Tuesday, June 6, 2023

News bits: An advance in local realism theory; Etc.

The Quantum Physics Lady describes the concept of local realism like this: Local realism is a quick way of saying two principles: 1) Principle of locality: the cause of a physical change must be local. That is, a thing is changed only if it is touched, and 2) Principle of realism: Properties of objects are real and exist in our physical universe independent of our minds. 

ars Technica writes about an advance in our understanding of local realism:

Qubits 30 meters apart used to confirm Einstein was wrong 
about quantum [spooky action at a distance] 
This experiment wasn't the first to show that local realism isn't how the Universe work -- it's not even the first to do so with qubits.
But it's the first to separate the qubits by enough distance to ensure that light isn't fast enough to travel between them while measurements are made. And it did so by cooling a 30-meter-long aluminum wire to just a few milliKelvin [almost absolute zero].

The quantum network is a bit 
bulkier than Ethernet

If quantum mechanics were right, then a pair of entangled objects would behave as a single quantum system no matter how far apart the objects were. Altering the state of one of them should instantly alter the state of the second, with the change seemingly occurring faster than light could possibly travel between the two objects. This, Einstein argued, almost certainly had to be wrong.

Getting rid of one of the major loopholes in these measurements is where things get difficult. You need to show that the correlation in the measurements could not have been mediated by information traveling at the speed of light. Since measurements require a bit of time to take place, that means you have to separate the two qubits by enough distance to allow the measurement to complete before light can travel between them. Based on how long the measurements take, the research team behind the new work, working at ETH Zürich, calculated 30 meters would be sufficient.

While that's barely down the hall in a typical lab building, 30 meters is extremely challenging because of the entanglement process, which involves using low-energy microwave photons, which are easily lost in a sea of environmental noise. In practice, this means that anything involved with these photons has to be kept at the same milliKelvin temperatures as the qubits themselves. So the entire 30 meters of aluminum wire that acts as a microwave waveguide needs to be chilled down to a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero.

In practice, this meant giving the entire assembly built to keep the wire cool access to the liquid helium refrigeration systems that housed the qubits at each end—and building a separate refrigeration system at the center point of the 30-meter tube. The system also needed flexible internal connections and exterior supports because the whole thing contracts significantly as it cools down.

Still, it all worked impressively well. Because of the performance of the qubits, the researchers could perform over a million individual trials in only 20 minutes. The resulting correlations ended up being above the limit set by Bell's equations by a staggering 22 standard deviations. Put in different terms, the p value of the result was below 10-108.

Separating entangled qubits by 30 meters allows proof that when one is disturbed, the other is changed and the change happens faster than light could travel the 30 meters between the qubits. This is confirming proof that quantum information can travel faster than the speed of light, 186,000 miles/second. Einstein hated that idea. He argued that information could only travel at the speed of light. Einstein was wrong. 


Is this for real or is it just vaporware?
Remember that wonderful post I did at Snowflake's Forum about the Higgs boson and statistical power needed for physicists to believe something was real? Yes, we all remember it. The threshold for belief is 5-sigma (5σ) significance p value or greater. 5σ significance amounts to a one chance in 3.5 million that a result is a fluke.


Here, the significance of the data is far greater than that needed to prove that Higgs or other things or phenomena were real. This amounts to far more than 1 million σ significance. In other words this is rock solid proof that information can travel faster than light. Poor Einstein - we can only hope his quantum entangled fee-fees don't get hurt.

________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________

Thoughts about spooky action at a distance, theism and pantheism: Now that we know that information can travel faster than light and the Principle of Locality has been debunked, what are the implications, if any? One can argue that since information in one part of the universe can theoretically be instantly known anywhere else, then could that be a basis for omniscience, i.e., a God(s) or universal sentience? 

Omniscience means knowing everything there is to know. Does that at least imply that all knowledge could be everywhere all at once and maybe God is the universe, and therefore we are God too? Its not clear to me what the implications are. 

Until recent years, most scientists believed that quantum effects were incompatible with life on Earth which operates at high temperatures ranging from slightly below to well above the freezing point of water. But in recent years, quantum biology, including quantum neurobiology have become active branches and sub-branches of science. Some quantum effects in plants and animals have been detected, but this area of research is in its infancy. Despite quantum effects and the fall of the Locality Principle, it is clear that humans are not omniscient and not full-blown Gods. This 2022 paper makes clear the primitive state of the art:
The question of whether quantum phenomena at the microscale in the brain play any role in influencing or even determining behavior at the human macroscale of experience is a controversial one1,2. Some researchers have proposed that quantum models of decision making fit experimental data better than classical models1,3, without suggesting physical causality from the microscale to the to the macroscale as possible explanation for this finding1,4. This avenue of research is labelled “quantum cognition”, and it is interested in applying principles and methods from quantum physics to the study of cognition as an abstract system, without concerning itself with the viability of the physical instantiation of the proposed quantum models in the brain. There are also several other claims about the possible existence of quantum phenomena in the brain that allegedly serve as the physical correlate of consciousness5,6,7, collectively referred to as the “quantum brain” hypothesis, but none of them has earned widespread acclaim.

