A science writer considers the cost of science functioning as an inquisition

With that out of the way, yes, you would think that any comments after a quoted piece would pertain to or be deduced from said piece. However, the safe assumption is if you cannot find such a connection either it is cryptic or derived from something else. So the best thing to do is ask. For example: "Excuse me, but I couldn't find anything in the article to support your claim of

Actually, Bohm’s biggest problem was that he was not a materialist.

Am I missing something or did you get that from some other source? I find that intriguing and would like to know more." Then we could both(hopefully) learn something as opposed having this little chat. ET

You're right. I was confused about what I said. hazel

hazel:

I don’t think one could say he was a materialist.

News say that the problem was that he was NOT a materialist. So I don't think one could say that he was a materialist. ET

No, but given that she posted that line right after posting the quotes she did, it's reasonable to infer that her remark was meant to follow from the quotes. Also, FWIW, I also posted quotes from Wikipedia (and there is more there) about Bohm and his philosophy: I don't think one could say he was a materialist. Maybe someone can find some evidence that I am wrong, but I think News was wrong in her comment. hazel

So a person has to base their opinion on another person from one article? ET

Sure she can. But I think her opinion is wrong if she based it on the article, which I read. Have you read the article? Can you point to anything in the article that says Bohm's main problem was that he was not a materialist? hazel

hazel:

I don’t see anything in this article that says that Bohm’s biggest problem was that he wasn’t a materialist.

OK. Can a person give a personal opinion of someone in their post? Clearly, they can. And how do you know that said opinion is wrong? Do tell... ET

Hazel

Also, like most (all?) QM theorists, things like the wave-particle duality and non-locality showed that the material world was not at all as it had been envisioned in the past.

But that doesn’t mean that QM is not part of the material world. But I guess that depends on your definition of “material world”. Things like magnetism and gravity are thought to be non-material by some. But most would now accept them as part of the material world. To the best of our knowledge, excluding WJM’s belief that there is not material world :) , neither magnetism nor gravity can exist without the physical. I am definitely no expert in the field, but don’t QM effects fall in the same category? Brother Brian

Well, then, we had different purposes in posting: you think the article is wrong and I think News is wrong. So at least we agree that something about the OP is wrong! :-) hazel

As I made clear at the beginning of my post, I commented on what the author wrote at the end of his article, not on the OP itself. As I also made clear, my beef is with his scientifically indefensible defense of Bohm's pilot wave theory. And since you never really concern yourself so much with the details of the science at hand, but with pushing your bizarre metaphysical presuppositions (regardless of empirical inconsistencies), I really could care less what you are saying. In fact, for the most part, I ignored your post since it was irrelevant to the main point at hand. Namely, despite the author's contention to the contrary, Bohmian mechanics is false! bornagain77

In case you'd like to know if anything ba wrote here (almost all repeats of things he has posted many times before) has anything to do with the OP, I'll point out that he seems to agree with me that News' comment that "Bohm’s biggest problem was that he wasn’t a materialist" isn't true. hazel

And although Weinberg rightly rejected the realist approach in quantum theory, it is interesting to look again at exactly why he rejected the ‘instrumentalist’ approach in quantum mechanics. Again Weinberg stated,,,

“,,, In the instrumentalist approach,,, humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level.,,, the instrumentalist approach turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else. It is not that we object to thinking about humans. Rather, we want to understand the relation of humans to nature, not just assuming the character of this relation by incorporating it in what we suppose are nature’s fundamental laws, but rather by deduction from laws that make no explicit reference to humans.,,, In quantum mechanics these probabilities do not exist until people choose what to measure, such as the spin in one or another direction. Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,,,” – Steven Weinberg –

Weinberg rejected the instrumentalist approach precisely because “humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level” and because it undermined the Darwinian worldview from within. Yet, regardless of how he and other atheists may prefer the world to behave, quantum mechanics itself could care less how atheists prefer the world to behave. For instance, this recent 2019 experimental confirmation of the “Wigner’s Friend” thought experiment established that “measurement results,, must be understood relative to the observer who performed the measurement”.

