How else to explain that almost a century after the most successful modern physics theory has been coined leading experts in the field can still not agree on how to interpret it?
In accordance with this main confusion, the view on the role of the observer is also all over the map:
The majority settles on a statement that no matter how I try to parse it, doesn’t make any sense to me: If our formalism describes nature correctly, and the observer plays a fundamental role in the latter, how is it supposed to not occupy a distinguished physical role? The cognitive dissonance to take this stance is dizzying. At least the quantum hippie choice of option (d) has some internal consistency.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that with regard to quantum computing these experts are as ignorant as the public at large and completely ignore that D-Wave is already shipping a quantum computer (if the phrasing was about a universal quantum computer these results would have been easier to tolerate). Invited to opine on the availability of the first working and useful quantum computer this was the verdict:
The paper contains another graph that could almost parse as a work of art, it visualizes the medium to strong correlation between the survey answers. To me it is the perfect illustration for the current State of Physics with regards to the interpretation of quantum mechanics:
It is a mess.
Given this state of affairs it’s small wonder that one of my heros, Carver Mead, recently described the QM revolution that started in the early last century as an aborted one. It is indeed time to kick-start it again.
It is past time to come clean. I have an addiction problem. It is said that the best way to confront this is to admit it: No matter how hard I try, I cannot stop paying attention to fringe science.
Of course I could blame early childhood experiences. Back when I was a teen, about three decades ago, the free energy crowd was already quite active, “Tachyon energy” was then their favorite pseudo science to justify how their fantastic contraptions could work. One of the free energy bulletins that I read credited an electrical engineer who just happened to be a very distant relative of mine. So I managed to get in touch with him. He was indeed engaging in some far-fetched research, but it had nothing to do with free energy, and he had never heard of the people who misrepresented him (at the time, he was researching if common radar microwave radiation played any role in the forest die-off that was widely attributed to acid rain, and to that end built some strange test machinery).
This is a pattern that I’ve seen repeated many times since then. The approach generally seems to follow these steps:
Find some far fetched fringe research.
Claim some tremendous break-through and purport that just a little bit of additional research will result in a fantastic product.
Based on this, collect investment money and then retire early after the R&D effort unfortunately doesn’t work out.
The latest fringe science to receive this treatment is the text book example for pathological science, cold fusion. It has since been rebranded LENR for Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (it also goes by some other acronyms, but this seems to be the most common one).
One story that fits this pattern perfectly is that of the marvellous E-Cat (short for Energy Catalyzer). It sprang on the scene about two years ago with a tantalizing, if not independently supervised, demonstration that was convincing enough to bamboozle two Swedish physics profs into proclaiming that no chemical energy source could have the necessary energy density to produce the observed heat (conversion of water to steam). Over time this generated some mainstream news stories, and a bunch of blogs and forums sprung up to follow this story. One such blog followed an interesting trajectory: Paul Story, the maintainer of ecatnews.com, started out quite optimistic on this device, even banned some critical voices from the comment section of his blog. But then he was approached by the Australian billionaire Dick Smith who offered a prize of $1 million to anyone who could prove a usable 1KW LENR device. Nobody came forward to claim the money, although several commercial entities claimed to have just such prototypes. But this changed the tone at ecatnews.com and made it one of the few uncensored places where adherents and sceptics of this field could discuss (sometimes raucously) without the fear of being censored.
But Paul closed shop after he came to the conclusion that the E-Cat is just a scam. And this is where my addiction problem comes in. His blog was where I got my daily LENR dose, and the other blogs that still cover this story are by far less open and critical to be an adequate substitute. So in order to manage my addiction I have created a sub-blog, called Wavewatching Fringe Edition. This new addition is by no means supposed to take away the focus of this main blog, but rather help to manage my fringe science problem, and possibly serve as a resource to warn people to double check before investing in fringe science projects.
Be warned though, fringe science is addictive, it offers stories taller and more imaginative than any soap opera. If you want to stay clean, stay clear of the fringe.
Update
After losing a FB “Like” I feel like clarifying what I classify as “fringe science”. To have an objective criteria I lump everything into this category that doesn’t flow from efforts published in reputable peer reviewed journals (creating new journals in order to get published doesn’t qualify). Since everything performed by humans is far from infallible, peer review can miss interesting things, but the signal to noise ratio in the fringe category will be much higher.
Similar as with my “Lost Papers” section I will try to focus on aspects that maybe shouldn’t be overlooked. But there is also the additional aspect that I focused on above. Old Hilbert papers make a very bad basis to solicite investments funds, on the other hand many of the hotter fringe science topics virtually spawn their own industries (that usually go nowhere). If somebody researches these topics because they’ve been approached for investment funds then I hope the fringe section will paint a critical and realistic picture.
Of course it’ll be great if something as controversial as LENR could get to the point were repeatable, scalable experiments with a proper theoretical under-pinning brings it back to physics’ forefront. Some LENR proponents feverishly believe that this is already the case. Obviously I disagree, but I am not entirely ruling out that it could happen.
The curious fact that matter can exhibit wave-like properties (or should this rather be waves acting like particles?) is now referred to as the wave particle duality. In old times it was often believed that there was some magic in giving something a name, and that it will take some of the christened’s power. Here is to hoping that there may be some truth to this, as this obvious incompatibility has claimed at least one prominent life.
It was Einstein who first made this two-faced character of matter explicit when publishing on the photo electric effect, assigning particle-like characteristics to light that up to this point was firmly understood to be an electromagnetic wave phenomenon.
