Quantum angels

One of the reasons I get so impatient with woo-woos is that science is plenty cool enough without making shit up.

But because quantum physics is already weird even without any embellishment or misinterpretation, it's been particularly prone to being co-opted by woo-woos in their search for explanations supporting (choose one or more of the following):

• homeopathy
• psychic abilities
• astrology
• "natural healing"
• the soul
• "chakras" and "qi"
• auras

But you don't need to do any of this to make quantum physics cool, and I've got two good examples.  Let's start with an experiment regarding quantum entanglement -- the linking of two particles in a state describable by a single wave function.  While this might seem uninteresting at first, what it implies is that altering the spin state of particle A would instantaneously change the spin state of its entangled partner, particle B -- regardless of how far apart the two were.  It's almost as if the two were engaging in faster-than-light communication.  Most physicists, of course, do not believe this is what happens -- that it's more like separating a pair of gloves, each in its own sealed box, and sending one to Alpha Centauri.  Then you open the box that's still here on Earth, and find it contains the right-handed glove; at that point, you automatically know that the one on Alpha Centauri must contain the left-handed glove.  Information didn't travel anywhere; that knowledge is just a function of how the pairing works.

However, entanglement is still one of those things that isn't fully explained, even that way.  There's a further twist on this, and that's where things get even more interesting.  Most physicists couple the entanglement phenomenon with the idea of "local realism" -- that the two particles' spin must have been pointing in some direction prior to measurement, even if we didn't know what it was.  Thus, the two entangled particles might have "agreed" (to use an admittedly anthropomorphic term) on what the spin direction would be prior to being separated, simulating communication where there was none, and preserving Einstein's idea that the theories of relativity prohibit faster-than-light communication.

Right?

Scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands seem to have closed that loophole.  Using an extremely fast random number generator, they altered the spin state of one of two entangled particles separated by 1.3 kilometers, and measured the effect on its partner.  The distance makes it impossible for sub-light-speed communication between the two.  This tosses out the idea of local realism; if the experiment's results hold -- and they certainly seem to be doing so -- the particles were indeed communicating faster than light, something that isn't supposed to be possible.  Einstein was so repelled by this idea that he called it "spooky action at a distance."

To quote the press release:

With the help of ICFO’s quantum random number generators, the Delft experiment gives a nearly perfect disproof of Einstein's world-view, in which "nothing travels faster than light" and “God does not play dice.”  At least one of these statements must be wrong.  The laws that govern the Universe may indeed be a throw of the dice.

If this wasn't weird and cool enough, a second experiment performed right here at Cornell University supported one of the weirdest results of quantum theory -- that a system cannot change while you're watching it.

Graduate students Yogesh Patil and Srivatsan K. Chakram cooled about a billion atoms of rubidium to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, and suspended them between lasers.  Under such conditions, the atoms formed an orderly crystal lattice.  But because of an effect called "quantum tunneling," even though the atoms were cold -- and thus nearly motionless -- they could shift positions in the lattice, leading to the result that any given atom could be anywhere in the lattice at any time.

Patel and Chakram found that you can stop this effect simply by observing the atoms.

This is the best experimental verification yet of what's been nicknamed the Quantum Zeno effect, after the Greek philosopher who said that motion was impossible because anyone moving from Point A to Point B would have to cross half the distance, then half the remaining distance, then half again, and so on ad infinitum -- and thus would never arrive.  Motion, Zeno said, must therefore be an illusion.

"This is the first observation of the Quantum Zeno effect by real space measurement of atomic motion," lab director Mukund Vengalattore said.  "Also, due to the high degree of control we've been able to demonstrate in our experiments, we can gradually 'tune' the manner in which we observe these atoms.  Using this tuning, we've also been able to demonstrate an effect called 'emergent classicality' in this quantum system."

Myself, I'm not reminded so much of Zeno as I am of another thing that doesn't move while you watch it.

See what I mean?  You don't need to add all sorts of woo-woo nonsense to this stuff to make it fascinating.  It's cool enough on its own.

Of course, the problem is, understanding it takes some serious effort.  Physics is cool, but it's not easy.  All of which supports a contention I've had for years; that woo-wooism is, at its heart, based in laziness.

Me, I'd rather work a little harder and understand reality as it is.  Even if it leaves me afraid to blink.

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Spookier action

One of the downsides of being a layperson rather than a scientist (and I very much consider myself to be the former, despite having been a science teacher for over three decades) is that my understanding is hampered simply because it's impossible to know all the details of research by people who are way smarter than I am.

This is worst in completely counter-intuitive disciplines like quantum physics.

That doesn't prevent me from being really interested in all this stuff.  I was just discussing quantum entanglement with a dear friend a couple of days ago (as one does), and his question was, "Could you use it to communicate information?"  On the surface, it seems like it should be possible, right?

