We are told that quantum Darwinism has passed its first test

Guys guys guys I got something! Here is the question bare with me here, just follow, what if, just think about it but what if we are allll Boltzmann brains that survived!!! We’re the ones that didn’t degrade into nothing yet just think about it mind blowing isn’t it Ooooooooooohhhhhhhh Each one of us is a quantum bubble universe AaronS1978

Seeing that this is the second paper in a row from Philip Ball that more or less proves that he does not know what he is talking about when it comes to quantum mechanics, I think Ball should take a break from trying to author articles on Quantum Mechanics. Here is a scathing review of Ball's last article before this one: In particular, here is the last sentence:

"I don't think it makes sense for me to discuss the paper and Ball's summary more deeply. One would have to correct every sentence that is wrong or at least misleading – which is basically every sentence both in Ball's text as well as the text in Nature. "Quantum leaps midflight" and "quantum trajectory theory" [a term from some incoherent contemporary mutation of Bohmism] my arse, please."

Here is a fuller excerpt from the article:

Experimenters and especially journalists can't write good far-reaching interpretations of QM experiments - June 2019 Philip Ball wrote a text for the Quanta Magazine "Quantum Leaps, Long Assumed to Be Instantaneous, Take Time" which makes semi-covert statements that an experiment has allegedly disproved the basic principles of quantum mechanics. That much is clear from the title. The subtitle is even a bit more radical than that: "An experiment caught a quantum system in the middle of a jump — something the originators of quantum mechanics assumed was impossible." Another text saying that the founding fathers of quantum mechanics were not only wrong but idiots, as some current geniuses revealed. In reality, it's the other way around, of course. The article by science journalist Philip Ball is promoting a paper in Nature "To catch and reverse a quantum jump mid-flight by Minev, Devoret + 7 co-authors" which reports their results involving an effectively 3-level system and something that they consider a violation of the quantum mechanical wisdom. An artificial superconducting atom is observed to transition from level 0 to level 1 and the authors claim to predict the transition in advance, and to be continuous, after all, by observing whether the transition to level 2 has taken place. And they make various extraordinary statements – although a bit shyly – such as: the 3-level spectrum isn't really discrete; the unpredictable stochastic process of quantum leaps is predictable, after all, and more. Needless to say, every single one of these statements is completely wrong. When one measures an observable such as H that has three eigenvalues, E0,E1,E2, then the spectrum is discrete and there is no continuous way for the system to interpolate between the levels. The jumps are discrete or quantized, indeed. The discreteness of some observables is the reason why quantum mechanics uses the "quantum" adjective. To dispute this basic fact is an extraordinary statement. Observing the presence of the atom at the highest level 2 may be claimed to be "clever" by someone who just hypes some random experiment but a more unambiguous fact is that this observation changes the experiment. In particular, everyone who knows the Quantum Zeno Effect realizes that if you constantly watch whether the system that was known not to be at level 2 has transitioned to level 2, it will never get there! And if you pretend that you don't have to be careful about what you're actually doing with the system and what you're observing because it doesn't matter, then your conclusions are guaranteed to be garbage. In quantum mechanics, it always matters whether you're observing and what you're observing. Lots of people can't reconcile their limited minds with this basic new fact that refutes some assumptions that used to underlie classical physics but it's their fault, not a fault of quantum mechanics. The fact that by some added constant observation of something, you are changing the experiment, is something that undergraduate students should learn in the first lectures of an introductory quantum mechanical course. However, it's normal for science writers and even some experimenters to misunderstand these basic these days, and that's why they are often spreading brutal misinterpretations of what is going on which usually culminate in bombshell statements that are totally incorrect. Quite generally, it should be obvious that the experimental part of this work is rather trivial and straightforward. But most of the paper in Nature is about some theoretical interpretations if not philosophical musings. And because the authors aren't theorists – or at least, they are not good theorists – the result of this "visiting scholarship" into theory is unsurprisingly bad. Every sentence is at least a little bit wrong. Scientists simply shouldn't try to do scholarship in disciplines they're not verifiably good at. Needless to say, they haven't found anything that would disagree with the predictions of quantum mechanics, as defined by the Copenhagen folks and derivable from the Copenhagen rules, which is why their statements that they have refuted some Copenhagen ideas is just completely wrong. But a general problem with the culture of science writing as of 2019 is that it doesn't seem to matter to many people in the "system" that the experimenters haven't found anything that violates the predictions by the Copenhagen QM. Instead, they just do some experimental masturbation that isn't new in any way and use this masturbation as an excuse to write completely silly personal opinions of the experimenters about theory. They just use some castrated crippled quasi-classical idiosyncratic theory, falsify this straw man, and claim that some extra mutation is therefore needed. That's not what the proper role of experiments and theory looks like in proper science, Gentlemen. Experimenters have the role to verify the predictions of verifiably well-defined theories, usually written down and calculated by theorists. They may use their creativity to design a clever way to do so but they shouldn't be verifying their own misinterpretations of some philosophical statements. The philosophical statements made by the QM founding fathers are really brilliant generalizations from lots of experiments that were done by very careful and ingenious men. An average man can't change these big principles by randomly talking about a single random experiment. In this sense, experiments like that (plus the interpretations) resemble Afshar's alleged falsification of the Bohr complementarity that I wrote about almost 15 year ago on this blog – I've met Afshar in the pub at that time – the time is fast. I don't think it makes sense for me to discuss the paper and Ball's summary more deeply. One would have to correct every sentence that is wrong or at least misleading – which is basically every sentence both in Ball's text as well as the text in Nature. "Quantum leaps midflight" and "quantum trajectory theory" [a term from some incoherent contemporary mutation of Bohmism] my arse, please. https://motls.blogspot.com/2019/06/experimenters-and-especially.html

