From: sarfatti@netcom.com (Jack Sarfatti) Subject: Gell-Mann's "FLAPDOODLE" Message-ID: Followup-To: sci.physics Keywords: Quark and Jaguar Review, Mind, Paranormal, Causality Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest) Date: Tue, 7 Jun 1994 02:57:48 GMT Lines: 221 Xref: columba.udac.uu.se sci.physics:11011 sci.skeptic:11096 sci.cognitive:758 sci.math:9517 sci.edu:504 sci.philosophy.meta:1165 comp.ai:1854 alt.paranormal:2102 alt.consciousness:1089 rec.arts.books:11808 alt.sci.physics.new-theories:1294 sci.psychology:3957 Gell-Mann's "Flapdoodle" First part of a review of The Quark and the Jaguar distributed far and wide on the Internet by Jack Sarfatti sarfatti@netcom.com "Bull Tweedle!" Suky Sedgwick Murray dedicates his book to his "Poet" Marcia Southwick and I dedicate this note to my Muse, Suky Sedgwick. We at least have that in common! :-) First, let me say that Gell-Mann's book has some important valid insights and is fundamentally a good book worth reading - but! .... Murray at the beginning of his book admits his fear of making mistakes (1) - well he has made a big one in Chapter 12 called "Quantum Mechanics and Flapdoodle" when it comes to the meaning of Bell's inequality. Like Mermin (Physics Today) and Jeremy Bernstein (Quantum Profiles) before him in their articles and books, he makes the claim indirectly that my well-known ideas distort the truth in the context of a particular oft-quoted letter written by me and A.L. Chickering of Ed Meese's Institute for Contemporary Studies to Richard De Lauer when he was Under Secretary of Defense under Cap Weinberger. (2) So I can rightly claim a direct influence on the content of the book as one of the major outlaws of physics! It's no wonder that I have not gotten a Mac Arthur grant since Murray sits on the board!:-) But seriously, Gell-Mann, great as he is, has simply, in that case, (distracted perhaps by stolen primitive art from Columbia or Ecuador) not thought deeply enough about the problem, and he presents a minority point of view as if it is incontestable and obvious. It is Murray who in fact distorts the truth here while he pretends to correct what he calls "distortion". "Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone." Whoops! my Tipler is showing. :-) Murray's scope in the book as a whole is broad but his depth in this crucial case of nonlocality is shallow. The subject of "nonlocality" sparks irrational reactions and even the Great Gell-Mann is not immune. Murray's logic is faulty as I shall show below, and I shall endeaver to hoist him by his own petard in the manner of Cyrano. Thus, he writes on p.172: "The Story Distorted The principal distortion dessemated in the news media and in various books is the implication, or even the explicit claim, that measuring the polarization, circular or plane, of one of the photons somehow affects the other photon. In fact, the measurement does not cause any physical effect to propagate from one photon to another." In this last remark, Murray seems to ignore Bell's demonstration that the standard statistical predictions of quantum mechanics violate a seemingly innocent criterion of "locality" which says that there is no physical connection between two measurements on correlated photons at a spacelike separation from each other. Physicists who have written that such "superluminal connections" exist include, I believe, in part David Bohm, Henry Stapp, Philipe Eberhard, Oliver Costa De Beauregard, J. P. Vigier, Brian Josephson and Nick Herbert among others. Now, let us not confuse this with the separate idea of faster-than-light communication of useful messages in which phase entanglement is the communication channel. Gell-Mann does not seem to keep this crucial distinction clearly in mind in his popular exposition. None of the physicists mentioned in the above list, other than Nick Herbert maybe (he believes on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday and disbelieves the other days :-)), thinks that standard quantum mechanics allows such faster-than-light communication. Even I don't think that anymore (on at least 5 out of the 7 days! :-)) The important problem is whether there is a generalization of standard quantum mechanical theory, which involves both gravity and the complexity measures that Gell-Mann is so fond of, as well as chaotic amplification from the Planck scale to the chemical scale of 1ev, that permits such strong causality-violating communication on the quantum connection. Brian Josephson suspects that living systems are able to use the quantum connection for communication. This is not crackpot "vitalism" because the claim is not that one has to invoke supernatural forces. The relation of the general theory of the quantum including adaptive systems to the special theory of the quantum of 1925 etc would be analogous to the relation of Einstein's general relativity to Newton's theory. The fact that different pieces of human memory are located in widely separated parts of the brain, cries out for the idea that our immediate subjective mental experience of the unity of self and our perception of the world, is explained by a robust adaptive (or self-referential) macroscopic quantum state in which there are "depth"-dependent deviations from the Born probability rule which would be