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Letter from Einstein to Schrodinger (1950)
You are the only contemporary physicist... who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. (Ed: he is warning against subordinating intuitive perceptions codified by classical Newtonian physics for theoretical extrapolations from limited experiments)----
Their interpretation is, however, refuted most elegantly by your system of radioactive atom + amplifier + charge of gunpowder + cat in a box, in which the psi-function of the system contains both the cat alive and blown to bits. Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation.
I was drawn to this area by watching the four part Nova series Cosmos, The Fabric of the Universe. As someone who never even took a college physics course, I'm in no position to evaluate most of the propositions presented on the program, but there were two that I do feel able to challenge. The first is that time, that intuitive sense that Emanual Kant described as needing no explanation because it was "a priori", meaning part of what makes us human. This is so true that in the very discussion of time even those who refute its reality must use this intuitive understanding. We can't speak of beginnings, ending, of of expansion of the universe with out implicit reference to time.
The reality of time becomes more poignant, more real, as one approaches the end of their life, or in my case when the specter of dementia looms larger, nearer, meaning less time to achieve or to experience before the end of time....for me. There is a neurology researcher whom I have been corresponding with, James Brewer M.D. Ph.D, who has developed a technology to predict within very narrow limits using advanced MRIs how long someone has before dementia will deprive them of their cognitive abilities. It is all about time, devastating when it turns out to be short, exhilarating when his tests show it to be more than the patient anticipated.
Brewer is an empathetic man, but like the theoretical physicists who claim time is merely an illusion, he can not fully understand the consequences of the information that he is providing that will, in spite of his denial, become part of the culture of medicine, of how we deal with aging.
I may have just let ignored the excesses of the Nova program except my next door neighbor in our suburban San Diego community just happens to be a professor who is member of the international academic community that studies and writes about time, arguing that it is an illusion of our particular species. Since we chat about this while we are walking our dogs and picking up their shit, it sort of makes the issue more accessible, especially since he happens to be a very accessible guy. Out of my contention that "illusion" is not what time is anymore than our perception of color, one we have but our dogs don't, has come some insights. He mentioned that he enjoys the reaction to his use of the term illusion, as it gets people riled.
I gave him a hypothetical, a thought experiment, of a community of meteors in deep space that were destined to spend eternity simply following their orbits described by Newtonian and Einsteinian rules. I told him to assume they had cognition and if they talked about time, it truly would not exist, as the past and the future would both be known absolutely by the very same rules. There would be no now, as this concept only has meaning to those entities embedded in ecosystems describing the moment of the actor's action that affects all other systems of which they are in contact-in other words it is a concept of life, something that theoretical physicists try their best to ignore.
Leonard Susskind, a renowned theoretical physicists who was one of the creators of string theory among his many accomplishments, has a series of lectures on quantum mechanics available to the public on youtube. In his introductory course he inadvertently sheds some light on how the concept of reversibility of time has entered the language of academic physics. He demonstrates the paradoxes of quantum process, comparing it to that of classical physics. He gives an example of reversing the process, causing the particle to go in the other direction and then he hesitates, and says, "If you reverse the direction of time, if you like" Later he repeated himself by this time after describing this reversal said "so to speak."
Susskind was qualifying this term since he understood that it was not time as we know it. I personally see his awkward caveat as going beyond this, as an acknowledgement of the violence that is done to reality by calling a reversal of a particle as being reversal of time. Yet, he used the term, as this usurpation of the meaning of time has become something more, quite more, something that is not to be understood by the laws of physics, no matter how advanced, but by the higher level rules of sociology of knowledge and group psychology.
In the Nova series, Brian Greene who produced the program, leaned quite a bit to the Wow aspect of the implications of quantum mechanics, giving the impression that Time Travel as described by H.G. Wells and many others was possible. The other possibility from the Quantum Leap segment was Human quantum teleportation, which I will get into later.