It's not -- at least as far as our current understanding goes.  But the reason isn't obvious on first glance.  In entanglement, a pair of particles is created which can be described by a single wave function; this means that their states are correlated, and knowing the state of one of them automatically tells you the state of the other, regardless of how far apart they are.  Let's say you and I create an entangled pair that has a net spin of zero.  You take your particle to Tokyo and I take mine to Lisbon.  Then you measure yours, and find it has a spin axis pointing upward.  I know immediately that if I measure mine, it will have a spin axis pointing downward.

Graph of the wave function of a single particle [Image is in the Public Domain]

So far, it seems like, "what's so weird about that?"  It doesn't seem any more remarkable than having a matched pair of gloves each in its own sealed box, and if you open your box in Tokyo and find it's a left-handed glove, mine in Lisbon has to be a right-handed glove.  The reality of the particles is weirder -- the members of the entangled pair are neither spin-up nor spin-down until they're measured, but in a state of superposition -- existing in a field of probabilities of both states at the same time.  Only once one of them is measured does it lock in to a particular state, and that measurement is what locks in the other particle simultaneously -- something Einstein famously called "spooky action at a distance."

Okay, so why couldn't that be used for communication?  The reason is rather subtle.  Let's say you want to communicate something simple, something that can be answered "yes" or "no."  So you and I take the two particles in our entangled pair to Tokyo and Lisbon, respectively.  We agree ahead of time that once you get there, you are going to go outside to see if it's a clear day and whether you can see Mount Fuji.  If you can, you will force your particle into a spin-up state; won't that force mine into a spin-down state, thus communicating the information to me instantaneously, thousands of miles away?

The answer is no.  The reason is, you didn't just measure your particle's state, you changed it.  And this breaks the entanglement.  The moment you do anything to alter the state of your particle, it decouples it from mine, and my particle now has a 50/50 chance of being spin-up or spin-down; it's no longer affected by what happens to yours.  Every kind of information transfer known requires changing the state of the particles you're using to carry the information, and that transfer can only travel at the speed of light or slower.

So it seems like the faster-than-light "subspace communication" used in Star Trek is impossible, right?

Well... maybe.

This is where I skate out over very thin ice, because what got all this started (besides the conversation with my friend) was a paper last week in Quantum Science and Technology which -- if I'm reading it right, and I might well not be -- suggests that there might be a way around this, by sending information (1) without using particles, and (2) by having the information go directly from sender to receiver without traveling through the intervening space.

If you're thinking, "That sounds like a wormhole" -- exactly.  Hatim Salih, of the University of Bristol, says he's found a way to create a "traversable wormhole" that could transfer quantum information instantaneously.

Salih calls this even-spookier-action-at-a-distance counterportation.  "Here’s the sharp distinction," he said in a news release.  "While counterportation achieves the end goal of teleportation, namely disembodied transport, it remarkably does so without any detectable information carriers traveling across.  If counterportation is to be realized, an entirely new type of quantum computer has to be built: an exchange-free one, where communicating parties exchange no particles.  By contrast to large-scale quantum computers that promise remarkable speed-ups, which no one yet knows how to build, the promise of exchange-free quantum computers of even the smallest scale is to make seemingly impossible tasks – such as counterportation – possible, by incorporating space in a fundamental way alongside time."

"We experience a classical world which is actually built from quantum objects," said John Rarity, Salih's colleague at the University of Bristol.  "The proposed experiment can reveal this underlying quantum nature showing that entirely separate quantum particles can be correlated without ever interacting.  This correlation at a distance can then be used to transport quantum information (qbits) from one location to another without a particle having to traverse the space, creating what could be called a traversable wormhole."

Okay... that's just nifty, but... but... Einstein?  Speed of light?  How do you avoid the paradoxes that come with faster-than-light information transfer?

Maybe there's something I'm not understanding, here.  All right, to be fair, I'm sure there's a gazillion things I'm not understanding, here.  Cf. my aforementioned layperson status.  But it sure seems like if you can do this, you're talking about something that would break the cosmic speed limit for information transfer, and shake physics down to its roots.

Much as I'd love to see the world of Star Trek realized, I'm pretty certain that I'm missing something critical, and this isn't going to turn out to be what it sounds like.  There's probably some subtlety -- like the measuring-versus-changing distinction in entanglement -- that isn't apparent.

What that might be, however, escapes me.  If any physicists read this post, do enlighten me.  While I don't relish the idea of my hopes being dashed, I'm virtually certain they will be.  And as Carl Sagan so trenchantly put it, "For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

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Nonlocal and unreal

This year, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to three scientists who have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that our common-sense perception of how the universe works is very, very far off from the reality.

What that reality actually is remains to be seen.

John Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeilinger were the recipients of the award this year "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science."  Their experiments established a mind-boggling fact: the universe is not locally real.

