Blake and I were discussing Sal's latest nonsense earlier. Blake is the physics expert here, but let's face it, he's sick. So I'll substitute for him in pointing out the serious flaws in Sal's argument. Sal essentially claims that, since quantum systems are time-reversible and only collapse into classical states through observation, there must be an "ultimate observer" providing measurements to give us the bondary conditions of classical physics. Problems:
- Sal is restricting himself to the classical Copenhagen interpretation in explaining "wave-function collapse". There are several other interpretational frameworks that physicists use in quantum theory, such the Everett (Many-Worlds) and Consistent Histories interpretations, neither of which, as far as I know, hold the observer as fundamental.
- Sal ignores the experimentally verified phenomenon of quantum decoherence. Decoherence provides an explanatory framework for the appearance of "wave-function collapse" by formalizing how quantum systems interact with each other and their environment. The collapse associated with measurement in quantum mechanics no longer requires a mechanismless handwave like "observation".
- Sal attempts to say that the existence of an "ultimate observer", i.e. god, "implies intelligent design". Perhaps Sal would like to revisit logic 101 to rediscover the difference between sufficient and necessary conditions. Assuming there is a point at which intelligent design contrasts with our current understanding of evolution, said current understanding is completely compatible with the argument he is proposing.
- Even in the Copenhagen interpretation, the result of a measurement can only be known within a certain probability. This fact plays a prominent role in quantum computation, where linear-composed coherent qubits return a classical result with a given probability after they are measured. That certainly implies an upper-bound on the knowledge any quantum mechanical observer can have, and such a being would be prohibited from being "All-Knowing". And furthermore, the observer doesn't have any control over the result of its observations. If God is an observer, it's certainly more a hapless, disconnected deity that the one Sal apparently wants us to believe is implied by his argument.
That's all for me, others can jump in at their leisure.
10 comments:
Nature is in no way bound to make things work in such a way that facilitates human understanding. Very nice arguments.
I think "that" should be "than" in your last sentence.
Sal's writing gets worse the more I look at it. I can only describe his "physics" as willful non-comprehension, brought about by reading popularized accounts of quantum mechanics and indulging in verbal fantasies fueled by his religious preconceptions. I think he's also displaying a bit of a persecution complex:
[Tipler and Barrow's] book was hailed by the prestigious scientific journal Nature. However, in 1996, when Tipler came forward and said the “Ultimate Observer” was to be identified with the Judeo-Christian God, Tipler’s ideas were immediately ridiculed and his pay was cut.
Actually, a review of Tipler's Physics of Immortality, published in Nature, called that book "a masterpiece of pseudoscience ... the product of a fertile and creative imagination unhampered by the normal constraints of scientific and philosophical discipline". It's funny Cordova doesn't mention that review, isn't it?
This idea deserves ridicule. Even if the "Ultimate Observer" were a legitimate deduction from known science — and the development of quantum mechanics since 1970 has shown that it ain't — such an "Observer" would not have the properties ascribed to the Jewish or the Christian God by actual Jews and Christians. (Let's face it: "Judeo-Christian" is a nasty, Frankensteinned word, a term which bigoted Christians employ to make themselves sound good. The Christian God is a three-in-one oil, and the Jewish one isn't.)
To identify some concoction of physics ideas with any divine being, including the Christian one, is to bastardize physics and devalue the scholarly study of religion, all in the same breath. Consider: we can trace the historical development of Christianity with considerable confidence, beginning with storm-god worship in the Fertile Crescent perhaps four thousand years ago. During the Israelite and Judean monarchies, polytheism was gradually supplanted by a "henotheist" view: one God rules supreme in this land, but others hold sway elsewhere. Eventually, the notion of a worldwide deity was articulated (witness the book of Jonah, in which the protagonist flees to the edge of the known world but can't escape YHWH), and the idea of a cosmic dualism between good and evil beings was adapted from the Persians. Paul of Tarsus wrenched Christianity away from Judaism, Priscillian or one of his colleagues slipped the Trinity into 1 John. . . and on and on until the present day, when a few learned folk sing the praises of NOMA while the masses fill the coffers of faith-healers and closeted megachurch pastors. Why should we identify the discoveries of science with this one, particular mythological tradition?
Cordova attributes the following statement to John Barrow, in response (supposedly) to a critique by Dawkins:
You have a problem with these ideas, Richard [Dawkins], because you’re not really a scientist. You’re a biologist.
I know one shouldn't trust any quote which has passed through creationist hands, but wow. . . If that one is remotely accurate, Barrow is a dick.
I think it's pretty obvious that Sal understands precisely nothing about what he has just posted. He simply copy and pasted a bunch of crap from Barrow and Tipler and, aparently, a book called "God in the Equations".
I agree with you about that quote. If it is even remotely accurate, Barrow is a world-cass asshole. But I don't trust Sal on quotes as it is, and this predilection is reinforced when no source is provided.
