Physics: A peek behind the veil of reality earns physicist Templeton Prize

In "Work on 'veiled reality' earns French physicist $1.4 million award", Brendan Conway
reports (Christian Science Monitor, March 17, 2009) that

"French physicist Bernard d' Espagnat won the 2009 Templeton Prize for his exploration of a reality that exists beyond observable phenomena."

The annually award prize is worth $1.4 million.

D'Espagnat, a professor emeritus at the University of Paris-Orsay,

wrote 20 books, countless papers and articles, and is best known for positing that matter everywhere is entangled in a "veiled reality" that exists beneath time, space, and energy.

The veiled reality is, of course, the entangled quantum world. It halfway reminds me of Francis Thompson's (1859-1907) poem:

O WORLD invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

I think the ol' "Hound of Heaven" quarry had a purely spiritual world in mind, but perhaps the quantum world is a dim reflection of that. One thing it isn't is the crass materialism so often fronted as "science" in popular media.

In 1981-82,

A team of physicists under the French physicist Alain Aspect found that a change in polarization of a photon miles from a separate photon could be detected in both – and it would all happen faster than the speed of light. This violated a series of principles on the behavior of particles.

For instance, it challenged a basic premise of classical physics: Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. That, at least, would be true if "travel" is the operative word.

Perhaps it isn't. The photons do not behave as if they are travelling faster than light. They behave as if there is no space between them. That is the famous "action at a distance" which is supposed to be impossible.

D'Espagnat doesn't claim he can unveil the veiled reality. He told Conway,

"It's not that science will explain the ultimate reality of certain objects or events," d'Espagnat said. "Rather, it is that the concepts we use, such as space, time, causality, and so on, ... are not applicable to ultimate reality."

Perhaps they are best described as the names we give to what we ourselves experience, so we can communicate with each other. But we must not demand that ultimate reality be what we discuss.

Note: The photo is of d'Espagnat.

See also:

Quantum mechanics and popular culture: Artist's kit offers chance to produce trillions of universes; Quantum theory and popular culture: Hit job on - of all people - Paul Dirac?;
Science fiction: Reflections on the nature of time; A theory of almost everything is the best we can do?; No escape from philosophy through equations; Can reincarnation save Schrodinger's cat? Could God live in an infinite sea of universes? It depends ... Quantum mechanics: Could cosmic microwave background show that it is wrong?

Quantum theory and popular culture: Hit job on - of all people - Paul Dirac?

In his review for The Sunday Times (January 11, 2009) of a new book on the life of quantum physicist Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo of the Science Museum of London, John Carey begins by noting that Paul Dirac was the greatest British physicist since Newton:

In the 1920s and 1930s, together with Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Pauli, he opened up the field of quantum physics, changing the course of science. In 1933, aged 31, he became the youngest theoretician to win a Nobel prize.

However, according to Farmelo, the reason there was no biography of Dirac until now is that he was

pathologically silent and retiring, and as a thinker he was unintelligible except to mathematicians. Even his fellow physicists complained that he worked in a deliberately mystifying private language. For his part, he insisted that the quantum world could not be expressed in words or imagined. To draw its picture would be “like a blind man sensing a snowflake. One touch and it's gone”. Its beauty revealed itself only in mathematical formulae.

Actually about the quantum world, Dirac is certainly right, and certainly not the only person to think so. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, "the real difficulty in understanding quantum mechanics lies in coming to grips with their implications — physical, metaphysical, and epistemological."

It is not Dirac's fault if he didn't make the non-materialist implications of quantum physics acceptable to materialists. Materialists have been trying to tame it for about seventy years now, I guess. Not only have they not succeeded, but the disaster has spread to neuroscience.

Farmelo argues that Dirac suffered from autism. As a layperson, I am suspicious of psychological diagnoses of the dead, even from professionals - and the review certainly implies that the book is gossipy, which discourages me from changing my mind on the subject.

"But the tittle-tattle of Dirac's daily life is ultimately irrelevant," Carey tells us, after offering an unexpected shower of same. But then we learn something very interesting:

What does come across, surprisingly, is how far Dirac's methods seem like those of an imaginative writer. His ideas came as intuitions. They were not derived from experimental observation, but from contemplation of pure mathematics. His discovery of antimatter followed this pattern. He deduced from his equations that if electrons exist, anti-electrons must exist also, though nobody had ever observed one. The universe, he suggested, was composed of equal parts of matter and antimatter, and though, for some unknown reason, human experience is confined almost entirely to matter, there may be parts of the universe made of antimatter. Most physicists greeted this with derision. Yet within months an experimenter at Caltech had photographed a positron or anti-electron; nowadays, Farmelo points out, particle accelerators generate billions of anti-electrons and anti-protons daily for use in industry and medicine, where positron emission tomography allows doctors to see inside patients' brains and hearts.

I have long supposed that a proper realignment of science would realign sciences and arts in precisely this way.

Anyway, physicist friend A. J. Meyer, who calls the Sunday Times article a "crass hit job" has given me permission to post his opinion:

I got to know knew Dirac & his wife Manci through Behram Kursunoglu's Coral Gables Conferences. They were sort of a "Maggie & Jigs" couple. Manci was [Nobelist] Eugene Wigner's sister. She would storm into meetings asking:"Where is that idiot?"

