably a vast number of such events. You’d really have to try hard to fine-tune and rig the model to get only one Big Bang.

As with any other physical process, producing multiple Big Bangs is far more natural and in-line with known physics than trying to find a model that produces only one. Trying to find such a model — while totally lacking any good reason to do so — would be akin to looking for a process that could create one snowflake or one sand grain or one star or galaxy, but not more than one.”

Patrice Says: NO POINTS, AND THUS NO MULTIVERSE(s):

Did the universe expand from one point? Not necessarily. It could have been from a line, a plane, a volume, even something with a crazy topology. The Big Bang is the time zero limit of the FLRW metric. Then the spacing between every point in the universe becomes zero and the density goes to infinity.

Did the Universe expand from Quantum Gravity? Beats me, I don’t have a theory of Quantum Gravity.

What I know is that, expanding from what’s known of gravity, if the universe expanded from a “point”, that would be smaller than the Planck volume, thus the universe would be within a Black Hole. From what we know about those, no expansion.

Once we don’t have the universe expanding from a point, we cannot argue that it expanded from one point in some sort of “stuff”. If the universe is the “stuff” itself, and it’s everywhere, and expanding from everywhere, exit the argument about a “point”.

The argument about a “point” was that: why this particular point? Why not another “Quantum Fluctuation” from another “point” in the “stuff”. Why should our “point” be special? Is it not scientific to believe in the equality of points? Except points have measure zero in three dimensional space, and thus it’s more “scientific”, “mathematical” to suppose the universe expanded from a non-measure zero set, namely a volume (and it better be bigger than the Planck Volume).

So the argument that there should be many universes because there are many points and many Quantum (Gravity) fluctuations flies apart.

Remains the argument that we need Cosmic Inflation. Yes, but if the universe expands from all over, all over, there is only one such. Cosmic Inflation does not have to appear at all points generating baby universes, It becomes more like Dark Energy.

Speaking of which, why should we have two Cosmic Inflations when we already have one? Even my spell checker does not like the idea of two inflations. It does not like the “s”. Ah, yes, the existing Big Bang needs its own Inflation.

Yet if there is only one inflation, presto, no more standard Big Bang, But then what of Helium, Lithium, etc? How do we synthesize enough of those? Well maybe we would have much more time to synthesize them, inside stars… Especially super giant stars.

Another word about these Quantum Fluctuations. Are they the fundamental lesson of Quantum Physics (as the Multiversists implicitly claim)? No.

Why? There are several most fundamental lessons about Quantum Physics. Most prominent: the DYNAMICAL universe is made of waves. That fact, by itself implies NON-LOCALITY. It also implies neighborhoods, no points, are the fundamental concepts (one cannot localize a wave at a point). This is the origin of the “Quantum Fluctuations”.

So we just saw that “Quantum Fluctuations” may not be the most fundamental concept. Fundamental, yes, but not most fundamental. When debating fundamentals with the Devil, you better bring exquisite logic, and a Non-Local spoon, otherwise you will be Quantum fluctuated out.

Patrice Ayme’

No Multiverse, No Teleportation. Yet Quantum Consciousness?

There is a flaw, at the very root of the definition of the Multiverse:

Multiverse partisans believe anything, any physics, is possible. However if such is the case, among those possibilities, the universe is one of them. But then, if the Universe exists, there is just one universe, and the Multiverse can’t be!

Logic is a terrifying thing for those who have too little…

[The preceding is actually the latest variant, thanks to yours truly, of the 25 centuries old Cretan Paradox.]

We are led by some physicist who, not only have little knowledge, and little imagination, but they don’t have much logic, either! We look up to physics, because we look up to intellectual, or, more precisely, logical, scientific leadership. Prominent statements about the “Multiverse” or “Teleportation”, though, go the other way.

“Teleportation” Is About States, Not Particles. Nothing Simplistic!

In one of the world’s major science museum, instruction is conducted for children between the age of 4 and 94 years old. Somewhere above the mastodonts and triceratops’ fossils is an special exhibition of the science of science-fiction.

An exhibit was about “teleportation”. There I was informed that particles had been successfully “teletransported” by “scientists” already.

I was so pleased to be informed of this that I teletransported all those who believe such inanities to a mental asylum.

They make a drastic mistake: confusing “particle” and “state”.

Particles cannot be “teletransported”. To pretend otherwise is a complete affabulation. What can be “teletransported” are Quantum States.

http://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-have-quantum-teleported-a-particle-of-light-across-25-kilometreshttp://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-have-quantum-teleported-a-particle-of-light-across-25-kilometres

The staff of Sciencealerts, 22 September, 2014, used the following banner: “Physicists have quantum teleported a particle of light across 25 kilometres.”

No, they did not. They teleported the state of a third photon.