What that means, in non-technical language, is harder to pin down.  In physics, the concept of locality has to do with the fact that information transfer has a speed limit -- the speed of light.  If an event occurs at one point in space, then that event can only affect another point in space if it's nearby enough that light has enough time to travel between one and the other.  Reality means that an object's properties are independent of observation; it's a hard-science version of the time-honored question, "if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there, does it make a sound?"

While the "locality" piece isn't perhaps something that impacts us on a daily basis -- light travels so fast that on the scales we usually deal with, it may as well be instantaneous -- "reality" certainly does.  Even the physicists balked for decades against the hints they were getting that locality and reality were on shaky ground.  No less a luminary than Albert Einstein said, "Do you really believe that the Moon is not there when you are not looking at it?"  But ever since Northern Irish physicist John Stewart Bell first proposed that there was something at the heart of quantum mechanics that called local reality into question, way back in 1962, the loopholes for avoiding that bizarre conclusion have been closing one by one.

The heart of the problem lies with entanglement.  The idea here is that you can create a pair of particles such that you know if one has a particular property (such as a spin axis pointing up) the other will have the opposite property (spin axis pointing down).  So far, nothing too weird about that.  It's no odder than putting each of a pair of gloves into a sealed box, and handing a box to your friend; if when your friend opens his box, he finds a left-handed glove, you automatically know your box must contain the right-handed one.  The system was set up that way.

But what Bell implied was that this wasn't the case.  The gloves were neither right nor left until you opened one of the boxes; if your friend did that, and observed a left-handed glove, the glove in your box "sensed that" (whatever the hell that means!) and instantaneously became right-handed, regardless of how far apart they were at the time.  The measurement process somehow created the state of the system, even if the parts of it were separated by a distance too great for light to cross.

For a long time, the prevailing approach amongst physicists was just to pretend it wasn't happening, an approach David Mermin summed up as "shut up and calculate."  Perhaps there were "hidden variables" that made some sort of locally real explanation account for the strange phenomenon of entanglement; using our analogy, that the gloves were what they were even though they hadn't been observed yet, no superluminal communication necessary.  And for a while, they kind of got away with it.  But with a series of ingenious experiments, Clauser, Aspect, and Zeilinger conclusively showed that there are no hidden variables; the universe, it seems, is not locally real.

What exactly is happening is another matter.  The three recipients of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics have shown that what John Stewart Bell proposed sixty years ago is spot-on correct, as crazy as it sounds.  There is something about the process of observation that does lock the observed object into a particular state faster than should be possible; Schrödinger's long-suffering cat seems to be not a wild metaphor but how the universe actually works.

I find this whole thing fascinating but a little overwhelming.  It's hard to imagine how our physical surroundings can behave in a manner so completely opposite to our common-sense notions.  But Clauser, Aspect, and Zeilinger have demonstrated conclusively that they do -- and it lies with the rest of the physics community to tell us laypeople exactly what that means.

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Spooky action, weeping angels, and quantum physics

One of the reasons I get so impatient with woo-woos is that science is plenty cool enough without making shit up.

Today we'll take a look at two examples of this from the field of quantum physics.  Because quantum physics is plenty weird even without any embellishment or misinterpretation, it's been particularly prone to being co-opted by woo-woos in their search for explanations supporting (choose one or more of the following):

• homeopathy
• psychic abilities
• astrology
• the soul
• "chakras" and "qi"
• auras

But you don't need to do any of this to make quantum physics cool.  Let's start with an experiment regarding "quantum entanglement" -- the linking of two particles in a state describable by a single wave function.  While this might seem uninteresting at first, what it implies is that altering the spin state of particle A would instantaneously change the spin state of its entangled partner, particle B -- regardless of how far apart the two were.  It's almost as if the two were engaging in faster-than-light communication.

There is a further twist on this, and that's where things get even more interesting.  Most physicists couple the entanglement phenomenon with the idea of "local realism" -- that the two particles' spin must have been pointing in some direction prior to measurement, even if we didn't know what it was.  Thus, the two entangled particles might have "agreed" (to use an admittedly anthropomorphic term) on what the spin direction would be prior to being separated, simulating communication where there was none, and preserving Einstein's idea that the theories of relativity prohibit faster-than-light communication.

Scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have closed that loophole.  Using an extremely fast random number generator, they have altered the spin state of one of two entangled particles separated by 1.3 kilometers, and measured the effect on its partner.  The distance makes it impossible for sub-light-speed communication between the two.  This tosses out the idea of local realism; if the experiment's results hold -- and they certainly seem to be doing so -- the particles were indeed communicating faster than light, something that isn't supposed to be possible.  Einstein was so repelled by this idea that he called it "spooky action at a distance."