At this point, I'm not sure what to make of this. Maybe more research or deeper thinking will lead to better insight. 
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________

A WaPo article describes some strange goings on in congress. What it means isn't clear. The WaPo writes:
FBI had reviewed, closed inquiry into Biden claims at center of Hill fight

Republican lawmaker James Comer said he will still seek to hold the FBI director in contempt of Congress after viewing document in question

The FBI and Justice Department under then-Attorney General William P. Barr reviewed allegations from a confidential informant about Joe Biden and his family, and they determined there were no grounds for further investigative steps, according to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and other people familiar with the investigation.

After the two lawmakers reviewed the document in a secure area on Capitol Hill on Monday, Comer announced that House Republicans would still pursue holding FBI Director Christopher A. Wray in contempt of Congress.

“Americans have lost trust in the FBI’s ability to enforce the law impartially and demand answers, transparency and accountability,” Comer told reporters. 

.... the allegation in the document came to the FBI through the Pittsburgh field office, where Barr had created a channel for allegations involving Ukraine. That included materials Rudy Giuliani — who was then President Donald Trump’s personal attorney — had gathered from Ukrainian sources claiming to have damaging information about Biden and his family.

The allegation contained in the document was reviewed by the FBI at the time and was found to not be supported by facts, and the investigation was subsequently dropped with the Trump Justice Department’s sign-off, according to the people familiar with the investigation.

Comer and Raskin offered disparate accounts of their meeting with the FBI. Comer in a written statement said FBI officials told the lawmakers “that the unclassified, FBI-generated record has not been disproven.” Raskin said in a statement that DOJ officials signed off on closing the assessment of the information, “having found no evidence” to corroborate the allegations.

The FBI did not confirm Comer’s account of the meeting, but called his pursuit of a contempt vote “unwarranted.”
Although Comer says that Americans have lost trust in the FBI’s impartially, transparency and accountability, this suggests that an partisan extremist Republican lie. The Biden inquiry is no basis for concern. A far more important basis for concern was the FBI shafting Hillary close to the 2016 election, costing her precious votes. At the same time, the FBI was shielding Trump from its onging investigation into his possible criminal activities. If Americans lose trust in the FBI, what the FBI did to hurt Hillary and to help Trump in 2016 is a very good reason for loss of trust.

Apparently, the FBI under Barr and Trump looked at the allegations of crimes by one or more Bidens and decided there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Joe or Hunter at the time. If that is the case, it seems that most or all the basis for claiming Joe is a criminal was never real from the beginning. Confusingly, a recent Vox article asserts that criminal charges against Hunter are still possible:
There are four possible charges in the mix, according to CNN. Two of these are misdemeanor charges about Hunter’s failure to file taxes, and a third is a felony tax evasion charge that would allege he over-reported business expenses. The fourth potential charge is about a false statement on a federal form Hunter filled out when buying a gun in 2018 (he claimed he was not a drug user).
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________

The New York Intelligencer magazine writes about projected voting behavior of Millennials:
That millennials voted more Democratic in Biden’s first midterm than they had in 2016 appeared to indicate that aging effects were essentially nil: Millennials were becoming no more conservative (and, perhaps, even a bit more liberal) as they got older. Which would suggest that generational replacement is poised to devastate the conservative movement.

Alas, the New York Times analyst Nate Cohn warns that the “emerging Democratic majority” on the horizon may be a mirage. Contrary to some recent reports, Cohn said millennials have in fact been moving right as they’ve aged; this reality has just been disguised by the changing composition of the millennial electorate. The millennial voting bloc of 2022 is not the same as that of 2008, as “six additional years of even more heavily Democratic millennials became eligible to vote” after Barack Obama’s initial election.

In their youth, older millennials (i.e., those born between 1981 and 1989) had produced the largest age gap in the modern history of U.S. elections: In 2008, voters under 30 were 16 points more Democratic than those over 30.

But between the 2012 and 2020 elections, these millennials became more likely to vote Republican (and this was especially true of those born before 1985):


If voters continue to vote for extremist anti-democracy ideologues, which now dominate the Republican Party leadership, America could lose its democracy and citizens, especially non-heterosexuals, women, non-Whites and non-Christians could lose most of their civil liberties. 

It's no longer rational to deny that America's extremist right really has normalized and empowered what used to be considered fringe Christian fundamentalism and capitalist extremism in the Republican Party. The extremists now dominate. Their propaganda asserts that extremism is merely moderate, while the actual center-right, e.g., Biden and the Democratic Party, are extremist socialist tyrants and pedophiles. And tens of millions of Americans believe it, or at least act like they believe it.

No comments:

Post a Comment