More Than One Reality Exists (in Quantum Physics) By Mindy Weisberger – March 20, 2019 Excerpt: “measurement results,, must be understood relative to the observer who performed the measurement”. https://www.livescience.com/65029-dueling-reality-photons.html

Moreover, although there have been several major loopholes in quantum mechanics over the past several decades that atheists have tried to appeal to in order to try to avoid the ‘spooky’ Theistic implications of quantum mechanics, over the past several years each of those major loopholes have each been closed one by one. The last major loophole that was left to be closed was the “setting independence” and/or the ‘free-will’ loophole:

Closing the ‘free will’ loophole: Using distant quasars to test Bell’s theorem – February 20, 2014 Excerpt: Though two major loopholes have since been closed, a third remains; physicists refer to it as “setting independence,” or more provocatively, “free will.” This loophole proposes that a particle detector’s settings may “conspire” with events in the shared causal past of the detectors themselves to determine which properties of the particle to measure — a scenario that, however far-fetched, implies that a physicist running the experiment does not have complete free will in choosing each detector’s setting. Such a scenario would result in biased measurements, suggesting that two particles are correlated more than they actually are, and giving more weight to quantum mechanics than classical physics. “It sounds creepy, but people realized that’s a logical possibility that hasn’t been closed yet,” says MIT’s David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and senior lecturer in the Department of Physics. “Before we make the leap to say the equations of quantum theory tell us the world is inescapably crazy and bizarre, have we closed every conceivable logical loophole, even if they may not seem plausible in the world we know today?” https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140220112515.htm

And now Anton Zeilinger and company have recently, as of 2018, pushed the ‘free will loophole’ back to 7.8 billion years ago, thereby firmly establishing the ‘common sense’ fact that the free will choices of the experimenter in the quantum experiments are truly free and are not determined by any possible causal influences from the past for at least the last 7.8 billion years, and that experimenters themselves are therefore shown to be truly free to choose whatever measurement settings in the experiments that he or she may so desire to choose so as to ‘logically’ probe whatever aspect of reality that he or she may be interested in probing.

Cosmic Bell Test Using Random Measurement Settings from High-Redshift Quasars – Anton Zeilinger – 14 June 2018 Abstract: In this Letter, we present a cosmic Bell experiment with polarization-entangled photons, in which measurement settings were determined based on real-time measurements of the wavelength of photons from high-redshift quasars, whose light was emitted billions of years ago; the experiment simultaneously ensures locality. Assuming fair sampling for all detected photons and that the wavelength of the quasar photons had not been selectively altered or previewed between emission and detection, we observe statistically significant violation of Bell’s inequality by 9.3 standard deviations, corresponding to an estimated p value of ? 7.4 × 10^21. This experiment pushes back to at least ? 7.8 Gyr ago the most recent time by which any local-realist influences could have exploited the “freedom-of-choice” loophole to engineer the observed Bell violation, excluding any such mechanism from 96% of the space-time volume of the past light cone of our experiment, extending from the big bang to today. https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.080403

Moreover, here is another recent interesting experiment by Anton Zeilinger, (and about 70 other researchers), that closed a technical loop-hole and insured the complete independence of the measurement settings in a Bell test by using the free will choices of 100,000 human participants instead of having a super fast randomizer determine the measurement settings (as is usually done in these quantum experiments).

Challenging local realism with human choices – A. Zeilinger – 20 May 2018 Abstract: A Bell test, which challenges the philosophical worldview of local realism against experimental observations, is a randomized trial requiring spatially-distributed entanglement, fast and high-efficiency detection, and unpredictable measurement settings. While technology can perfect the first two of these, and while technological randomness sources enable device-independent protocols based on Bell inequality violation, challenging local realism using physical randomizers inevitably makes assumptions about the same physics one aims to test. Bell himself noted this weakness of physical setting choices and argued that human free will could rigorously be used to assure unpredictability in Bell tests. Here we report a suite of local realism tests using human choices, avoiding assumptions about predictability in physics. We recruited ~100,000 human participants to play an online video game that incentivizes fast, sustained input of unpredictable bits while also illustrating Bell test methodology. The participants generated 97,347,490 binary choices, which were directed via a scalable web platform to twelve laboratories on five continents, in which 13 experiments tested local realism using photons, single atoms, atomic ensembles, and superconducting devices. Over a 12-hour period on the 30 Nov. 2016, participants worldwide provided a sustained flow of over 1000 bits/s to the experiments, which used different human-generated bits to choose each measurement setting. The observed correlations strongly contradict local realism and other realist positions in bi-partite and tri-partite scenarios. Project outcomes include closing of the freedom-of-choice loophole, gamification of statistical and quantum non-locality concepts, new methods for quantum-secured communications, a very large dataset of human-generated randomness, and networking techniques for global participation in experimental science. https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04431

Thus regardless of how Steven Weinberg and other atheists may prefer the universe to behave, with the closing of the last remaining free will loophole in quantum mechanics, “humans are indeed brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level”, and thus these recent findings from quantum mechanics directly undermine, as Weinberg himself stated, the “vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.” On top of that, here is fairly recent video that lays out many lines of evidence from quantum mechanics that, IMHO, overwhelmingly prove that foundational, even defining, attributes of consciousness, and the experimental results we are getting from quantum mechanics, are irrevocably correlated at the deepest level:

How Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Correlate - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f0hL3Nrdas

Moreover allowing free will and/or Agent causality into the laws of physics at their most fundamental level has some fairly profound implications for us personally. First and foremost, allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned,,,, (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders),,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands (with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”.