To quote the press release:

With the help of ICFO’s quantum random number generators, the Delft experiment gives a nearly perfect disproof of Einstein's world-view, in which "nothing travels faster than light" and “God does not play dice.”  At least one of these statements must be wrong.  The laws that govern the Universe may indeed be a throw of the dice.

If this wasn't weird and cool enough, a second experiment performed right here at Cornell University supported one of the weirdest results of quantum theory -- that a system cannot change while you're watching it.

Graduate students Yogesh Patil and Srivatsan K. Chakram cooled about a billion atoms of rubidium to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, and suspended them between lasers.  Under such conditions, the atoms formed an orderly crystal lattice.  But because of an effect called "quantum tunneling," even though the atoms were cold -- and thus nearly motionless -- they could shift positions in the lattice, leading to the result that any given atom could be anywhere in the lattice at any time.

Patel and Chakram found that you can stop this effect simply by observing the atoms.

This is the best experimental verification yet of what's been nicknamed the "Quantum Zeno effect," after the Greek philosopher who said that motion was impossible because anyone moving from Point A to Point B would have to cross half the distance, then half the remaining distance, then half again, and so on ad infinitum -- and thus would never arrive.  Motion, Zeno said, was therefore an illusion.

"This is the first observation of the Quantum Zeno effect by real space measurement of atomic motion," lab director Mukund Vengalattore said.  "Also, due to the high degree of control we've been able to demonstrate in our experiments, we can gradually 'tune' the manner in which we observe these atoms.  Using this tuning, we've also been able to demonstrate an effect called 'emergent classicality' in this quantum system."

Myself, I'm not reminded so much of Zeno as I am of another thing that doesn't move while you watch it:

See what I mean?   You don't need to add all sorts of woo-woo nonsense to this stuff to make it fascinating.  It's cool enough on its own, although throwing in a Doctor Who reference does give it an extra special frisson.

Of course, the problem is, understanding it takes some serious effort.  Physics is awesome, but it's not easy.  All of which supports a contention I've had for years; that woo-wooism is, at its heart, based in laziness.

Me, I'd rather work a little harder and understand reality as it is.  Even if it leaves me afraid to blink.

************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is about our much maligned and poorly-understood cousins, the Neanderthals.

In Rebecca Wragg Sykes's new book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art we learn that our comic-book picture of these prehistoric relatives of Homo sapiens were far from the primitive, leopard-skin-wearing brutes depicted in movies and fiction.  They had culture -- they made amazingly evocative and sophisticated art, buried their dead with rituals we can still see traces of, and most likely had both music and language.  Interestingly, they interbred with more modern Homo sapiens over a long period of time -- DNA analysis of humans today show that a great many of us (myself included) carry around significant numbers of Neanderthal genetic markers.

It's a revealing look at our nearest recent relatives, who were the dominant primate species in the northern parts of Eurasia for a hundred thousand years.  If you want to find out more about these mysterious hominins -- some of whom were our direct ancestors -- you need to read Sykes's book.  It's brilliant.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Order of operations

I try not to write in Skeptophilia about topics I don't fully understand -- well, at least understand as fully as my brainpower and the available information allow.  But today I'm going to tell you about a recent paper in theoretical physics that blew my mind so completely that I had to write a post about it, even though saying "I don't completely comprehend this" is a serious understatement.

So here goes.  Just don't ask me to clarify further, because the most you'll get is the Canine Head-Tilt of Puzzlement.

The paper, which appeared last week in Nature Communications, is entitled "Bell's Theorem for Temporal Order," and was written by Magdalena Zych and Fabio Costa (of the University of Queensland), Igor Pikovski (of Harvard University), and Časlav Brukner (of the University of Vienna).  The issue the four physicists were looking at was the seeming paradox of the different way that time (specifically, temporal order) fits into general relativity and quantum theory.  In relativity, the flow of time depends on your relative speed and the distribution of mass near you; in general, the faster you're going, or the nearer you are to a massive object, the slower your clock runs.  Because reference frame is relative (thus the name of the entire theory), you don't notice this effect yourself -- to you, your clock runs just fine.  But to someone observing you at a distance, the flow of time in your frame of reference has become more sluggish.

Weird enough, but that's only the beginning.  To take the most familiar example, consider two astronauts in spacecraft zooming away from each other at a substantial fraction of the speed of light.  To astronaut A, his clock is running fine, and astronaut B's clock is slow (because he's moving away from A at a high speed).  But from B's perspective, it's A that's moving; so B thinks his own clock is accurate, and A's is the one that's running slow.

And it's not that one's right and the other is somehow being fooled.  Both of them are right -- because time is relative to your speed.

As an outcome of this (and germane to the paper I referenced), what this also means is that A and B can differ in what they perceive as the time order of two events.  Occurrences that appear simultaneous to one of the astronauts might appear sequential to the other.