He is equally scathing of Ball's current article on "Quantum Darwinism":

Quanta Magazine's anti-quantum zeal Most people enjoy the summer. There are lots of things to write about but the interest is refocused on the holiday activities. To avoid week-long hiatuses, let me mention a new article by Philip Ball in the Quanta Magazine: Quantum Darwinism, an Idea to Explain Objective Reality, Passes First Tests What I find remarkable is that virtually every single sentence in the article is completely wrong. The "new story" that is discussed is about the purported tests of "Quantum Darwinism": the information that can copy itself in a nearly classical way becomes the information that is likely to become the information perceived as classical in a classical limit. So the observables compete for the "survival of the fittest", Wojciech Zurek said, and that's needed for the classical limit to emerge. That's nice and it's true in some sense but it is not a new theory or a new piece of a theory that has to be added to quantum mechanics. Instead, it is just a story and a way to talk about some consequences of an underlying theory in a class of contexts. And the underlying theory must still be quantum mechanics for Quantum Darwinism to work. The rest is a straightforward, nearly tautological, derivation combined with marketing. Indeed, there is no "hard science" behind the recommendation to promote the analogy between the emergence of a classical limit from quantum mechanics; and Darwin's theory about the origin of species. You may like or dislike this analogy. There is no testable way to find out whether this is the right way of thinking. The analogy is surely imperfect – it is not a precise equivalence – and whether the analogy is close enough to be interesting or worth repeating is up to your taste. Analogies between these vastly different fields are at most a matter of pop science, pedagogy, or marketing; they are not science. So these experiments aren't really testing any new fundamental theory. They're just testing quantum mechanics because the rephrasing of the "story" in terms of "Quantum Darwinism" is nothing else than another consequence of quantum mechanics. As long as the derivation is done correctly, the predictions follow from normal quantum mechanics and their confirmation – which is pretty much guaranteed – is nothing else than another confirmation of quantum mechanics. Like either Zurek's buzzwords, einselection and especially decoherence, these are just buzzwords conveying pretty much the same content. There is nothing interesting in these experiments to be seen – they're just technically undemanding trivialities whose performers are making living out of the fog that surrounds quantum mechanics in the eyes of the laymen. And it's this fog that is primary. While they always end up with the conclusion that "the theory has passed the tests", they always love to add their own misinterpretations and misunderstandings about what the theory – quantum mechanics – actually says. Let me look at Ball's initial motivation and introduction. Quantum Darwinism, an Idea to Explain Objective Reality, Passes First Tests That's too bad if an idea linked to quantum mechanics "explains objective reality" because a primary fact proven in the quantum revolution is that the reality isn't "objective" – it is unavoidably observer-dependent and in this sense "subjective". It’s not surprising that quantum physics has a reputation for being weird and counterintuitive. The world we’re living in sure doesn’t feel quantum mechanical. What's remarkably about these two first sentences of the article is that they are exactly what Sidney Coleman mocked in his 1994 talk Quantum Mechanics In Your Face (TRF 2010). Let me quote from my older text: At the very end, Sidney paraphrases a wise comment by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. People used to believe geocentrism. Wittgenstein asked why people had usually considered such a history "natural". His friend told him that it was because it "looks like" the Sun is revolving around the Earth. Wittgenstein replied with this key point: Well, what would it look like if it had looked as if the Earth were rotating? :-) Obviously, it would look exactly like the world around us. ;-) It's natural for things to move - and people could have known for quite some time that "free motion" is indistinguishable from the rest (the old principle of relativity, perhaps combined with the equivalence of inertial and gravitational masses). Some people try to justify the scientifically invalid approach of the geocentrists but they are just wrong. The conclusion that "it seems that geocentrism had to be valid" was always completely irrational. It couldn't have ever been justified by the scientific evidence. Geocentrism was always a naive emotional dogma that was spreading by the "consensus" of the blinded believers, not by rational arguments. In the very same way, some people keep on saying that it "looks like" there must be a classical mechanism beneath the quantum phenomena - a real process corresponding to the reduction of the wave packet. But Coleman encouraged everyone