(February 19, 2019) To support Isabel Piczek’s claim that the Shroud of Turin does indeed reveal a true ‘event horizon’, the following study states that ‘The bottom part of the cloth (containing the dorsal image) would have born all the weight of the man’s supine body, yet the dorsal image is not encoded with a greater amount of intensity than the frontal image.’,,, Moreover, besides gravity being dealt with, the shroud also gives us evidence that Quantum Mechanics was dealt with. In the following paper, it was found that it was not possible to describe the image formation on the Shroud in classical terms but they found it necessary to describe the formation of the image on the Shroud in discrete quantum terms. https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/experiment-quantum-particles-can-violate-the-mathematical-pigeonhole-principle/#comment-673178

To give us a small glimpse of the power that was involved in Christ resurrection from the dead, the following recent article found that, ”it would take 34 Thousand Billion Watts of VUV radiations to make the image on the shroud. This output of electromagnetic energy remains beyond human technology.”

Astonishing discovery at Christ’s tomb supports Turin Shroud – NOV 26TH 2016 Excerpt: The first attempts made to reproduce the face on the Shroud by radiation, used a CO2 laser which produced an image on a linen fabric that is similar at a macroscopic level. However, microscopic analysis showed a coloring that is too deep and many charred linen threads, features that are incompatible with the Shroud image. Instead, the results of ENEA “show that a short and intense burst of VUV directional radiation can color a linen cloth so as to reproduce many of the peculiar characteristics of the body image on the Shroud of Turin, including shades of color, the surface color of the fibrils of the outer linen fabric, and the absence of fluorescence”. ‘However, Enea scientists warn, “it should be noted that the total power of VUV radiations required to instantly color the surface of linen that corresponds to a human of average height, body surface area equal to = 2000 MW/cm2 17000 cm2 = 34 thousand billion watts makes it impractical today to reproduce the entire Shroud image using a single laser excimer, since this power cannot be produced by any VUV light source built to date (the most powerful available on the market come to several billion watts )”. Comment The ENEA study of the Holy Shroud of Turin concluded that it would take 34 Thousand Billion Watts of VUV radiations to make the image on the shroud. This output of electromagnetic energy remains beyond human technology. http://westvirginianews.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-study-claims-shroud-of-turin-is.html

Verse and Video:

Colossians 1:15-20 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. Turin Shroud Hologram Reveals The Words “The Lamb” – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tmka1l8GAQ

Thus in conclusion, despite how badly atheists might want to find a solution to quantum theory that does not involve God, the fact of the matter is that all their proposed 'realist' solutions have utterly failed and the Christian Theist is, once again, scientifically vindicated in his belief that God upholds this universe in its continual existence and, more importantly for us mortal humans, that Christ's resurrection from the dead provides the correct solution for the 'theory of everything'. i.e. The correct solution for 'why' the universe exists in the first place. bornagain77

The author lets the cat out of the bag towards the end of his article:

Bohm’s ideas are also still alive, despite some of the “killer blows” they are reputed to have suffered. There are other options, too. The many-worlds interpretation, where quantum events occur in separate realities, is growing in popularity. This is more appealing to Jerome; he always liked the dangerous idea of a plurality of worlds. In the end, we can be reasonably confident that none of our current interpretations of quantum theory are right. The most likely scenario is we, like Jerome, don’t have all the information necessary to make a correct inference about the nature of reality.

Thus, he apparently did not have the courage of his convictions for Bohm’s ideas when he brought in 'other interpretations' as a possible solution to the experimental results of quantum theory. Here are some of the 'killer blows' to Bohm's pilot wave theory that the author failed to mention in his romanticized characterization of Bohm's ideas: For one, ' pilot-wave theory requires that “hidden variables” exist,'. Yet, "multiple mathematical theorems have all but proven that hidden variables cannot explain away all of the bizarre behaviors seen in quantum mechanics".