This sort of confusion goes to the core of the mental retardation in which physics has spent most of the Twentieth Century. I pointed out that it originated with Einstein. Einstein made the following statement, which I view as an extreme error:

“Energy, during the propagation of a ray of light, is not continuously distributed over steadily increasing spaces, but it consists of a finite number of energy quanta LOCALIZED AT POINTS IN SPACE, MOVING WITHOUT DIVIDING and capable of being absorbed or generated only as entities.”

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/einsteins-error-the-multiverse/

That opinion of Einstein  above,  “the propagation of a ray of light… consists of a finite number of energy quanta LOCALIZED AT POINTS IN SPACE, MOVING WITHOUT DIVIDING” is complete affabulation, a fantasy. Yes, I know, Einstein got the Nobel Prize in Physics for it, and, thus, by saying this, I do not just grab Einstein by the horns, but the entire physics establishment. As Martin Luther would say, though, I see no other way…

I affabulate, and fantasized too, most often. However, when I do, while searching for truth, I try to respect known, well-established facts. In 1905, Einstein could imagine things about photons the way he did. Why not? It was natural: from Lucretius to Newton, most thinkers believed in particles. Particles were supposed to be the ultimate atoms of matter (atom means, in Greek, what cannot be divided).

However, since then, facts have intervened. The “particle” hypothesis became untenable. Indeed, the particular effect, how,  the Quantum shows up, is only how the energy of fundamental processes is released. In complete conflict, how the fundamental process proceeds is all about waves.

Einstein himself, after talking extensively about this with the (physicist and) philosopher Karl Popper, came to write the “EPR” paper… what is now called TELEPORTATION.

Einstein called this teleportation of states a “spooky interaction at a distance“. In truth, it’s an obvious consequence that fundamental processes are computed with waves, and waves are, by definition, NON-LOCAL.

***

Quantum Computing: What’s the Difference, And How Conscious Is It?

Present computing is similar to computing with water canals, one primitive manipulation at a time. Quantum Computing will be about computing with the interferences waves bring.

For more on Quantum Waves:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/04/05/quantum-wave/

And there a quandary is presented: Quantum behavior has much in common with the attributes of consciousness. Thus a full computer may well behave unpredictably, and as if it had consciousness, but also, truly, be conscious. We wouild be not just facing Artificial Intelligence, but Artificial Consciousness.

Skynet may not just acquire control, but be sentient…

This, I do believe, is a real “danger”. Working on the Quantum Computer, is working on Artificial Consciousness. However, the proximal danger is that the aura of contagious stupidity has infected what passes for political leadership. To with European “leaders”, leading into the abyss, because the Greek leader has decided to submit the latest austerity measures to a referendum by the Greek People.

Does not the Greek Prime Minister know that the People does not rule? Demo-cracy = Demos Kratos, People Power. Not what we have. How come the Prime Minister of Greece does not know the basics of the corrupto-world we live in? Democracy is just a word polite people of wealth and taste use to mask plutocracy.

The Greeks want a referendum on whether they want to suffer some more? Unforgivable. So negotiations of the worthies with uppity Greece are interrupted. The CE chief, J-C Junkers is little more than a polyglot Mafioso, having managed the tax evasion of hundreds of billions of Euros of hundreds of companies, when he “led” Luxembourg. Now he can talk tough.

Insanity in physics has shown the way to insanity in politics and ethics. Inspired by the Schrodinger cat who is supposed to be both dead and alive, our great leaders thought they could get away with being all about money, and all about the people. If you don’t like this universe, go live in another.

(OK, maybe our great political leaders do not know enough physics to think this consciously; however the little critters who advise them, and write their discourses for them have themselves friends who feel they are very smart, and that physics says one can be all things to all people, at the same time. So the pernicious influence of mad physics go far, that way. And it has penetrated ethics, indeed.)

Even the Pope has noticed that supposedly refined economics, such as “cap and trade” (a European invention now used in California) were obviously inspired by the Devil. He condemned them. But, nowadays, like Schrodinger’s Cat, our great leaders imagine they can be the Devil and the Good Lord at the same time, in different places, and we will still embrace their feet religiously, our hearts frantic with unbounded admiration.

Time to cut the Gordian knot, with a very sharp sword. A sword cannot cut the universe in two (as the naïve Multiversists believe), but it can certainly cut the crap. And teletransport minds to a state closer to reality.

Patrice Ayme’

EINSTEIN’S ERROR: The Multiverse

In 1905, his so-called Wonder Year, Albert Einstein presented a theory of the photoelectric effect. The new idea came in just two lines. However I boldly claim that Einstein’s theory of the photoelectric effect, although gloriously correct, was also, below the Nobel-winning surface, crucially wrong. A photoelectric truth covering a grievous localization lie. It was Einstein’s Greatest Error. Quantum Field Theory implicitly contradicts Einstein, by replacing particles with fields, that is, delocalizing them.