With me so far?  Well, the problem that Zych et al. were investigating was that in quantum theory, there's no allowance for relativistic ordering of events.  Time's arrow is one-directional, and if event X followed Y in one reference frame, it would do so on all reference frames.

Well, that's what the physicists thought -- until this paper showed a theoretical framework that suggests otherwise.

Zych et al. proposed a thought experiment involving two spaceships, one of which is near a massive object (which, as I mentioned, warps spacetime in such a way as to slow down the passage of time).  They're engaged in a war game that requires them to fire their phasers simultaneously and immediately afterward start their engine so as to dodge the blast.  The problem is, the ship near the massive object will have a slower clock, and will not be able to fire quickly enough to escape being blasted by the other ship.

So far, weird but not that hard to understand.  What Zych et al. did was to ask a single question: what if the two ships were in a state of quantum superposition before they fired?

Superposition is one of the weirdest outcomes of quantum physics, but it's been demonstrated experimentally so many times that we have no choice but to accept that this is how the universe works.  The idea is that if a physical system could exist in two or more possible states, its actual state is an array of possibilities all existing at the same time until some measurement destroys the superposition and drops the system into one of the possible outcomes ("collapsing the wave function").  The most famous iteration of this is Schrödinger's Cat, who is both alive and dead until the box is opened.

In the case of the ships, the superposition results in quantum entanglement, where the entire system acts as a single entity (in a causal sense).  Here's how the result is described in a press release from the University of Vienna:

If a powerful agent could place a sufficiently massive object, say a planet, closer to one ship it would slow down its counting of time.  As a result, the ship farther away from the mass will fire too early for the first one to escape. 

The laws of quantum physics and gravity predict that by manipulating a quantum superposition state of the planet, the ships can end up in a superposition of either of them being destroyed...  The new work shows that the temporal order among events can exhibit superposition and entanglement – genuinely quantum features of particular importance for testing quantum theory against alternatives.

So each of the ships is in a state of both being destroyed and not being destroyed, from the standpoint of an outside observer -- until a measurement is made, which forces the system into one or the other outcome.

Note what this isn't saying; it's not implying that one of the ships was destroyed, and we simply don't know which yet.  It's implying that both ships are in an entangled state of being blasted to smithereens and not.

At the same time.

The authors write:

This entanglement enables accomplishing a task, violation of a Bell inequality, that is impossible under local classical temporal order; it means that temporal order cannot be described by any pre-defined local variables.  A classical notion of a causal structure is therefore untenable in any framework compatible with the basic principles of quantum mechanics and classical general relativity.

All of which leaves me sympathizing a great deal with Winnie-the Pooh.

So there you have it.  It turns out that the universe is a weird, weird place, where our common-sensical notions of how things work are often simply wrong.  Even though I'm far from an expert -- I run into the wall pretty fast when I try to read actual papers in physics, or (for that matter) in most scientific fields -- I find it fascinating to get a glimpse of the actual workings of the cosmos.

Even if it blows my tiny little mind.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a must-read for anyone interested in astronomy -- Finding Our Place in the Universe by French astrophysicist Hélène Courtois.  Courtois gives us a thrilling tour of the universe on the largest scales, particularly Laniakea, the galactic supercluster to which the Milky Way belongs, and the vast and completely empty void between Laniakea and the next supercluster.  (These voids are so empty that if the Earth were at the middle of one, there would be no astronomical objects near enough or bright enough to see without a powerful telescope, and the night sky would be completely dark.)

Courtois's book is eye-opening and engaging, and (as it was just published this year) brings the reader up to date with the latest information from astronomy.  And it will give you new appreciation when you look up at night -- and realize how little of the universe you're actually seeing.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Quantum fuzziness

I'm of two minds when laypeople write about science.

On the one hand, I applaud anyone who is willing to delve into the often deep waters of scientific research.  To put it bluntly, science ain't easy.  After all, by comparison to actual researchers, I'm a layperson myself, despite a degree in physics and the fact that I've taught biology for 31 years.  So to any non-specialist who puts in the time and effort to truly understand something from actual scientific research, I have nothing but admiration.

Also in the positive column is the incalculable benefit that has come from popularizers, people like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson.  While they themselves are scientists, they've made abstruse topics accessible to the masses -- something for which they are sometimes criticized, a stance about which I've written before and which I truly cannot understand.

However.  The problem with laypeople leaping into science writing is their potential for getting things wrong, for interjecting fuzzy-headed ideas, and thus misrepresenting the science itself.  It's usually done with the best of intentions; unlike some of the people I write about here, it's seldom about self-aggrandizement or making a profit.  But it does create the difficulty that a person can read an article and actually understand less about the science involved when they're done than they did before they read it.

