“Post-empirical science”

The informed reader will know that the title represents an oxymoron. Without its empirical character science would not be science. It is very much what defines the cultural activity that we call “science” to be what it is.

Why then this glaring contradictory notion? It has popped up in the literature related to a recent “publicity stunt” where a simulation of a wormhole in a toy model was blown out of all proportions by being deemed to have created an actual wormhole. The simulation was done on a puny quantum computer incorporating merely 9 qubits.

Although this story has been hyped by various sources (and I am not going to give any links because I don’t want to mislead more people), many people have strongly criticized the story, including John Horgan, Scott Aaronson, Ethan Siegel, and Peter Woit. I can go on to try and clarify, but these posts are doing a much better job than I can.

Of course it is nonsense. A simulation is a numerical calculation of the physical process under study. It is not the real thing. And it does not matter whether the simulation is done with a classical digital computer or with a quantum computer. It is still just a simulation. Moreover, the amount of information that one can extract from 9 qubits is 9 bits, which is barely enough to specify one single ASCII character in a text document. So, no wormholes were created.

Perhaps the result they obtained from their simulation agreed well with what they expected to see, but that does not mean that it qualifies as being an experiment. Simulations and experiments are different things. Usually simulations are used when the direct calculations are too difficult. However, there is almost no limit on what one can simulate. It does not have to be something that can actually exist. If I have a set of equations that describe some weird imagined process that cannot exist in our universe, I can still program those equations into a computer and simulate it. For this reason, the results of a simulation can never take the place of an actual experiment.

What does this have to do with the notion of post-empirical stuff? Well, the problem lies in fundamental physics where it becomes progressively more difficult to perform experiments to learn about how things work. As a result, people are trying to motive that we start to learn about these things without having to do the experiments. That would have been great if it could work. Unfortunately, it has been tried before and found not to work. That was what the philosophers did before the advent of the scientific method. The nonsense they came up with still bounces around in the cultures of the world.

No! the day we cannot perform experiments to learn how this universe works is the day we stop learning more about our universe. A lot of people may go on coming up with stuff, but for sure, that stuff is worth nothing if it cannot be shown to work that way in our universe.

Unfortunately, there is already a lot of this going on, as this hyped wormhole nonsense demonstrates. It is related to several such non-scientific ideas that people work on and call physics, even though they don’t have much or any hope ever to show that it actually works that way through a scientific process.

The annoying thing is that there are prominent people in the physics community that are driving the hype. They’ve been doing this with other similar stories. Apparently, the reason for this hype is to induce funding agencies to give them more funding. Well, I think that if funding agencies can be led by their noses so easily, then the situation is more hopeless than I thought. These prominent people are not prominent for having done any solid scientific work. There are also other ways to become prominent. Well, I’ve ranted enough about people being prominent for the wrong reasons and don’t want to do it again.

Morality in a changing world

Current developments in the world makes one concerned about whether humanity or civilization will survive for much longer. If you are a person that is concerned about more than just yourself and those dear to you, then you would want to do something to improve the situation. (Perhaps you disagree that the current situation is anything to be concerned about. That is a debate for another day.)

An obvious aspect of the current situation that is threatening humanity is the way people behave. To improve matters, one would need to change people’s behavior. That begs the question: “what is considered good behavior?”, which brings in the notion of morality.

Sometimes one gets the impression that morality is consider to be an old out-of-date notion. However, if our survival depends on how people behave, then morality is definitely not an outdated notion. Nevertheless, morality itself changes with time and different cultures view it differently. So how can we argue that morality would have anything to do with the survival of humanity if it is so variable?

The purpose of this post is to explain that although it is variable in the ways stated above, morality has structure that ensures the survival of humanity. To support this explanation, I use a source which has dealt with morality authoritatively: the Bible. I realize that there are many people that do not consider the Bible as an authoritative source. For those people, I ask that you do not judge on the basis of the origin, but on the statements themselves, their intrinsic value and their implied consequences.

In the Bible, it is stated that the command to love your neighbor as yourself, represents the complete fulfillment of the law. In other words, this simple principle forms the foundation of all morality. So, although morality may vary from culture to culture, unless such moralities are founded on this principle, they are basically flawed.