I claim that Einstein talked too much. His intuition was not careful enough, and too tied up with old fashion particles. Quantum Mechanics, one of the inventors Einstein was, questioned the very nature of elementary particles. Einstein imposed, at the outset, a solution, which, I claim, was erroneous.

What Einstein ought to have said is that electromagnetic energy was absorbed in packets of energy hf (h was Planck’s Constant, f the frequency of the light). That explained immediately the photoelectric effect. It was just enough to explain the photoelectric effect.

My Intuition Is More Informed Than Yours

***

PHOTOELECTRIC EFFECT EXPLAINED SOLELY AS RECEPTION QUANTIZATION:

An electron receiving energy from light, receives a packet hf. If f is too small, the electron cannot be emitted: the electron needed some energy, say A, to escape the material. One needs hf > A.

Nor can an electron just pile up energy from light until the stored energy exceeded A. Why? Because energy is RECEIVED in such packets, and only these packets. It was hf, or nothing.

That explanation of the photoelectric effect was both necessary and SUFFICIENT. Such an explanation is exactly the symmetric statement of the one made by Planck in 1900.

(Planck did much more than that, he had to invent his constant, and it is astounding that he did not explain the photoelectric effect, as he had done 99% of the work).

Should Einstein have said what I said, he would have explained the photoelectric effect, instead of putting all of physics on an erroneous path.

***

EINSTEIN LOCALIZATION, AN ERRONEOUS HYPOTHESIS:

However, Einstein instead said something prophetic he had no reason to proffer.

Here is Einstein statement from 1905, translated from German:

“Energy, during the propagation of a ray of light, is not continuously distributed over steadily increasing spaces, but it consists of a finite number of energy quanta LOCALIZED AT POINTS IN SPACE, MOVING WITHOUT DIVIDING and capable of being absorbed or generated only as entities.”

[I emphasized what I view as the grievously erroneous part.]

With Planck’s E = hf, this is what gave Einstein the Nobel Prize in 1921. So not only Einstein got it wrong, but so did the Nobel committee.

(Planck objected strenuously, because he never meant for the Electro-Magnetic field to be quantized outside the blackbody cavity. I agree about quantization upon reception, as that explanation works. My objection is that Einstein had no proof of what he advanced about LOCALIZATION.)

Einstein claimed that light is made of “quanta localized at points in space, moving without dividing”. Thus, Einstein invented elementary particles. Einstein had no reason for of this fabrication, whatsoever, and did not need it, as I said.

***

THE POISONOUS WAVE-EIGENSTATE SALAD:

Fast forward thirty years. By then, thanks to the likes of Dirac (inventor of Quantum Electro Dynamics, who stumbled on Cartan’s Spinor Space and Antimatter) and Von Neumann (Functional Analysis maven), etc. the Quantum formalism had been sculpted like Mount Rushmore in the mountains of natural philosophy.

The formalism consisted in claiming that the elementary particles invented by Albert were vectors in a (Hilbert) space whose basis was made of the possible results of the experiment E.

The mathematics worked well.

However, IF Einstein’s initial invention was false, so was the picture of reality it conveyed.

And indeed, as we saw, Einstein had no reason to claim what he did: he violated Newton’s “Hypotheses Non Fingo” (“I do not FABRICATE hypotheses”… my translation).

Isaac Newton: …”I do not fabricate hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.”

***

DEMOLISHING THE MULTIVERSE ERROR:

Galileo, to expose his ideas more pedagogically, set-up a trialogue, between “Simplicius” and two others (one being Galileo himself).

I pursue my exposition of what those who believe in the Multiverse cannot dare to articulate, as it would expose their utter confusion, and more:

Simplicius: So you say that Einstein fabricated localized Quanta, out of his fertile imagination, and that axiom wrecked all of physics?

Patrice Ayme: Exactly. I would prefer to call it not fertile, but obsolete, imagination. After Einstein had fabricated his seemingly innocuous hypothesis, the localized elementary particle, the next step was to identify it with the wave function.

Simplicius: Do you not insist that the world is mostly made of Quantum Waves?

PA: Yes but “Wave Functions” are just fist order approximations of “Quantum Waves”. “Wave Functions” cannot be real, they are mathematical artefacts.

Simplicius: How come?

PA: Wave functions are made of end states, the so-called eigenvectors, the end products of experiments. That makes wave functions intrinsically teleological, made up of the future. You may as well identify human beings to their tombstones, that’s how they end up.

Simplicius: What is the connection with the Multiverse?