The Templeton people give the same quotation. (Shame on me for not running it through Teh Google earlier.) Quoting from the aforelinked article:
Barrow, the rigorous scientist, is comfortable as Barrow, the parishioner at Cambridge’s United Reform Church. Where others see a war between science and religion, he sees no conflict at all. A religious conception of the universe also uses approximations and analogies to try to grasp ultimate questions, he points out. Those analogies are not the whole truth, but they are a shadow of the truth, just as the scientific understanding of the universe has repeatedly evolved and exposed some previous scientific understanding as blinkered, self-serving, and mundane.
What. Planet. Is. Barrow. Living. On?
Experts in science admit the fallibility and incompleteness of our understanding. "Authorities" in religion don't — or if they do, nobody outside a philosophy department has heard of them.
As a scientist, Barrow has some useful advice for religious believers: “Don’t be cowed because religious images are often naive or simple. They are merely a shadow of something far more sophisticated. And, as in science, as more knowledge accumulates, old ideas often turn out to be part of the deeper truth that eventually emerges.”
Again, I'd like to know more about Barrow's home planet, 'cause it looks a lot friendlier than mine.
Also from that article:
"For Barrow, biology is little more than a branch of natural history. “Biologists have a limited, intuitive understanding of complexity. They’re stuck with an inherited conflict from the 19th century, and are only interested in outcomes, in what wins out over others,” he adds. “But outcomes tell you almost nothing about the laws that govern the universe.” For physicists it is the laws of nature themselves that capture and structure the universe—and put brakes on it as well."
Looks like Barrow is not only an asshole, but an idiot. Biology in the 20th. century involves population genetics, biochemistry, molecular genetics, genomics, etc., all of which is concerned with systematic generalizations of behavior and not merely "outcomes". That's basically what the "laws of physics" are, only on a much more basic level (bonus points to him for confusing the presciptive and descriptive connotations of the word "law").
""Authorities" in religion don't — or if they do, nobody outside a philosophy department has heard of them."
Actually, even the ones who claim to be "liberal" an admit the fallability of their belief system often speak with a forked toung. The Anglican bishop that Dawkins spoke to in "The Root of All Evil?" admitted that certain beliefs were beyond refutation no matter what, his example of this was the ressurrection, one of the most scientifically implausible postulates in the Christian canon.
I was only going to comment on this article. I really was. But I started pulling quotations from Sal's article and responding to them. Then I started checking facts. Tracking down other articles.
Before I knew it I had written a whole post. I am weak.
Flavin, thanks for the contribution. I've added some thoughts over at the new location.
>>>He simply copy and pasted a bunch of crap from Barrow and Tipler and, aparently, a book called "God in the Equations".<<<
Not even a book. A website, which I had run across at least once before when Sal was making ludicrous claims. The website is where he got the scanned image of the equation (that, or they both got it from another source).
As a side note, the "theory" that Tipler was bitching about being roundly rejected is called the omega-point theory. It relied on a claim that if black holes evaporated, they would violate unitarity if they finished evaporating before the end of the universe. However, in 2004 Hawkings showed that black hole evaporation does not violate unitarity so long as the black hole evaporates fully.
Hi, W. Kevin Vicklund.
Prof. Stephen Hawking's paper on the black hole information issue is based on the AdS/CFT correspondence (anti-de Sitter space/conformal field theory correspondence), which is a conjectured correspondence between a string theory of one space and a non-gravitational quantum field theory on the causal boundary of that space, but lower by a dimension or more.
That is to say, Prof. Hawking's paper is based upon make-believe physics, as no string theory is known to be correct. For that paper, see:
"Information loss in black holes," S. W. Hawking, Physical Review D, Vol. 72, No. 8, 084013 (October 2005). http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0507171
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005PhRvD..72h4013H
Contrast that ad libitum approach to doing physics with that of Prof. Frank J. Tipler, who bases his Omega Point Theory strictly on the known laws of physics (i.e., general relativity, quantum mechanics, and the Standard Model), and that of Prof. David Deutch (the formal founder of the field of quantum computation, being the first person to formally describe how quantum computation would work algorithmically; for which work he won the Institute of Physics' 1998 Paul Dirac Medal and Prize). They both believe we have to take the known laws of physics seriously as true explanations of how the world works, unless said physics are experimentally refuted.
I cordially invite you to read Prof. Tipler's below paper, which is in large part on his Omega Point Theory:
F. J. Tipler, "The structure of the world from pure numbers," Reports on Progress in Physics, Vol. 68, No. 4 (April 2005), pp. 897-964. http://math.tulane.edu/~tipler/theoryofeverything.pdf Also released as "Feynman-Weinberg Quantum Gravity and the Extended Standard Model as a Theory of Everything," arXiv:0704.3276, April 24, 2007. http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.3276
Prof. Deutsch defends the physics of Prof. Tipler's Omega Point Theory in Chapter 14: "The Ends of the Universe" in his excellent book The Fabric of Reality, of which extracts from the chapter are available below with Prof. Tipler's replies to it:
David Deutsch, extracts from Chapter 14: "The Ends of the Universe" of The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1997), ISBN: 0713990619; with additional comments by Frank J. Tipler. http://geocities.com/theophysics/deutsch-ends-of-the-universe.html
http://www.math.tulane.edu/~tipler/physicist.html
On the below website can be found more information on the Omega Point Theory:
Theophysics http://www.geocities.com/theophysics/
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