The One Theory of Quantum Mechanics That Actually Kind of Makes Sense – But most physicists don’t buy it. – Dec 1, 2016 Excerpt: pilot-wave theory requires that “hidden variables” exist,,, But despite Einstein’s reservations, multiple mathematical theorems have all but proven that hidden variables cannot explain away all of the bizarre behaviors seen in quantum mechanics. http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a24114/pilot-wave-quantum-mechanics-theory/

Besides that, it has now also been experimentally confirmed that “entangled objects do not cause each other to behave the way they do.” And "results demonstrate that a causal influence from one measurement outcome to the other, which may be subluminal, superluminal, or even instantaneous, cannot explain the observed correlations."

Quantum correlations do not imply instant causation – August 12, 2016 Excerpt: A research team led by a Heriot-Watt scientist has shown that the universe is even weirder than had previously been thought. In 2015 the universe was officially proven to be weird. After many decades of research, a series of experiments showed that distant, entangled objects can seemingly interact with each other through what Albert Einstein famously dismissed as “Spooky action at a distance”. A new experiment by an international team led by Heriot-Watt’s Dr Alessandro Fedrizzi has now found that the universe is even weirder than that: entangled objects do not cause each other to behave the way they do. http://phys.org/news/2016-08-quantum-imply-instant-causation.html Experimental test of nonlocal causality – August 10, 2016 DISCUSSION Previous work on causal explanations beyond local hidden-variable models focused on testing Leggett’s crypto-nonlocality (7, 42, 43), a class of models with a very specific choice of hidden variable that is unrelated to Bell’s local causality (44). In contrast, we make no assumptions on the form of the hidden variable and test all models ,,, Our results demonstrate that a causal influence from one measurement outcome to the other, which may be subluminal, superluminal, or even instantaneous, cannot explain the observed correlations.,,, http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600162.full

Moreover, Bohmian mechanics, to put it mildly, simply doesn’t mesh with Quantum Electrodynamics, which is regarded as one of our most precisely tested theories ever in the history of science.

Bohmian mechanics, a ludicrous caricature of Nature - Lubos Motl - July 15, 2013 Excerpt: There's no way out here. If you attempt to emulate a quantum field theory (QED) in this Bohmian way, you introduce lots of ludicrous gears and wheels – much like in the case of the luminiferous aether, they are gears and wheels that don't exist according to pretty much direct observations – and they must be finely adjusted to reproduce what quantum mechanics predicts (sometimes) without any adjustments whatsoever. Every new Bohmian gear or wheel you encounter generally breaks the Lorentz symmetry and makes the (wrong) prediction of a Lorentz violation and you will need to fine-tune infinitely many properties of these gears and wheels to restore the Lorentz invariance and other desirable properties of a physical theory (even a simple and fundamental thing such as the linearity of Schrödinger's equation is really totally unexplained in Bohmian mechanics and requires infinitely many adjustments to hold – while it may be derived from logical consistency in quantum mechanics). It's infinitely unlikely that they take the right values "naturally" so the theory is at least infinitely contrived. More likely, there's no way to adjust the gears and wheels to obtain relativistically invariant predictions at all. I would say that we pretty much directly experimentally observe the fact that the observations obey the Lorentz symmetry; the wave function isn't an observable wave; and lots of other, totally universal and fundamental facts about the symmetries and the interpretation of the basic objects we use in physics. Bohmian mechanics is really trying to deny all these basic principles – it is trying to deny facts that may be pretty much directly extracted from experiments. It is in conflict with the most universal empirical data about the reality collected in the 20th and 21st century. It wants to rape Nature. A pilot-wave-like theory has to be extracted from a very large class of similar classical theories but infinitely many adjustments have to be made – a very special subclass has to be chosen – for the Bohmian theory to reproduce at least some predictions of quantum mechanics (to produce predictions that are at least approximately local, relativistic, rotationally invariant, unitary, linear etc.). But even if one succeeds and the Bohmian theory does reproduce the quantum predictions, we can't really say that it has made the correct predictions because it was sometimes infinitely fudged or adjusted to produce the predetermined goal. On the other hand, quantum mechanics in general and specific quantum mechanical theories in particular genuinely do predict certain facts, including some very general facts about Nature. If you search for theories within the rigid quantum mechanical framework, while obeying the general postulates, you may make many correct predictions or conclusions pretty much without any additional assumptions. https://motls.blogspot.com/2013/07/bohmian-mechanics-ludicrous-caricature.html

A few more insurmountable problems with Bohm's pilot wave theory are clearly elucidated in the following video:

A Critique of Bohmian Mechanics (Pilot Wave theory) - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn2hoU4jaQQ