PA: Wave functions are intrinsically multiversal, they are made by adding different outcomes, as if they all happened. But only one can ever happen, in the end. However, when in flight, we are been told that (Einstein’s) localized particle is made of as many pieces of universes as there are eigenstates.

Simplicius: So you conclude that Einstein’s localized quantum hypothesis plus the basic Quantum Formalism implies that the simplest elementary particle is made of pieces of different universes that will happen in the future?

PA: Exactly. Einstein, in conjunction with the Hilbert formalism, invented the Multiverse. This is what Everett observed, and, at the time, it made the inventors of Quantum Mechanics (minus Planck and Einstein) so uncomfortable that Everett was booted out of theoretical physics, an even his adviser Wheeler turned against him.

Simplicius: But did not Einstein demonstrate with the EPR thought experiment that “elements of reality” could not be localized?

PA: Exactly. With a little help from Karl Popper, maybe. Entanglement has been experimentally shown to not be localizable with the metric used in General Relativity. So light quanta themselves not only are not points, something that was obvious all along, sorry Einstein, but also, the speed of light is an emerging metric for the Universe.

It has been a conspiracy all along.

Simplicius: Conspiracy?

PA: Yes, there is a famous mistake in Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics. He insists that a photon interfere only with itself. That is demonstrably false (radio interference and independent lasers playing double slit). Dirac had to say that to NOT make the Quantum Waves themselves the main actors.

Simplicius: Why would physicists conspire to push false physics?

PA: Because, if they admit that their physics is false, and have nothing better to propose, they are losing status. (Whereas I improve mine by showing why they are wrong.)

Another point is that the “Multiverse” is suitably mysterious and absurd to impress common people. It is obviously the greatest miracle imaginable, so those who have penetrated this secrecy are very great men.

WHAT IS GOING ON?

We saw Einstein’s hypothesis of localization led to the Multiverse. As the Multiverse is unacceptable, so is the localization hypothesis.

But we already knew this in several ways (diffraction, 2-slit, and other non-local wave effects; plus EPR style experiments, let alone the QM formalism itself, which also predicts non-localization).

The intuition of the real sub-quantic theory depends, in part, on such facts.

Patrice Ayme’

P/S (2021); In one sentence: The multiverse theory comes from a nefarious cognitive interference between Einstein’s unproven theory of momentum-energy pointwise localism with the nonlocal nature of (quantum) dynamics.

Some Basics Of Natural Philosophy

NO MULTIVERSE, NO PLATONISM (Less Air Travel, Too):

Some people go around, and brandish the “Multiverse”. Of course, the “Multiverse” exists, in one’s brain. The brain, among other things, extends all over imagination. Out there, among the galaxies, in the real world, there is no reason to suppose there is a “Multiverse, whatsoever.

It is basically something to sell books with. Or, just as with evil minded religions, for some physicists to claim they are like gods and can believe in something really absurd, and grotesquely self-contradictory:

There is No Universe, But the Universe:

The Universe is all there is. By definition. By philosophical definition. Just by philosophical definition? Not so. Any logic is associated to a universe. If the “logic” is nature itself (“all of the logic”) the associated universe (in the Logic sense), is, well, the Universe.

If something some would want to call the “Multiverse”, whatever that would be, existed, it would be part of the Universe.

Galaxies Used To Be Called “Island Universes”. They Collide; This Is A Much Older Universe Than People Understand

***

Age Of The Universe? Really?

Befuddled physicists go around, telling us about the “First Three Minutes” (Weinberg; Electro-Weak Nobel laureate), or the “History Of Time” (Hawking; remarkable survivor-physicist in a wheelchair).

That rests on their perfect knowledge of how the universe evolved.

This, in turn, depends upon ignoring Dark Energy. Dark Energy shows up as an unpredicted acceleration of the expansion of the Universe.

The old theory of expansion of the Universe was established before Dark Energy was discovered.

So they think they know, but I know they don’t really know.

I don’t know if the Universe has an age. But it is aging, or, at least, let’s be more cautious, the Universe is changing.

***

How Both Physics And Mathematics Became Not Even Wrong:

Mathematics themselves have always been developed in particular directions, in light of what it was felt was needed to understand the physical world. That was certainly true with Buridan, and his students, who developed computational methods, and graphs, to handle what they wanted to do with inertia. That was true with calculus developed for all sorts of engineering and physics explanations.

And so on through the next three centuries. However, in the last three decades, what I personally viewed as extremely erroneous notions in physics became dominant.

Indeed, it had become that clear time was not “relative” (whatever that is supposed to mean). True, time was local, as per Relativity, but it was local in an absolute way. The absoluteness comes from Quantum Theory… And the absoluteness of curvature in cosmology (the focusing of light, by galaxies and galactic clusters is absolute, thus so is time, locally around such focusing objects!).