That still leaves much that can change within the different moralities. Which one would be the correct one? That is the wrong question. A better way to pose a question would be to ask: how should we view the different moralities?

Here I want to use two more statements from the Bible: The one is “For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” The other is “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” What is the common theme here? It means that moralities are based on how people define them. Each person should therefore live according to the morality within the context of that person’s culture. In other words, the morality that a person should adhere to is the morality as defined by the culture of that person.

The Bible does not say much about the concept of a culture and how we should view culture, at least not explicitly. But it does so by implication. If God created humanity, then obviously He also created culture and then one can conclude that culture was created with a definite purpose in mind. It is the mechanism that replaces the survival-of-the-fittest principle, valid for the animal kingdom, by the love-your-neighbor-as-you-love-yourself principle, which enables the development of a civilized humanity.

One last quote from the Bible: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.”

These words can either be understood to refer to all the various commandments as explicitly stipulated in the various books of the Bible, including those in the Old Testament. Or it can be understood in the context of cultures as explained above. The most widely used understanding is probably the former, which leads to much animosity, because how can we still be expected to obey those old laws which were relevant in the context of those old cultures? However, in face of our current world and all the changes, I think it more valid to consider the latter understanding. It then states the importance of being obedient to every aspect of the morality of the culture within which you find yourself.

So, if we want to change the world to become a better world in which humanity or civilization has a better change to survive, let’s uphold the morality associated with the culture within which we find ourselves. Let’s communicate these moralities to everyone, especially to the next generation. Although moralities may change, we need to make sure that it never violates the principle of love: Love your neighbor as you love yourself.

Have a blessed Merry Christmas!

Confinement and particles

The idea that fundamental fields are just that, fields and not particles, runs into a problem at some point. If I pick up a tennis ball and bounces it a few times then I am basically handling a particle. So, somewhere between the tiny scales of fundamental physics and the larger scales of everyday life, particles need to appear.

If the fundamental fields are just fields interacting at points, then any combinations of such field would still be fields, even though they may be interacting with one another. No, particles! Then there would also not be atoms consisting of nuclei and electron bound to them in different orbitals.

So, at some point, or some scale, a transition needs to happen where particles are created. How would that happen? It seems that if there are no fundamental particles, the universe would be condemned to exist as a soup of fields at all scales.

Then it occurred to me that there is a process that may be able to introduce particles. Confinement to the rescue! The highly nonlinear dynamics of the strong force, which is modeled by quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is believed to introduce a special scale (the QCD scale) where the force becomes so strong that it confines itself to regions with a restricted volume. The size of this volume is believed to determine the size of protons and neutrons.

Proton model (with fundamental particles), from Desy

So, although the fundamental fields are just fields with no particles, the mechanism of confinement may be responsible for adding particles in our universe. As a result, the constituents of the nucleus of the atom are particles in the true sense of the word. The nuclei can now act as the sources of the potentials that bind the electrons to form atoms.

If confinement is the reason why we have real particles in this universe, then the process of confinement is very important. The funny thing is that it is not yet a solved problem in theoretical physics. In fact, there is an outstanding Millennium Problem of the Clay Mathematics Institute about the mass gap in Yang-Mills theories, which is related to the problem of confinement. Perhaps it is something that theoreticians in fundamental physics can focus on.

Seriously, it is not that complicated

It was more than a 100 year ago that Max Planck introduced the notion of the quantization of radiation from a black body. The full-blown formulation of quantum mechanics is almost a hundred years old (the 5th Solvay conference more or less represents that achievement). Over the years since then, many ideas have been introduced about quantum physics in the struggle to understand it. Once new ideas have been introduced, nobody can ever remove them again regardless of how misleading they may be. Nevertheless, among these ideas, we can find enough information to form a picture representing an adequate understanding of quantum physics.

It would be very arrogant to claim that this understanding is unassailable or even complete. (I still have some issues with fermions.) Therefore, I simply call it my current understanding. It is a minimalist understanding in that it discards the unnecessary conceptual baggage (thus following Occam’s razor). Yet, it provides an ontology (although not one that guarantees everybody’s satisfaction).