This is a good time to raise the linguistic limitations that makes discussing this difficult. Here my academic background in experimental group psychology, M.Phil from Columbia, has some relevance, as human perception and cognition is the underlying motif of this non-theraputic segment of academic psychology. It recognizes the need for operational definitions, jargon-in the best sense of the word, that is more precise than normal day to day discourse.
The definition of possible is predicated on the set of consensual rules of reality. Thus, the potential of a small amount of material producing an explosion thousands of times greater than nitrogen based compounds was not only unfeasible, but impossible until the earliest work on radium in the late 19th century. Now in retrospect one would have to express this as "considered impossible" but at the time it was simply, and correctly "impossible." Having within a few short generations seen so many things that had been impossible actually created we have to ask whether the word itself is obsolete in thinking potential developments. And this brings us to the next question, if anything is possible at some future stage of understanding, is there any meaningful separation between science and science fiction. If not, is science fiction transformed into science when presented by credentialed individuals in settings that confirm their authority.
The Nova program qualified all of the futuristic dramatizations as "speculative", "not currently possible" and "controversial," but the dramatizations were vivid and detailed, their precision belying these caveats to convey the impression that this is will someday happen. The presentation of quantum entanglement teleportation, similar to the Star Trek transport beam, in this light is something I want to focus on.
I will argue that this presentation, by ignoring the biological constraints of this process, so grossly distort the scientific endeavor that rather than stimulating critical thinking it discourages the active evaluation of what we are lead to believe in all areas of life. This presentation is also breaches the goal of what Biologist E.O. Wilson calls Consilience, the unification of all fields of scientific endeavor.
One of the luminaries of Quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger, whose name is forever linked with the very phenomenon, Entanglement, which happens to be the process that underpins teleportation, goes beyond physics to look at the other essential element that is rarely addressed in this book, What is Life. He begins by asking, "Is Life Based on the Laws of Physics?"
What I wish to make clear in this last chapter is,
in short, that from all we have learnt about the
structure of living matter, we must be prepared to
find it working in a manner that cannot be
reduced to the ordinary laws of physics. And that
not on the ground that there is any 'new force' or
what not, directing the behaviour of the single
atoms within a living organism, but because the
construction is different from a anything we have
yet tested in the physical laboratory.
To say as Brian Greene did on Nova that teleportation is not yet possible is to imply that it shall be, or may be, or is not excluded by the law of physics which as Schrodinger points out has nothing to do with determining the laws of biology, even though it underlies them. Thus, it is potentially possible that the complete set of cells of a human being can be quantumly teletransported as depicted on the Nova program. If this were ever to occur the only thing that would be missing is life, something that Greene pretends the essential qualities of which are unknown.
Let's listen to Schrodinger again:
According to the
evidence put forward in the preceding pages the
space-time events in the body of a living being
which correspond to the activity of its mind, to
its self conscious or any other actions, are
(considering also their complex structure and the
accepted statistical explanation of
physico-chemistry) if not strictly deterministic at
any rate statistico-deterministic. To the physicist
I wish to emphasize that in my opinion, and
contrary to the opinion upheld in some quarters,
quantum indeterminacy plays no biologically
relevant role in them, except perhaps by
enhancing their purely accidental character in
such events as meiosis, natural and X-rayinduced
mutation and so on -and this is in any
case obvious and well recognized.
While we may not satisfactorily answer what life is, we do know what it is not, an aggregation of quanta, atoms, molecules, cells or organs. This is what, even theoretically, will be transmitted through quantum teleportation. Brian Greene in the process of explaining quantum mechanics conveys the a message that is refuted by the person who not only explored the limits of this phenomenon, but understood the dynamics of what will be called genes, even though it's structure awaited explication by Watson and Crick, who acknowledged Schrodinger's work as seminal to their own.
The essay form too constrained to articulate the consequences of the loss of the concept of possible. We either accept the convention that it is to society's benefit to assume that the laws of nature are constant or at least understand the consequence of breaching this norm. In the words of Albert Einstein in a letter to Schrodinger, "Most of them (contemporary physicists) simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established."