Efforts were launched towards was felt would be the mathematics of “superstrings” and “field theory”. That would have been wonderful, if the initial meta-axiom motivating the whole enterprise, that nature worked with strings, super, and field mathematics perched on field math, all the way down… had been, roughly, correct.

Mathematics is not “natural”. Or let’s say, not anymore “natural” than the human brain can get contrived. Mathematics is an adventure in what the geometry, the Quantum geometry, of neurology is capable of.

Mathematics is not unreasonably effective (as the famous physicist-mathematician Wigner put it).

Mathematics is reason, manipulated to be effective in a particular way. Correctly determining in advance what the way will be makes the difference between understanding nature, and failing to do so.

Math is just, roughly, neuronal geometry that “works” (“working” here meaning what the brain does, whatever it is, beyond just manipulating electric and chemical signals).

***

Do We Need To Tour Frantically With Jets? 

In other news, after the crash in France of a Lufthansa A320 plane, pundits will surely come, and claim aloud that air travel is the safest mode of travel.

Is it? It depends upon the method of measurement.

The way advertisers come up with the “air travel is the safest form of travel” statement is by dividing number of people killed by distance travelled.

However, another measure would be to divide the number of people killed by the number of travels they engaged in. This is a more significant measure to think about. And air travel looks much good that way: in just one day in Europe, more car travels happen than all the air travel for the entire world, in a year.

Not to say that air travel should be discouraged. It is not exactly like smoking, with no redeeming value, whatsoever. Families ought to be reunited. Getting to know other countries, encouraged. However one week tourism, far away, thanks to plane travel ought, in my opinion, to be discouraged.

Instead, the projections are that air travel will augment considerably in the next few decades.

Between Barcelona and Dusseldorf, one ought to be able to travel just as fast by rail (not all the high speed lines are built, nor will they be built, thanks to plutocratically imposed austerity, and subsidies to… air travel). Electric trains pollute much less, by more than an order of magnitude, and are much safer.

The global CO2 situation is that bad. Besides, look at that entire high school classroom of fifteen year old that went down with the plane… Just for a week in Barcelona?

Patrice Ayme’

Non-Conservation Of Energy & Multiverse Madness

Before unreason took over physics, one of the major principles was energy conservation. However, this was before. Now Sean Carroll, following other Multiversists (as I call them insolently) crucially depend upon nonconservation of energy.

Sean wrote an article, short and to the point: “Energy is not conserved.”

Well written, indeed. Carroll glibly asserts that “see, it was not so hard” (to throw away the most fundamental principle of physics, energy conservation).

Galactic Cluster Focuses Blue Galaxy Light

All the blue blotches are images of a far-away galaxy, which are focused by the cluster of galaxies in front. By the way, both Newtonian Theory and Einstein Theory predict the deviation of light by matter (more so with Einstein, as time slows down, allowing for more time to deviate).

The Universe we have, and can see, is so immense, we can’t comprehend it. There is no need to claim there are more of them than atoms. Except if there is a need to go completely crazy (something Putin and other plutocrats are all for!)

That energy is NOT conserved is essential to enable the creation of universes at the drop of a hat.

Nothing is really true anymore, even energy is not conserved. It costs nothing to create a universe.

Next we will all be led to believe plutocrats create not just jobs, but universes.

It’s probably related. Thanks, Sean.

So take two galaxies clusters, G1 and G2. Suppose they separate from the expansion of the universe. Sean Carroll, following the Multiverse fashion, asserts that it cost no energy to separate said galaxies.

Then he has a photon P travelling from G1 to G2, and he sees it has lost energy, so energy is not conserved. Multiversists repeat this argument ad nauseam.

In truth, what they stumbled upon is that the definition of mass-energy in the Theory of Gravitation is not clear. That’s all. The difficulty has been known for generations of mathematicians (behind closed doors). However, it does not mean that physics reduces to dust.

It just means one has to go back to Riemann’s intuition of the 1860s, and reconsider it carefully. Riemann tried to reduce force to geodesic separation. I would suggest to reduce energy to a function related to geodesics density. As geodesics separate, energy is put in the system. With this notion, the fact that it costs nothing to create a universe disappear. https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/quantum-trumps-spacetime/

Physicists can’t reduce the universe just to physics, physics has to reduce to mathematics, too, at least in part.

One may wonder what the Multiversists reduce physics to. Apparently, having done away with energy conservation, a fundamental axiom, they replace it by universe creation. They reduce all of physics to the creation of universes.

Dark Energy, the accelerated expansion of the universe, questions the entire scheme of present day cosmology, let alone physics. Starting the conversation (logos) by throwing out the most sacred principle of physics (energy conservation), and replacing it with instant karma is as glib as glib gets.

Instant karma? Thanks to the alleged non-conservation of energy, the creation of trillions of universes per second per cubic meter is eminently reasonable.