Dirac told a mutual friend that Manci always called him an idiot. Manci was not shy, during one meeting she walked across the room to lecture me about my pipe.

I really liked Dirac, and he certainly wasn't taciturn when he talked about physics. He just didn't like small talk.

Dirac was extremely frugal with words, but nevertheless he maximized their information content.

One day, I gave a presentation on "Primatons" -- the ultimate granularity of space-time. After the talk, I asked him for his opinion - Dirac answered: "You are out on a limb."

I then asked him: "Are you going to saw it off?"

He replied: "No."

I have a hunch that Dirac's economical use of words was carried over from his well founded belief that if the mathematics that described a physics theory wasn't beautiful - simple & elegant, then the theory was probably false.

At the very last Coral Gables Conference, at which I heard Dirac speak, he stressed the importance of beautiful mathematics and how distressing it was that the younger generation of physicist had a lack of rigour and were using slipshod mathematics in their work. One younger physicist then asked: "How do you define 'beautiful mathematics'?" Dirac replied: "If you have to ask that question, then you are in the wrong business."

Ah yes. Perhaps much of the problem with science today is that many of its practitioners are in the wrong business.

The Darwinists should, for example, be writing fiction, along the lines of "goo = zoo = you = poo, purely by accident!", for example.

Oh wait. They do.

They don't call it fiction, because fiction readers are moderately discerning. They market it as science, because nowadays any nonsense marketed as science sells.

Can reincarnation save Schrodinger's cat?

Reincarnation can indeed save Schrödinger's cat, reports Zeeya Merali in Nature News (July 2, 2008).

The "cat" is a 1935 thought experiment intended to illustrate the superposition of two states in quantum theory - that is, both states exist until a measurement is attempted, which forces one or other to prevail (live cat or dead cat).

According to WhatIs,

We place a living cat into a steel chamber, along with a device containing a vial of hydrocyanic acid. There is, in the chamber, a very small amount of a radioactive substance. If even a single atom of the substance decays during the test period, a relay mechanism will trip a hammer, which will, in turn, break the vial and kill the cat. The observer cannot know whether or not an atom of the substance has decayed, and consequently, cannot know whether the vial has been broken, the hydrocyanic acid released, and the cat killed. Since we cannot know, the cat is both dead and alive according to quantum law, in a superposition of states. It is only when we break open the box and learn the condition of the cat that the superposition is lost, and the cat becomes one or the other (dead or alive). This situation is sometimes called quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox : the observation or measurement itself affects an outcome, so that the outcome as such does not exist unless the measurement is made. (That is, there is no single outcome unless it is observed.)

But,

Now, Nadav Katz at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his colleagues have performed an experiment in which they pull a quantum state back from the brink of collapse, 'uncollapsing' it and returning it to its unobserved state. Effectively, they have peeked at Schrodinger's cat in its box, but saved it from near-certain death (N. Katz et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3547).

To physicists raised on the textbook Copenhagen interpretation, any notion of uncollapsing a quantum state seems “astonishing”, says Markus Büttiker, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. “On opening the box, Schrödinger's cat is either dead or alive — there is no in between.”

However, a more recent interpretation of quantum mechanics, 'decoherence theory', suggests that collapse does not occur instantaneously. Instead it plays out gradually as the quantum system slowly interacts with its environment (see Nature 453, 22–25; 2008). In 2006, Alexander Korotkov of the University of California, Riverside, and Andrew Jordan, of the University of Rochester in New York, proposed that this may leave open a time period in which experimenters could intervene to halt the collapse (A. N. Korotkov & A. N. Jordan Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 166805; 2006). They provided blueprints for an experiment to test the idea, which Katz, Korotkov and their colleagues have now done.

Well, if quantum collapse does not occur instantaneously, maybe events are not as certain as many have thought.

Indeed, I wonder if quantum physicists will end up proving CS Lewis's concept in The Great Divorce, where

[B]oth good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in the town, but all their life on Earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it’, not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say ‘Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven’, and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell’. And both will speak truly.” (The Great Divorce, pg. 69)

Actually, I think that the process begins in this life, once you have a few decades under your belt. So even if you don't believe in eternal life, you can still cash in some of those coupons right now.

Save the cat, but get her spayed. And do read The Great Divorce.

(Note: The image of Schrodinger's cat is from SDLY in China.)

Quantum mechanics: Could cosmic microwave background show that it is wrong?

Might quantum mechanics be just plain wrong? That would eliminate much angst and inconvenience for surviving Einstein supporters.

According to "Observations of the cosmic microwave background might deal blow to theory" by Zeeya Merali

The question of whether quantum mechanics is correct could soon be settled by observing the sky — and there are already tantalizing hints that the theory could be wrong.

Antony Valentini, a physicist at Imperial College, London, wanted to devise a test that could separate quantum mechanics from one of its closest rivals — a theory called bohmian mechanics.

The article is behind a paywall, but go here, here, and here for comments that give you the sense of it.

Basically, the hope is that, by analyzing the cosmic microwave background, researchers could see whether the hot and cold spots are distributed in the way quantum mechanics predicts or bohmian mechanics predicts.

Of course, even if quantum mechanics doesn't always hold, that doesn't show that it isn't usually correct.