I ran into a particularly good example of this in the online magazine Medium a couple of days ago.  The article was "Quantum Mechanics and Existentialism: Removing my Fear of Death" by Alex Vervloet.  It starts off promisingly enough; a description of Vervloet's curiosity about subatomic physics and quantum mechanics, which spurred him to do some research and reading on the subject.  (The book he chose to read, Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli, is one I'm unfamiliar with, but Rovelli himself is a theoretical physicist and one of the founders of the theory of loop quantum gravity, so he certainly has sterling credentials.)

In any case, Vervloet starts out right, both in his search for information and in his article.  But about halfway through, he had passages like this:

You and I are both made up of a seemingly countless number of particles, and those need energy.  Now, when I say energy, I’m not just talking about one thing — there are many different types of energy.  As early as Elementary School we learn about Kinetic and Potential Energy.  Later on we learn about Gravitational, Nuclear, Electromagnetic, Chemical, and other types of Energy.  Calories, sleep, sunlight and water are all converted into Chemical Energy for our bodies.  This in turn gets converted into Electromagnetic Energy for our nervous system, Heat Energy for our blood and skin, Kinetic Energy for our organs, and Potential Energy for our muscles.  Some of it remains chemical as well.

And my expression changed to something like this:

Amongst the many things wrong with this passage is the idea that we convert "calories, sleep, sunlight, and water... into chemical energy."  This is either some metabolic pathway I've never heard of, or else he's just making shit up.

My vote is for the latter.

He also throws in a mention of the Oscillating-Universe Model -- put simply, that the outward motion of the galaxies will eventually be reversed, and we'll have a "Big Crunch" followed by another Big Bang -- and treats it as if it were accepted science, when in fact it is at the moment a mere speculation.  (I could write a whole post on the subject of the mass of the universe, and the possibility of our expanding outward forever or eventually collapsing, which brings in some of the least-understood parts of physics -- dark matter and dark energy.)

Then he takes these pieces and runs right off the cliff with them, with his "theory" -- which I will quote rather than trying to describe, so you can get the full effect:

We know that when certain particles of mass combine, they create elements, and those elements make up the universe.  But what about energy?  What happens when certain energies combine?  Explosions. 

I believe this is the secret to our consciousness.  Just like the universe began with The Big Bang (or bounce), so did we.  Every human being is the product of a Big Bang.  The right combination of entangled energy particles combined into a sperm cell and ovum to create us.  Our body and consciousness explodes into existence and expands to adulthood, then shrinks until it reaches its inevitable death (every mass is eventually converted back to energy and visa versa).  It’s then either buried in the ground to be converted into energy for plants, cremated into heat energy, or donated to science, where the energy leaves the body, and another body can use its energy to power the part(s).

Oookay.  Where do I start?

"Combining energies" does not create explosions.  In fact, I'm not even sure what he means by "combining energies," given that he seems to be using the woo-woo definition of "energy" to mean "the cosmic interconnectedness of all beings" rather than the rigorous scientific definition of "what is introduced to a system either to heat it or to give it the potential to do physical work."  But then he goes even further off the beam with quantum entanglement causing consciousness, there being entangled particles in sperm and eggs, and that the energy in our bodies can be "converted into energy for plants" (which is wildly wrong; plants are solar powered, so while the materials of a dead body might be recycled into a plant, the energy in the body would be devolved as heat during decomposition).

He then goes off into cycles and reincarnation and various other odd tangents, but at that point I kind of stopped paying attention.

Okay, I'm not trying to be mean, here.  Vervloet sounds like his heart is definitely in the right place, and a lot of his muddled ideas could be fixed (and hopefully will be fixed) if he continues researching what the physicists are actually saying.  But what bothers me here is that the publishers of Medium chose to post his article, which is really just the meanderings of someone with a rudimentary grasp of the topic.  (As evidenced by his use of the word "theory" to mean "something I just pulled out of my ass and which could be wrong as easily as right.")

All of which makes me sound like a humorless know-it-all.  And I acknowledge readily that there are tons of topics about which I am mostly ignorant -- but I refrain from writing about them, because whatever I wrote would be irrelevant.  The problem is that a publication, even an online one, becomes a conduit of information, and this is giving a completely wrong impression of what the science actually says.

In any case, I hope Vervloet keeps reading and keeps learning.  It's certainly a fascinating, if difficult, topic.  Ignorance, after all, is a universal condition, but it's completely curable.  You just have to be willing to admit where your understanding falls apart, and find someone who knows more than you do to remedy the situation.

Spooky action, weeping angels, and quantum physics

One of the reasons I get so impatient with woo-woos is that science is plenty cool enough without making shit up.