Does that makes Middle –Age theology sitting angels on pinheads a plausible outcome? This is reductio ad absurdum, if I ever saw it.

Quantum Field Theorists may smirk, and accuse me of not knowing that energy is not conserved in QFT

The time-energy uncertainty relation seems indeed to allow for large energy excursions, if they happened in a short time. But that’s related to “virtual particles”, which admittedly are neither virtual, nor particles… Just resting on that would allow a universe in a length of time so short it has no meaning (because it has no clock).

Agreed, physics is hard. Agreed, today’s “Standard Model” of High Energy Physics explains only 4% of the universe.

But that’s no excuse to go crazy, and see gazillion universes on every pinhead.

That only help the crazies.

Crazy like foxes, crazy like plutocrats.

Patrice Ayme

Is Philosophy The New Science?

A provocative title, assuredly, while science is everywhere, and philosophy, in appearance, some will say, nowhere. But actually our world owes even more to philosophy than to science: after all, according to my convoluted theories, the rise of Europe is greatly due to the push of the Franks against slavery, and towards less sexism. (It will not escape the cognoscenti that the great dynasty of the Tang in China, in the same period, was marked by powerful empresses.)

Science and philosophy are basically methods at both extremities of the same spectrum.

The age of science is upon us, thus the age of philosophy.

Science is about what is true. Philosophy is about what could be true.

Science is about realistic circumstances, philosophy is about imagining them. Science is about knowing, philosophy about guessing.

Neither goes without the other, since there have been baboons, and they think.

Homotherium Kept Yesteryear’s Thinkers Honest

All animals with advanced brains have to be scientific enough to catch dinner, have sex, play hard to get, and they have to be a bit philosophical. However both science and philosophy took gigantic dimensions, once the genus Homo made culture into, well, a science.

With its intricate brains, Homo Sapiens could create, in said brains, entire world of ideas, neurological structures constructed by experiences, the world of tangibles, the world of truth, science. But it could also instruct, from the same, more free form structures, the world of imagination, where philosophy feeds at the trough.

In particular, 10,000 religions blossomed, and many a virgin perished in their names.

So what now?

Some say philosophy is dying. What they mean, is that they are dead.

This is the age of science, the age of truth. Much is known, but it’s nothing relative to what is coming. What is coming is automatic science. It’s not yet here, but some computer scientists are working on machines to prove theorems, automatically.

That does not mean mathematics would become meaningless, impotent, just the opposite. Mathematicians will devote themselves to the imagination, in other words, to the philosophy. Machines will see if it (mathematical philosophy) works.

In the myth of the singularity, dear to some “futurists”, science starts to progress so fast, that all becomes a blur. We are not yet there: electronic chips’ speed has stalled (from overheating), and multi-core programming is hard. However, even with slower progress, all mundane intellectuals tasks will fall to machines pretty soon.

And all over the world of inquiry, so it will be. Even in law, machines (computers) will be able to fill in all the details, check, in advance what are the consequences of imaginable laws.

All over, the imagination will be the specific human impulse. In other words, philosophy.

If one considers prehistoric man, one is considering a scientist: knowing what was true allowed survival. Being seriously wrong did not mean one’s “paper” would be rejected by a prestigious journal, but that one would be torn apart by a Homotherium pack.

There was little time and inclination for wild guesswork about the nature of the universe. Now is just the opposite: Homotherium has got extinct 10,000 years ago, with a whole panoply of terrible predators. Machines, increasingly, bring food and medicines.

We have all the time in the world to go on a rampage of guesswork.

This is already happening in physics: Strings, Superstrings, Supersymmetry, and their ilk are theories that were launched on the thinnest philosophical fumes.

For example, symmetries allowed to guess the existence of a few particles. So why not suppose that there is a symmetry (whatever that means) means the two main types of particles, Fermions and Bosons? That would remove an “infinity” or two which plagues the computations. Thus the idea of “Supersymmetry’.

Here is another example of stealth, wild philosophizing in physics, the idea of “A Universe For Nothing”.

(That’s described in the eponymous book of a professional salesman, Lawrence Krauss.) Wild guessing, if there ever was any. It makes Middle Age theologians, with their angels on pinheads, sound boring.

The Universe-for-nothing folks have prestigious chairs in the most prestigious universities in the world, and got multi-million dollars prizes (from plutocrats, of course). They use, in their despair, a completely idiotic argument about potential energy. Or, let’s say, a philosophical argument. That allows them to pretend it should cost nothing, energy-wise, to create a universe. Or a zillions of them per nanometer, actually, in every instant of time.

15,000 years ago, thinkers that crazy, arguing that Homotherium was created from nothing, would have been promptly swallowed by a pack of the saber tooth, social felids.