the limit of zero depth ("depth" as defined by Gell-Mann - hence the "petard" allusion above). That is, generalized quantum mechanics is the solution for the "binding problem" for ordinary consciousness. Gell-Mann continues: "In fact, the measurement does not cause any any physical effect to propagate from one photon to the other. Then what does happen? If, on a particular branch of history, the plane polarization of one photon is measured and thereby specified with certainty, then on the same branch of history the plane polarization of the other photon is also specified with certainty. On a different branch of history the circular polarization of one of the photons may be measured, in which case the circular polarization of both photons is specified with certainty .... no signal passes from one photon to the other in the experiment that confirms quantum mechanics. No action at a distance takes place." p.172 First of all Gell-Mann acts as though no other interpretation of standard quantum mechanics is possible. For example, in Bohm's interpretation there is a clear action at a distance from a "super quantum potential" in his "field theory" as explained in detail in the books Quantum Implications and Undivided Universe (with Hiley). But let us accept Gell-Mann's interpretation as the only true one. His argument then implies that it is the observer's free choice of whether to measure plane or circular polarization that selects out the branch of history that is actualized. Therefore, Gell-Mann is forced into the New Age Camp that he despises in which "we create our own reality". In Gell-Mann's picture we can hop about between different alternative branches. Now what about the "paranormal" thing of actual communication that Gell- Mann really thinks is "crackpot" (3). Suppose you choose to measure circular rather than plane polarization. The fact of standard quantum mechanics that prevents you from decoding a message at one end of a time series ensemble of polarization-correlated photon pairs, is the uncontrollable collapse (with probability 1/2) of the coherent pair wave function into either right circular or left circular polarization for each individual pair. If, on the contrary, Alice could control the collapse into a desired state of say right circular polarization for each photon she detects, then, that kind of control would constitute a decodable message to Bob who is detecting the twins to Alice's photons. Now here is the important logical point. This kind of action at a distance communication would happen even in Gell-Mann's interpretation. The interpretation doesn't matter! The interpretation is only a conceptual frame of reference. What does matter is that the rules of the standard theory are being changed but in a testable and rational way. For example, Steven Weinberg has published a nonlinear model of a more general quantum mechanics which does have the kind of communication that Gell-Mann rejects out of hand as crackpot. The issue here is not whether Weinberg's particular model is true or not. The issue is what constitutes good physics and Gell-Mann's uncritical acceptance of the absolute truth of past cause/future effect does physics a disservice to real progress in physics given the fact of the man's enormous power and influence. Recent work on traversable wormhole, described in Kip Thorne's excellent book, Black Holes and Time Warps, show that Murray's grasping at coventional ideas of cause and effect are not at all warranted. Indeed, it can be argued, that the explanation of the indeterminism of individual quantum events is precisely because their conventional past causes must be supplemented by future causes which bring them out of Heisenberg's "potentia" into our actual history. We will see how Gell-Mann explains our actual history of the universe later on. To be continued - that was the bad news. In the next part I will focus on what is really good in Murray's book! Notes: (1) "When the errors concern me or my work, I become furious. The reader of this volume can readily imagine the agonies of embarrassment I am already enduring just through imagining dozens of serious mistakes being found by my friends and colleagues after publication and pointed out, whether gleefully or sorrowfully, to the perfectionist author." ppxv-xvi (2) "A third manifestation of flapdoodle is the submission of proposals, for example to the U. S. Department of Defense, for using quantum mechanics to achieve faster-than-light communication in military contexts." p.173 (3) ".. certain writers have claimed acceptability in quantum mechanics for alleged 'paranormal' phenomena like precognition, in which the results of chance processes are supposed to be known in advance to 'psychic' individuals. ... such phenomena would be just as upsetting in quantum mechanics as in classical physics; if genuine, they would require a complete revamping of the laws of nature as we know them." p.173 Murray is grossly exaggerating. A minor mathematical change in the rules, for example, the one by Weinberg, would easily account for alleged paranormal phenomena which is simply controlled action-at-a- distance. This does mean a violation of the projection axiom of standard theory, but that would be a normal advance in our understanding of the laws of nature.