to seriously consider the following question: Well, what would it look like if it looked like that the world is really following the causal laws of quantum physics without any [objectively real, he meant] reductions of the wave packets - and not any laws of classical physics - at the fundamental level? Needless to say, it would look exactly as our ordinary everyday life. Welcome home. :-) And thank you for your patience. So nice! ;-) So Mr Ball, you're wrong about thousands of technicalities and your and your soulmates' proposals to replace quantum mechanics with something else. But at the root of all this misguided activity, there is this single, obvious, wrong assumption: you just believe that quantum mechanics is incompatible with our observations. You never state this belief of yours in these clear words because you don't have the courage. You know that if you said quantum mechanics contradicts my observations, many more people would understand – and join me in pointing out – that you are completely misguided about the very basic points in physics. So you are obfuscating the belief of yours in various ways. But at the very end, you do believe that quantum mechanics is incompatible with observations. But it isn't. It is perfectly compatible – otherwise physicists would have already thrown it away. Quantum mechanics is perfectly compatible with our observations of the very small, of the very big, and everything in between, too. The vexing question then becomes: How do quantum probabilities coalesce into the sharp focus of the classical world? Well, the only correct answer is that it never does and you've been writing nonsense throughout your life. But for some reasons, you don't like this answer, do you? You would prefer a different one, wouldn't you? Our world works according to probabilistic laws – and it's true not only in the intrinsically quantum situations. In practice, the laws are probabilistic even when a classical approximation of the laws looks good enough, like in the casinos. Every kid knows that some things occur by chance. Last night, I watched the 1968 crime soap opera The Sinful People of the City of Prague (the episode about a missing shoe) where the cops shared the quote After all, chance is God by Anatole France (the TV quote was simplified, the page I linked to says "Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign."). Even very regular people know very well that chance is very important and omnipresent in our world! Quantum mechanics adds the uncertainty principle which guarantees that some degree of uncertainty – i.e. some existence of probabilities that are strictly in between 0 and 100 percent – is unavoidable. And indeed, it is unavoidable in Nature. Statements about big objects' properties may "look" certain because quantum mechanics may predict probabilities to be 99.9999% or higher for statements that are sufficiently trivial – vicinities of some dominant mean values of the predictions etc. If the vicinities are much broader than the error margin, the certainly may get very close to 100%. But quantum mechanics never allows the certainty to go to 100% for generic, non-tautological propositions (except for statements guaranteed by the conservation laws etc.). But in fact there’s no reason to think that the large and the small have fundamentally different rules, or that there’s a sudden switch between them. Right. But the correct theory that holds for the small and the large is quantum mechanics, not a classical or objective theory as you believe. Over the past several decades, researchers have achieved a greater understanding of how quantum mechanics inevitably becomes classical mechanics through an interaction between a particle or other microscopic system and its surrounding environment. Quantum mechanics can never "become" classical physics. Quantum mechanics is one in which FG?GF for a general pair of observables F,G is nonzero, proportional to Planck's reduced constant ?. Classical physics is where FG?GF=0. For this reason, quantum mechanics cannot become classical physics in the exact same sense in which a nonzero number such as two or pi can never become zero. Ball's writing is a typical example of the manipulative pseudoscience. All of this garbage rhetoric, useless experiments, their interpretations, hopeless new alternative theories, would-be arguments for them etc. is motivated by the consumers' belief that quantum mechanics disagrees with the observation. But this fundamental assumption of this whole quantum flapdoodle industry is a dogma everyone must remain silent about. It's never properly tested by these people – if they tested it (they would first have to learn quantum mechanics and how to make predictions using it which they clearly misunderstand), they could see that the fundamental dogma of this industry, and therefore every single "research direction" motivated by it, is wrong. But they don't really want to settle this question because the anti-quantum zeal is a religion of a sort and the emitters of fog about quantum mechanics are religious bigots. https://motls.blogspot.com/2019/07/quanta-magazines-anti-quantum-zeal.html