There were two examples of this from the field of quantum physics this week.  Because quantum physics is already weird even without any embellishment or misinterpretation, it's been particularly prone to being co-opted by woo-woos in their search for explanations supporting (choose one or more of the following):

• homeopathy
• psychic abilities
• astrology
• the soul
• "chakras" and "qi"
• auras

But you don't need to do any of this to make quantum physics cool.  Let's start with an experiment regarding "quantum entanglement" -- the linking of two particles in a state describable by a single wave function.  While this might seem uninteresting at first, what it implies is that altering the spin state of particle A would instantaneously change the spin state of its entangled partner, particle B -- regardless of how far apart the two were.  It's almost as if the two were engaging in faster-than-light communication.

There is a further twist on this, and that's where things get even more interesting.  Most physicists couple the entanglement phenomenon with the idea of "local realism" -- that the two particles' spin must have been pointing in some direction prior to measurement, even if we didn't know what it was.  Thus, the two entangled particles might have "agreed" (to use an admittedly anthropomorphic term) on what the spin direction would be prior to being separated, simulating communication where there was none, and preserving Einstein's idea that the theories of relativity prohibit faster-than-light communication.

Scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have closed that loophole.  Using an extremely fast random number generator, they have altered the spin state of one of two entangled particles separated by 1.3 kilometers, and measured the effect on its partner.  The distance makes it impossible for sub-light-speed communication between the two.  This tosses out the idea of local realism; if the experiment's results hold -- and they certainly seem to be doing so -- the particles were indeed communicating faster than light, something that isn't supposed to be possible.  Einstein was so repelled by this idea that he called it "spooky action at a distance."

To quote the press release:

With the help of ICFO’s quantum random number generators, the Delft experiment gives a nearly perfect disproof of Einstein's world-view, in which "nothing travels faster than light" and “God does not play dice.”  At least one of these statements must be wrong. The laws that govern the Universe may indeed be a throw of the dice.

If this wasn't weird and cool enough, a second experiment performed right here at Cornell University supported one of the weirdest results of quantum theory -- that a system cannot change while you're watching it.

Graduate students Yogesh Patil and Srivatsan K. Chakram cooled about a billion atoms of rubidium to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, and suspended them between lasers.  Under such conditions, the atoms formed an orderly crystal lattice.  But because of an effect called "quantum tunneling," even though the atoms were cold -- and thus nearly motionless -- they could shift positions in the lattice, leading to the result that any given atom could be anywhere in the lattice at any time.

Patel and Chakram found that you can stop this effect simply by observing the atoms.

This is the best experimental verification yet of what's been nicknamed the "Quantum Zeno effect," after the Greek philosopher who said that motion was impossible because anyone moving from Point A to Point B would have to cross half the distance, then half the remaining distance, then half again, and so on ad infinitum -- and thus would never arrive.  Motion, Zeno said, was therefore an illusion.

"This is the first observation of the Quantum Zeno effect by real space measurement of atomic motion," lab director Mukund Vengalattore said.  "Also, due to the high degree of control we've been able to demonstrate in our experiments, we can gradually 'tune' the manner in which we observe these atoms.  Using this tuning, we've also been able to demonstrate an effect called 'emergent classicality' in this quantum system."

Myself, I'm not reminded so much of Zeno as I am of another thing that doesn't move while you watch it.

See what I mean?  You don't need to add all sorts of woo-woo nonsense to this stuff to make it fascinating.  It's cool enough on its own.

Of course, the problem is, understanding it takes some serious effort.  Physics is cool, but it's not easy.  All of which supports a contention I've had for years; that woo-wooism is, at its heart, based in laziness.

Me, I'd rather work a little harder and understand reality as it is.  Even if it leaves me afraid to blink.

Macro-scaled craziness

People send me the oddest links.

In just the last few days, I've received links to the following:

• A website that keeps track of spurious correlations, which includes a graph showing that per capita consumption of cheese correlates almost perfectly with the risk of dying by becoming entangled in your own bedsheets.
• A Venn diagram of irrational nonsense, mapping out the intersection between the different types of bollocks.   Not surprisingly, Scientology lies at the intersection of all of them.
• A book review of the Official Worst Science Fiction Book Ever Written.
• A photograph that a guy took of his dog's ass because he thinks it looks like Jesus.

It's flattering that people think to send me stuff, although the last one did make me wonder why anyone would spend enough time looking at his dog's ass to come to that conclusion.

But the most bizarre ones usually have some kind of vague message attached, such as "I think you'll find this interesting" or "You should read this" or "Maybe you should think about this."  Such as the one that came yesterday, in an email from a stranger, with the message, "I know you won't be able to handle THIS."

Well, I don't know about "handle" it, but given my 'satiable curiosity, I had to click on it.  And I spent the next half-hour perusing "Are UFOs Macroscaled Quantum Effects?" with my jaw hanging slightly open.