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References:
Nova trailer for series that illustrates the "mystical" science fiction spin that gains audience share at a sacrifice to the scientific ethos.
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Teleportation Physics Study
Illustrating the potential harm, along with the existing damage deserves more extensive treatment than this format. This paper commissioned by the U.S. Air Force, Teleportation Physics Study by Physicist Eric W. Davis
It asserted the existence of controlled experimental evidence of quantum teleportation and para normal events quoting an array of studies:
The author, physicist citing self described illusionist Uri Geller is one example, but because of the obvious flaws only points to the same errors that are more easily conflated with scientific truth.
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In evaluating the possibility of human teleportation and also that the future is known, the assumption is made that we are a single organism, with a few trillion cells. This is one indication of the narrowness of perspective of those who posit this as someday happening. They don't understand what the human being is, as described here:
People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid
Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. From the invisible strands of fungi waiting to sprout between our toes, to the kilogram of bacterial matter in our guts, we are best viewed as walking "superorganisms," highly complex conglomerations of human cells, bacteria, fungi and viruses.
That's the view of scientists at Imperial College London who published a paper in Nature Biotechnology Oct. 6 describing how these microbes interact with the body.
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Reference must be made to Lee Smolen, the contemporary theoretical physicist who had the courage to take on his entire profession as being possessed by a fascination with a given approach, string theory, that has become an article of faith, since it can never be disproved. It is an approach to the much needed sociology of this advanced science that has reached the distressing point where it merges on fantasy.
Controversially, Physicist Argues Time Is Real is a 2013 article that includes this:
Smolin and Meck discussed the consequences of his idea, including what it means for our understanding of human consciousness and free will. One implication of the idea that time is an illusion is the notion that the future is just as decided as the past.
"If I think the future's already written, then the things that are most valuable about being human are illusions along with time," Smolin said. "We still aspire to make choices in life. That is a precious part of our humanity. If the real metaphysical picture is that there are just atoms moving in the void, then nothing is ever new and nothing's ever surprising — it's just the rearrangement of atoms. There's a loss of responsibility as well as a loss of human dignity."
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The film, What the Bleep do we know Down the Rabbit Hole. is a pastiche of spiritualism that is derived from the "spookiness" of quantum physics. I maintain that the excesses of what I describe in this text, the counter-factual clear unambiguous statement by Brian Green that there (it could be that there) is no difference between the future and the past, is not more fantastic than what was promoted in this film. The ease with which they selected excerpts from respected physicists was cut from the same cloth as the Nova production of "The fabric of the Universe." Yet, there was no vocal objection to this Nova presentation by the academic community
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Stuart Kaufman in his "Edge" article. BEYOND REDUCTIONISM: REINVENTING THE SACRED while brilliantly exploring the value of God as an organizing universal myth, states that predicting future complex ecosystems is "radically impossible." In other words, "time" -as defined as that which separates the past from the future, is a reality.
But the failure to prestate the possible preadaptations is not slowing down the evolution of the biosphere where preadaptations are widely known. Thus, ever novel functionalities come to exist and proliferate in the biosphere. The fact that we cannot prestate them is essential, and an essential limitation to the way Newton taught us to do science: Prestate the relevant variables, forces acting among them, initial and boundary conditions, and calculate the future evolution of the system…say projectile. But we cannot prestate the relevant causal features of organisms in the biosphere. We do not know now the relevant variables! Thus we cannot write down a set of equations for the temporal evolution of these variables. We are profoundly precluded from the Newtonian move. In short, the evolution of the biosphere is radically unknowable, not due to quantum throws of the dice, or deterministic chaos, but because we cannot prestate the macroscopic relevant features of organisms and environments that will lead to the emergence of novel functions in the biosphere with their own causal properties that in turn alter the future evolution of the biosphere. Thus, the evolution of the biosphere is radically creative, ceaselessly creative, in way that cannot be foretold. I find this wonderful.
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For essays on this subject and other AlRodbell.blogspot.com
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