bornagain77

you know now I’m just getting annoyed, If you can’t figure it out just add Darwinism AaronS1978

I’ve said this 1 million times and I’ve posted it multiple times on this site the philosophy of Darwinism is capable of explaining even the universe there is literally nothing it can’t explain. I need no more proof than this it was only a matter of time when they started doing it to the rest of the universe By the way I’m going to figure out why we are the only fine-tuned universe in all of existence I’m gonna add a dash of natural selection and answer the question right now Because were the only stable universe that could exist all other universes deteriorated and so our universe was naturally selected because it had the advantage of being stable and having an unequal amount of both dark matter and antimatter when it produced the Big Bang produced the universe Which in turn gave our universe the selective advantage to survive over all the other universes which were unstable THE END! Thank you Charles for a theory that is capable of enveloping absolutely anything and everything and need not have proof because everything supports it. it is a philosophy It is metaphysics With this theory I deserve a PhD in every form of science AaronS1978

The main flaw in Zurek's argument is that he presuppose particles, during decoherence, and via entanglement, are somehow influencing the states of other particles:

The answer often given is that superpositions are fragile, easily disrupted when a delicate quantum system is buffeted by its noisy environment. But that’s not quite right. When any two quantum objects interact, they get “entangled” with each other, entering a shared quantum state in which the possibilities for their properties are interdependent. So say an atom is put into a superposition of two possible states for the quantum property called spin: “up” and “down.” Now the atom is released into the air, where it collides with an air molecule and becomes entangled with it. The two are now in a joint superposition. If the atom is spin-up, then the air molecule might be pushed one way, while, if the atom is spin-down, the air molecule goes another way — and these two possibilities coexist. As the particles experience yet more collisions with other air molecules, the entanglement spreads, and the superposition initially specific to the atom becomes ever more diffuse. The atom’s superposed states no longer interfere coherently with one another because they are now entangled with other states in the surrounding environment — including, perhaps, some large measuring instrument. To that measuring device, it looks as though the atom’s superposition has vanished and been replaced by a menu of possible classical-like outcomes that no longer interfere with one another.,,, Zurek calls these “pointer states,” because they can be encoded in the possible states of a pointer on the dial of a measuring instrument. A particular location of a particle, for instance, or its speed, the value of its quantum spin, or its polarization direction can be registered as the position of a pointer on a measuring device. Zurek argues that classical behavior — the existence of well-defined, stable, objective properties — is possible only because pointer states of quantum objects exist.,,, Thus, as Zurek argued in the 2000s, our ability to observe some property depends not only on whether it is selected as a pointer state, but also on how substantial a footprint it makes in the environment. The states that are best at creating replicas in the environment — the “fittest,” you might say — are the only ones accessible to measurement.