Science used to keep us alive, now we can afford to live by ridiculous philosophies. All the more reason, as the Seventh Extinction, the one of the Anthropocene, looms, to create some which are as serious as our ancestors needed to be.

And to those who thought our ancestors were not brainy: it seems their brains, all things equal, were 10% larger. Fortunately, things are going to get very serious, very soon. And while machines will do most of the science, our thinking, and guessing, will have to be wilder and deeper, than ever.

Philosophy is the new science.

Patrice Ayme’

Universe: Not Just Mathematical

Some claim the “Universe is mathematical”. Their logic is flawed. I show why.

Max Tegmark, a MIT physics professor, wrote “Our Mathematical Universe”. I present here an abstract I concocted of an interview he just gave to La Recherche. Followed by my own incisive comments. However absurd Tegmark may sound, I changed nothing to the substance of what he said:

La Recherche (France; Special Issue on Reality, July-August 2014): Max, you said “Reality is only mathematical”. What do you mean?

Tegmark: The idea that the universe is a mathematical object is very old. It goes all the way back to Euclid and other Greek scientists. Everywhere around us, atoms, particles are all defined by numbers. Spacetime has only mathematical properties.

La Recherche: Everything is math, according to you?

Formulation Before Revelation of Mathematization

Tegmark: Think about your best friend. Her great smile, her sense of humor. All this can be described by equations. Mathematics explain why tomatoes are red and bananas yellow. Brout, Englert, Higgs predicted a boson giving mass to all other particles. Its discovery in 2012 at CERN in Geneva led to the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics!

Tyranosopher [unamused]: Notice, Max Tegmark, that the “Nobel” thoroughly excites you. You brandish it, as if it were a deep reality about the universe. But, in truth, the Nobel is strictly nothing for the universe. It’s just a banana offered by a few self-interested apes to other self-fascinated apes. The Nobel has more to do with the nature of apish society, rather than that of the universe. In other words, we ask you about the nature of the universe, and you answer with the Authority Principle among Hominidae. You may as well quote the Qur’an.

Tegmark [unphazed]: There are an enormous number of things that equations do not explain. Consciousness, for example. But I think we will make it. We are just limited by our imagination and our creativity.

La Recherche: According to you, there is no reason that part of the world escape mathematics?

Max Tegmark: None whatsoever. All properties are mathematical! We potentially can understand everything!

La Recherche: As a Platonic mathematician, you consider mathematical concepts are independent of all and any conscious act?

MT: I am an extreme Platonist, as I think that not only mathematical structures are real, but they are all what reality is.

Relativity and Quantum Physics confirmed that reality is always very different from what one believes. Very strange and very different from our intuition. Schrodinger’s equation, the fundamental equation of Quantum Mechanics, shows that a particle can be in several places at the same time. Thus one does not try to describe the motion of this particle, but the probability of its presence in such and such a place.

But, a century later, physicists are still in deep disagreement about what it all means. I think this interpretation keeps dividing people, because they refuse to admit what goes against their intuition.

Tyranosopher: Notice, Max Tegmark, that you presented as a fact (“a particle can be in several places at the same time”) something you admit later is only an “interpretation”. That’s dishonest: an “interpretation” is not a “fact”.

Tegmark [livid]: The strength of mathematics comes from the fact that they have no inhibition. Strangeness does not stop them.

Tyranosopher: Indeed, that’s why, as a trained mathematician, I am very insolent.

La Recherche: Max Tegmark, is it your mathematical approach that makes you defend another controversial idea, that of multiple universes?

Max Tegmark: I really believe that human beings never think big enough. We underestimate our capability to understand the world through mathematics, but also our capacity to apprehend its dimensions. To understand that we live on a planet with a diameter of a bit more than 12,000 kilometers was a first, enormous, step. That this planet is infinitesimal in this galaxy, itself one out of billions, was another enormous step. The idea of multiverses is more of the same. We discover again, and more, that what we understand is only a speck of something much larger. That much larger thing is the Multiverses, of types I, II, III, and IV.

Tyranosopher: La Recherche’s Interview then proceeds further, but let me unleash a fundamental critique here.

I am a deadly enemy of the Multiverse, as I believe that it rests on an ERROR of interpretation of Quantum Physics (the one Tegmark presented as a fact above, before admitting that it was, well, only an interpretation). The fact that it is another desperate scaffolding erected to save the Big bang theory does not make it better.

Now for the notion that the universe being full of math. This is understood to mean that the universe is full of equations. Equations were invented in the Sixteenth Century. Many, if not most, equate mathematics with the art of equating.

What’s an equation? It’s something that says that two things independently defined, one on the left side of the equal sign, the other on the right side, are equal. Great. What could be simpler: what is different is actually the same!