Thus, despite the author's romanticized characterization of Bohm's ideas the fact of the matter is that the 'killer blows' he mentioned are indeed fatally lethal. The author's claim that "Bohm’s ideas are also still alive" is simply a false claim on his part as far as the empirical science itself is concerned. To the extent Bohm's pilot wave theory lives, it lives only as a scientific zombie that refuses to die. i.e. It only lives in the imagination of 'true believers', such as the author himself, who refuses to let it die the normal death of a failed scientific hypothesis. As to the author's appeal to "other options" besides Bohm's pilot wave theory, (and although atheists will often appeal to multiple interpretations in quantum theory to avoid the obvious Theistic implications of quantum theory), when it comes to quantum theory itself there are, in reality, only two possible approaches to 'interpreting' quantum theory. The “realist” and “instrumentalist” approaches: As Steven Weinberg himself, (who is an atheist himself), stated,

The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics Steven Weinberg JANUARY 19, 2017 Today there are two widely followed approaches to quantum mechanics, the “realist” and “instrumentalist” approaches, which view the origin of probability in measurement in two very different ways.9 ,,, In the instrumentalist approach,,, humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level.,,, the instrumentalist approach turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else. It is not that we object to thinking about humans. Rather, we want to understand the relation of humans to nature, not just assuming the character of this relation by incorporating it in what we suppose are nature’s fundamental laws, but rather by deduction from laws that make no explicit reference to humans.,,, In quantum mechanics these probabilities do not exist until people choose what to measure, such as the spin in one or another direction. Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,,, These problems are partly avoided in the realist—as opposed to the instrumentalist—approach to quantum mechanics. Here one takes the wave function and its deterministic evolution seriously as a description of reality. But this raises other problems. The realist approach has a very strange implication, first worked out in the 1957 Princeton Ph.D. thesis of the late Hugh Everett.,,, In the realist approach the history of the world is endlessly splitting; it does so every time a macroscopic body becomes tied in with a choice of quantum states. This inconceivably huge variety of histories has provided material for science fiction,12,,, There is another thing that is unsatisfactory about the realist approach, beyond our parochial preferences. In this approach the wave function of the multiverse evolves deterministically. We can still talk of probabilities as the fractions of the time that various possible results are found when measurements are performed many times in any one history; but the rules that govern what probabilities are observed would have to follow from the deterministic evolution of the whole multiverse. If this were not the case, to predict probabilities we would need to make some additional assumption about what happens when humans make measurements, and we would be back with the shortcomings of the instrumentalist approach. Several attempts following the realist approach have come close to deducing rules like the Born rule that we know work well experimentally, but I think without final success. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/01/19/trouble-with-quantum-mechanics/

As you can see, Weinberg, again an atheist, rejects the ‘realist’ approach because of the insanity inherent in Everett’s MWI, and also because it does not successfully deal with the Born rule. This is not a minor problem. The irresolvable problem of deriving the "Born rule” within the MWI is clearly elucidated at the 4:30 minute mark of the following video

The Measurement Problem in quantum mechanics - (Inspiring Philosophy) - 2014 video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB7d5V71vUE

bornagain77

I don’t see anything in this article that says that Bohm’s biggest problem was that he wasn’t a materialist. (Actually his first big problem was that he was communist and Marxist at the start of his career.) Like many QM theorists at the time, he was interested in the metaphysical implication of QM, and possible connections to the mind. Also, like most (all?) QM theorists, things like the wave-particle duality and non-locality showed that the material world was not at all as it had been envisioned in the past. A while back I had an interesting discussion about Bohm here, and quoet his from Wikipedia:

In Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order, he used these notions to describe how the appearance of such phenomena might appear differently, or might be characterized by, varying principal factors, depending on contexts such as scales.[1] The implicate (also referred to as the "enfolded") order is seen as a deeper and more fundamental order of reality. In contrast, the explicate or "unfolded" order include the abstractions that humans normally perceive. As he wrote,

In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order. These ordinary notions in fact appear in what is called the "explicate" or "unfolded" order, which is a special and distinguished form contained within the general totality of all the implicate orders (Bohm 1980)

Bohm believed that the weirdness of the behavior of quantum particles is caused by unobserved forces, maintaining that space and time might actually be derived from an even deeper level of objective reality. In the words of F. David Peat, Bohm considered that what we take for reality are "surface phenomena, explicate forms that have temporarily unfolded out of an underlying implicate order". That is, the implicate order is the ground from which reality emerges.

These ideas are somewhat like metaphysical ideas I have offered here, so I am interested in learning more about Bohm There are a number of reasons why his theories didn’t become the dominant QM interpretation, but the fact that he wasn’t a materialist was not one of them. hazel