Zurek is basically arguing that the pointer state of a particular particle is somehow 'fitter' than the pointer states of other particles and is influencing and/or "creating replicas" in other particles. Small problem, decoherence itself, as they themselves admitted in the article, is a process involving a particle becoming quantumly entangled with the environment. And quantum entanglement is proven to be a thoroughly 'non-local', beyond space and time, affair that is not explainable by reference to the particles themselves..

Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory – 29 October 2012 Excerpt: “Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,” http://www.quantumlah.org/highlight/121029_hidden_influences.php Einstein vs quantum mechanics, and why he’d be a convert today – June 13, 2014 Excerpt: In a nutshell, experimentalists John Clauser, Alain Aspect, Anton Zeilinger, Paul Kwiat and colleagues have performed the Bell proposal for a test of Einstein’s hidden variable theories. All results so far support quantum mechanics. It seems that when two particles undergo entanglement, whatever happens to one of the particles can instantly affect the other, even if the particles are separated! http://phys.org/news/2014-06-einstein-quantum-mechanics-hed-today.html Einstein wouldn’t like it: New test proves universe is “spooky” – Oct 21, 2015 Excerpt: Eighty years after the physicist (Einstein) dismissed as “spooky” the idea that simply observing one particle could instantly change another far-away object, Dutch scientists said on Wednesday they had proved decisively that the effect was real. Writing in the journal Nature, researchers detailed an experiment showing how two electrons at separate locations 1.3 km (0.8 mile) apart on the Delft University of Technology campus demonstrated a clear, invisible and instantaneous connection. Importantly, the new study closed loopholes in earlier tests that had left some doubt as to whether the eerie connection predicted by quantum theory was real or not. Einstein famously insisted in a 1935 scientific paper that what he called “spooky action at a distance” had to be wrong and there must be undiscovered properties of particles to explain such counter-intuitive behavior. The idea certainly confounds our day-to-day experience of the world, where change only appears to occur through local interactions. But in recent decades scientific evidence has been building that particles can indeed become “entangled”, so that no matter how far apart they are, they will always be connected. The Delft experiment is conclusive because, for the first time, scientists have closed two potential loopholes at once. The first suggests that particles could somehow synchronize behavior ahead of time, while the second implies that testing might detect only a subset of prepared entangled pairs. To prove their case, the team led by Delft professor Ronald Hanson used two diamonds containing tiny traps for electrons with a magnetic property called spin and measured all entangled pairs across 1.3 km separating two laboratories. The experiment effectively closes a chapter in an 80-year scientific debate, http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/21/us-science-universe-einstein-idUSKCN0SF2GQ20151021

Simply put, one cannot appeal to the particles themselves, whether they be 'pointer particles' or not, as Zurek is doing, to explain quantum entanglement, but we are forced to appeal to a 'non-local' cause that is beyond space-time, matter-energy. Atheistic materialists are at a complete loss to explain how particles can be possibly be correlated,,,

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

,,, And while atheistic materialists are at a complete loss to explain how particles can be correlated, on the other hand Christian Theists readily have a beyond space-time, matter-energy, cause that they can appeal to in order to explain the quantum non-locality of entanglement:

Colossians 1:17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

bornagain77

"As in natural selection, the survivors are those that make the most copies of themselves." Allowing a sub-set to "make the most copies of themselves" should guarantee STAGNATION. And so how does such a system explain whales and bats and sea snakes (air breathing reptiles that lay their eggs on dry land but spend the rest of their lives in the ocean)? Shouldn't the tiny population of a newly emerging species ALWAYS get swamped by the stagnated "as is"? But I get the idea that all these new theories are just stuff for downcast atheists to talk about among themselves. vmahuna