I’ve written about many aspects of this understanding. So, where possible, I’ll thus link to those discussions. Where additional discussions may be necessary, I’ll postpone those discussions for later. Here then follows a breakdown of my current understanding of quantum physics.

Firstly, fundamental particles are not particles in the traditional sense. They are not “dimensionless points traveling on world lines.” Instead, they are better represented by wave functions or fields (or partites). Interactions among these fundamental fields (using the term “fields” instead of “particles” to avoid confusion) are dimensionless events in spacetime.

As a consequence, there is no particle-wave duality. Fields propagate as waves and produce the interference as, for example, seen in the double-slit experiment. Whenever these fundamental fields are observed as discrete entities, it is not a particle in the traditional sense that is being observed, but rather the localized interaction of the field with the device that is used for the observation.

Secondly, interactions are the key that leads to the quantum nature of the physical world. What Max Planck discovered was that interactions among fundamental fields are quantized. These fields exchange energy and momentum in quantized lumps. This concept was also reiterated in Einstein’s understanding of the photo-electric effect. Many of the idiosyncratic concepts of quantum physics follow as consequences of the principle of quantized interactions.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is not a fundamental principle. It is a consequence of the quantization relations associated with interactions. These relations convert conjugate variables into Fourier variables, which already represent the uncertainty principle. As a result, the conjugate variables inherit their uncertainty relationship from Fourier theory. It becomes more prevalent in quantum physics, due to the restrictions that the quantization of interactions imposes on the information that can be obtained from the observation of a single “particle.”

Planck’s constant only plays a physical role at interactions. Once these interactions are done, the presence of Planck’s constant the expressions of the fields have no significance. It can be removed through simple field redefinitions that have no effect on the physical representations of these fields. As a result, the significance that is attached to Planck’s constant in scenarios that are not related to interactions are generally misleading if not completely wrong.

Thirdly, another key concept is the principle of superposition. The interactions among fundamental fields are combined as a superposition of all possibilities. In other words, they are integrated over all points in spacetime and produce all possible allowed outcomes. As a consequence, after the interactions, the resulting fields can exist in a linear combination of correlated combinations. This situation leads to the concept of entanglement.

Since a single “particle” only allows a single observation, the different measurement results that can be obtained from the different elements in a superposition are associated with probabilities that must add up to one. The coefficients of the superposition therefore form a complex set of probability amplitudes. The conservation of probability therefore naturally leads to a unitary evolution of the state of the single particle in terms of such a superposition. This unitarity naturally generalizes to systems of multiple particles. It naturally leads to a kind of many-worlds interpretation.

It seems to me that all aspects of quantum physics (with the exception of fermions) follow from these three “principles.” At least, apart from the question of fermions, I am not aware of anything that is missing.

Inflated self-love

The media is full of it. Everywhere you see that people are told to love themselves; put themselves first; look out for “number one.” Such a notion is at the very least misleading, if not complete nonsense, and it is definitely dangerous.

A concern for oneself is built into our genes. Self-preservation has developed through biological evolution into a very strong instinct. Therefore, we don’t need to be told to love ourself. It comes naturally. But biological evolution is driven by the survival of the fittest. That makes for a very unfriendly world to live in.

Selfish child

The cultures of humanity oppose these strong instincts to allow the weak to survive as well, allowing the world to become a more friendly place to live in. Cultures accomplish it by instilling a concern for others.

The ancient biblical principles states “love your neighbour as much as you love yourself.” It represents a balance between the natural love all people have for themselves and the concern that should be extended to all other people they come in contact with.

This balance is important. It makes room for things like self-respect and self-confidence without which the balance would not be maintained. But it shows that such forms of self-concern should not exceed the level of concern for others.

A balanced level of competition with others is good and healthy, but when competition is driven too far it becomes destructive. In fact, it does not only harm others, but can start to be harmful to oneself.

So, don’t listen to all these calls for “learning to love yourself,” unless such messages are associated with self-development in balance with a healthy concern for others. A world full of selfish people is a very unfriendly world to live in, akin to the world in which the principles of the survival of the fittest rule, as they did during our biological evolution. In contrast, the foundation of a civilized world is the concern for others in balance with the concern for oneself.