Notice this, though: before you can equate, you must define what you are equating. On both sides.

An equation equates concepts independently defined. Ultimately, definitions are not mathematical (see on the Nature of Mathematics, to follow soon). At best, definition is metamathematical. Our metamathematical universe? End of Mr. Tegmark’s naivety.

When we get down to it, it’s more our philosophical universe, before it’s our mathematical universe: no definitions, no equations.

How can a physicist make such a gross logical mistake? Are they not supposed to be smart? (OK, it’s smart to sell lots of books).

What allows to make that logical mistake? Education, or lack thereof. Many a mathematician will make the same mistake too. The problem is that neither conventional mathematicians, nor, a fortiori, physicists, are trained logicians. They just play some in the media.

Who needs a multiverse? It seems the universe of science is already too large for many physicists to understand.

Patrice Ayme’

MULTIVERSE IDIOCY DISSECTED

Physicist Sean Carroll, “explaining why the many-worlds approach is not completely insane“, says: “If the particle can be in a superposition of two states, then so can the apparatus.”

This fundamental error, that everything is a superposition of states, is the essence of the idiocy of the Many World and Multiverse error.

Why Mr. Physicist Carroll? Why is it that, for you, if something is a superposition of two possibilities, then so can be something else? Where is the logic in that? There is none whatsoever. Let me show you why. Why that’s illogical.

Maybe, sometimes, because something can be cut in two, say a fish, another fish can be cut in two, or a million fishes can be cut in two, indeed.

The fact that fishes can be cut in two, because one fish can be cut in two, does not imply that everything else can be cut in two.

For example, the fact that one can cut fishes in two does not imply that the sea can be cut in two. Such is the Multiverse error, a very fishy argument.

Quantum Dot: Fuzzy, Not Discrete!

Transmission Electron Microscope Image of a single InAsP/InP Quantum dot (left; “In” is for Indium); such dots exhibit discrete electronic energy levels (Right Top), and this allows, upon spatial and spectral filtering, the generation of single photons on demand (Right bottom).

That some process can result ultimately in two states, does not mean that the sea, or anything else, will be a “superposition of two states”.

When we mention “the particle” (whatever that is) and the apparatus (whatever that is) we are talking here about things of completely different natures, obviously.

What’s the difference? Or differences?

Obviously, “the particle” is being measured. And it’s measured by “the apparatus”.

One is “Quantum”, “the particle”. The other is classical, the “apparatus”.

What’s the most basic difference between “Quantum” and “Classical”? “Quantum” is dominated by DISCRETE states. “DISCRETE” here is in the strict mathematical sense (in bijection with a subset of the natural numbers, N).

Discreteness of light emission is how Planck explained the Blackbody Radiation and resolved the Ultra Violet Catastrophe.(1900 CE)

Discreteness of light reception is how Einstein explained the Photoelectric effect. (1905 CE.)

Discreteness of electronic orbitals is Bohr explained the structure of atoms. (1912 CE.)

Discreteness of non-self-interfering-to-destruction waves is how De Broglie explained all the subjacent discreteness, uncertainty, interference and basic dynamics. (1923.)

Classical mechanics is NOT discrete. We do not understand why. It’s a major mystery.

But the passage from Quantum to Classical has been studied experimentally in simple, particular (namely made of PARTICLES) systems.

Let’s go back to Sean’s statement:

“If the particle can be in a superposition of two states, then so can the apparatus.”

I just said that “Quantum” is characterized, as its name indicates, by discreteness, a superposition of states.

In other words, in Sean’s view the foundation of the Many World Interpretation/Multiverse theory is that Quantum = Classical.

Yet, the very concept of “Science” comes from the ability of scindere, to cut in two, to make distinctions.

By ignoring the most basic distinction, that between Quantum and Classical, the Many Worlds/Multiverse theory reveals itself to not be science.

Yet, it’s even worse than that. The Multiverse error is reminiscent of the blind alley of the Epicycle theory of Ptolemy and company, 2,000 years ago.

Patrice Ayme’

Notes: 1) The error was inaugurated by Everret, a student of Wheeler, 1963 CE. At the time it was viewed as horrendous (probably for the reasons above, but they were left unsaid; the preceding is my reasoning, entirely). Everret was driven out of research physics (although there were lots of jobs at the time).

2) Bohr and his followers had got the ball rolling, by murky attacks against reality itself. It was debatable at the time, as some then-not-discovered particles (say neutrinos) led to apparent violation of energy-momentum conservation.

3) The philosopher Heidegger, maybe inspired by some of the less wise, contemporaneous statements of Bohr and company, insisted that the distinction between “subject” and “object” be eradicated. Unsurprisingly, he soon became a major figure of Nazism, where he was able to apply himself to further lack of distinction.