Well golly gee whiz, not only can the 'designer substitute' of natural selection create the overwhelming 'appearance of design' in biology, but apparently natural selection can now also be a stand in for God so as to explain quantum wave collapse and thus explain the continual existence of the universe itself. Apparently, there simply nothing that natural selection, (and a lot of unrestrained imagination), can't do. I wonder if they can add this miracle working natural selection stuff to washing detergents so that we may finally get whiter whites? Of course there will always be others, (i.e. Creationist lunatics), who will not be so easily impressed with this supposedly omnipotent power of natural selection to explain, not only all life in the universe, but apparently now also explain the existence of the universe itself.

As Adam Sedgwick originally pointed out to Charles Darwin himself about his theory of natural selection, “what is it but a secondary consequence of supposed, or known, primary facts. Development is a better word because more close to the cause of the fact.”,,, and yet,,, “You write of “natural selection” as if it were done consciously by the selecting agent.” From Adam Sedgwick to Charles Darwin? 24 November 1859 Cambridge Excerpt: As to your grand principle—natural selection—what is it but a secondary consequence of supposed, or known, primary facts. Development is a better word because more close to the cause of the fact. For you do not deny causation. I call (in the abstract) causation the will of God: & I can prove that He acts for the good of His creatures. He also acts by laws which we can study & comprehend— Acting by law, & under what is called final cause, comprehends, I think, your whole principle. You write of “natural selection” as if it were done consciously by the selecting agent. ’Tis but a consequence of the presupposed development, & the subsequent battle for life.— https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2548.xml ",, intelligent design is a thoroughly apt phrase, signifying that design is inferred because an intelligent agent has done what only intelligent agents can do, namely, make a choice. If intelligent design is a thoroughly apt phrase, the same cannot be said for the phrase natural selection. The second word of the phrase natural selection, is of course a synonym for choice. Indeed the l-e-c in selection is a variant of the l-e-g that in the Latin lego means to choose or select, and that also appears as l-i-g in intelligence. Natural selection is therefore an oxymoron. It attributes the power to choose, which properly belongs to intelligent agents, to natural causes, which inherently lack the power to choose." - William Dembski - Science and the Myth of Progress - pg 294 - 2003 https://books.google.com/books?id=9w53fjGdnAoC&pg=PA294 No Controversies About Darwinism? Try This One - May 30, 2017 Excerpt: “Natural selection functions in the realm of philosophy, not science.” For support, he quotes none other than staunch Darwinian Richard Lewontin of Harvard, who at least had the intellectual rigor to critically examine the meaning of natural selection: "For what good is a theory that is guaranteed by its internal logical structure to agree with all conceivable observations, irrespective of the real structure of the world? If scientists are going to use logically unbeatable theories about the world, they might as well give up natural science and take up religion. Yet is that not exactly the situation with Darwinism?" (Lewontin, “Testing the Theory of Natural Selection,” Nature 236, no. 543 (1972): 181-182, cited by Bethell, p. 65).,,, E.O. Wilson claims that kin selection is unscientific. His opponents will counter that group selection is unscientific. Perhaps it’s all unscientific. Its definitions are fuzzy, its units are unspecified, and it predicts opposite outcomes with equal ease. It cannot be falsified. Students, and thoughtful adults, deserve to know such things. https://www.evolutionnews.org/2017/05/no-controversies-about-darwinism-try-this-one/ “Darwinism provided an explanation for the appearance of design, and argued that there is no Designer -- or, if you will, the designer is natural selection. If that's out of the way -- if that (natural selection) just does not explain the evidence -- then the flip side of that is, well, things appear designed because they are designed.” Richard Sternberg - Living Waters documentary Whale Evolution vs. Population Genetics - Richard Sternberg and Paul Nelson - (excerpt from Living Waters video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0csd3M4bc0Q

bornagain77