But just like the question of the true nature of reality, the source of this dychotomy is almost as old as science itself, and arguably already inherent in the very idea of atomism as the other extrem of an all encompassing holism. The latter is often regarded as the philosophical consequence of Schroedinger’s wave mechanics, since a wave phenomenon has no sharp and clear boundaries, and in this sense is often presented as connecting the entirety of the material world. Taken to the extreme, this holistic view finds its perfect expression in Everett’s universal wavefunction (an interpretation happily embraced by Quantum Hippies of all ages) which gave rise to the now quite popular many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
While atomism proved to be extremely fruitful in the development of physics, it was never popular with religious authorities. You can find echoes of this to this day if you look up this term at the Catholic Encyclopaedia:
Scholastic philosophy finds nothing in the scientific theory of atomism which it cannot harmonize with its principles, though it must reject the mechanical explanation, often proposed in the name of science, …
Atomism is incompatible with Judeo-Christian principles because atomism views matter as independent of God, …
Religion of course really doesn’t have a choice in the matter as it can hardly maintain doctrine without some holistic principle. It is no coincidence that physics only progressed after the cultural revolution of the Renaissance loosened the church’s dominance over the sheeple’s minds. But history never moves in a straight line. For instance, with Romanticism the pendulum swung back with a vengeance. It was at the height of this period that Ludwig Boltzmann achieved the greatest scientific breakthrough of atomism when developing statistical mechanics as the proper foundation of thermodynamics. It was not received well. With James Clerk Maxwell having seemingly established a holistic ether that explained all radiation as a wave phenomenon, atomism had thoroughly fallen out of favour. Boltzmann vigorously defended his work and was no stranger to polemic exchanges to make his point, yet he was beset by clinical depression and feared in the end that his life’s work was for naught. He committed suicide while on a summer retreat that was supposed to help his ailing health.
He must have missed the significance of Einstein’s publication on Brownian Motion just a year early. It is the least famous of his Annus Mirabelis papers, but it lay the foundation for experimentalists to once and for all settle the debate in Boltzmann’s favor, just a few years after his tragic death.
Thermodynamics made no sense to me before I learned statistical mechanics, and it is befitting that his most elegant equation for the entropy of a system graces the memorial at his grave site (the k denoting the Boltzmann constant).
There is more than one path to classical mechanics.
So much to do, so little time. My own lost paper work (i.e. the translation of some of Hilbert’s old papers that are not available in English) is commencing at a snail’s pace, but at Kingsley Jones’ blog we can learn about some papers that were truly lost and misplaced and that he only recovered because throughout all the moves and ups and downs of life, his parents have been hanging on to copies of the unpublished pre-prints. Kingsley’s post affected me on a deeper level than the usual blog fare, because this is such a parent thing to do. Having (young) kids myself, I know exactly the emotional tug to never throw away anything they produce, even if they have seemingly moved on and abandoned it. On the other hand, the recollection of how he found these papers when going through his parent’s belongings after they passed away, brings into sharp relief the fact that I have already begun this process for my father, who has Alzheimer’s. So many of his things (such as his piano sheet music) are now just stark reminders of all the things he can no longer do.
On a more upbeat note: The content of these fortuitously recovered papers is quite remarkable. They expand on a formalism that Steven Weinberg developed, one that essentially allows you to continuously deform quantum mechanics, making it ever less quantum. In the limit, you end up with a wave equation that is equivalent to the Hamiltonian extremal principal–i.e. you recover classical mechanics and have a “Schrödinger equation” that always fully satisfies the Ehrenfest Theorem. In this sense, this mechanism is another route to Hamilton mechanics. The anecdote of Weinberg’s reaction when he learned about this news is priceless.
Ehrenfest’s Theorem, in a manner, is supposed to be common sense mathematically formulated: QM expectation values of a system should obey classical mechanics in the classical limit. Within the normal QM frameworks this usually works, but the problem is that sometimes it does not, as every QM textbook will point out (e.g. these lecture notes). Ironically, at the time of writing, the Wikipedia entry on the Ehrenfest Theorem does not contain this key fact, which makes it kind of missing the point (just another example that one cannot blindly trust Wikipedia content). The above linked lecture notes illustrate this with a simple harmonic oscillator example and make this observation:
“…. according to Ehrenfest’s theorem, the expectation values of position for this cubic potential will only agree with the classical behaviour insofar as the dispersion in position is negligible (for all time) in the chosen state.”
So in a sense, this is what this “classic Schrödinger equation” accomplishes: a wave equation that always produces this necessary constraint in the dispersion. Another way to think about this is by invoking the analogy between Feynman’s path integral and the classical extremal principle. Essentially, as the parameter lambda shrinks for Kingsley’s generalized Schrödinger equation, the paths will be forced ever closer to the classically allowed extremal trajectory.
A succinct summation of the key math behind these papers can be currently found in Wikipedia, but you had better hurry, as the article is marked for deletion by editors following rather mechanistic notability criteria, by simply counting how many times the underlying papers were cited.
Unfortunately, the sheer number of citations is not a reliable measure with which to judge quality. A good example of this is the Quantum Discord research that is quite en vogue these days. It has recently been taken to task on R.R. Tucci’s blog. Ironically, amongst many other aspects, it seem to me that Kingsley’s approach may be rather promising to better understand decoherence, and possibly even put some substance to the Quantum Discord metric.
The majority settles on a statement that no matter how I try to parse it, doesn’t make any sense to me: If our formalism describes nature correctly, and the observer plays a fundamental role in the latter, how is it supposed to not occupy a distinguished physical role? The cognitive dissonance to take this stance is dizzying. At least the quantum hippie choice of option (d) has some internal consistency.