The website certainly is... um, interesting.  It starts off with a bang:

In this post I am asking readers to determine for themselves if a theory I have synthesized matches the characteristics of Unidentified Atmospheric Phenomenon.  This theory has been in formulation over a decade in various differing observations but never as a coherent totality.  Is the UFO / UAP phenomenon, a macro-scaled quantum event, a result of the entanglement of matter and energy? 

We know that leading edge science is discovering new relationships all around us.  This concept may or may not explain the reasons why this phenomenon is both transient (very short in duration) as well as appearing in "waves" of activity.

What exactly does a "macro-scaled quantum effect" mean?  Quantum effects are by definition tiny.  Check out the first line from Wikipedia's page on quantum mechanics if you don't believe me:

Quantum mechanics (QM – also known as quantum physics, or quantum theory) is a branch of physics which deals with physical phenomena at nanoscopic scales where the action is on the order of the Planck constant.

So saying a "macro-scaled quantum effect" is a little like saying a "really huge microscopic object."

But how small are we talking about, here?  Physicists define the Planck scale, which is the scale of time and space at which quantum effects supersede ordinary (Newtonian) physics, as involving time intervals of about 5.4 x 10⁻⁴⁴ seconds and lengths of about 1.6 x 10⁻³⁵ meters.

That is to say, not the kind of thing you can observe on a daily basis, even if you have a fast camera or a really excellent magnifying glass.

But this doesn't stop the author, who plows on ahead as if what he said actually had any connection to reality:

Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently – instead, a quantum state may be given for the system as a whole.  One approach to the UAP / UFO enigma is to consider it to be a transitory quantum effect caused by the interaction of several fields that represent a system as a whole. The word "quantum" comes from the Latin "quantus", for "how much" or how many interactions there are as derived from the original meaning of measurement. 

I have tried as best I can to make it easy to read and understandable. I am expressing the very strong suspicion that UAP is a previously unidentified form of transitional energy that arises and is in a feedback loop in conjunction with both an energetic environment and the aggregate sum of the human mind as a energy field. One field is entangled in another.

I think this was the point when my eyes started glazing over.

Specifically, electromagnetic energy.  Students of science are taught that energy is transcribed as information.

Are we really?  Well, that's very interesting.  I...

Is there an intersection wherein energy and atomic structure as well as molecular structure are influenced or steered by the energy of an information field?  A good example is the mind \ brain relationship.  Does this occur elsewhere?  Apparently it does in a macro-scaled manner as demonstrated by scientists through a quantum entanglement effect.  In other words, our natural environment is not a matter of distinct or discrete divisions between matter and energy.  This intersection includes various interacting energy fields.  One field is our atmosphere, another is the human energy field, both of which contain information as energy.

Merciful heavens above, please stop...

Science accepts as foundational that all permutations of matter whether this matter has physicality or not has as one of the characteristics of their manifestation is energy.

*repeated headdesk*

*momentary pause to recover my equilibrium*

Okay, better now.  And I have only one response to all of this, which is summed up in the following picture:

Ex-ZACKLY.

What gets me about sites like this is not that some oddball has a blog.  Oddballs do that, after all, present company very much included.  It's that this guy seems to write along, using all sorts of scientific terminology, with no particular realization that he hasn't the foggiest idea what it means.  Whatever else you can say about me, I generally am aware when I'm ignorant about a topic, and as a result, I refrain from writing about it (which is why I so infrequently get onto the topic of politics).

But here's this dude, blithely making statements like, "Anyone can easily observe our atmosphere is energetic and that radiant energy from our solar star is transcribed into molecular matter through it’s [sic] medium," and evidently expecting all of us science-y types to say, "Bravo!" and nod in agreement.

Anyhow.  To whoever sent me the link, I can only say, "Thanks?" with a slight tilt of one eyebrow.  At least I got a post out of it, which is all to the good.  I'm not sure if that constitutes "handling" the information in the website, but it works for me.  And now I think I'm going to go permutate the energetic liquid in my coffee cup into my mouth, so I can actuate some macro-scaled quantum effects in my pre-frontal cortex when I get to school.  I don't know what my students would do if I was too addled to transcribe discrete radiant energy information onto my white board.  They'd be really disappointed, is my guess.

Quantum entanglement, and the path of mental laziness

There are, as far as I can see, two reasons why people believe the counterfactual, unsubstantiated nonsense that I deride daily as "woo-woo."  One of them I can actually sympathize with; and that's "wishful thinking."  I know what it feels like to wish, vehemently, that the universe was other than it is.  And some of the things woo-woos would like to be true are admittedly pretty cool.  Wouldn't it be awesome if crystals could heal you of incurable diseases?  If you could find out why your love life is in a tailspin by looking at patterns of Tarot cards?  If there really was a reason for everything that happened, and that all of the apparent chaos of life was linked by some grand, cosmic plan?

The second reason for woo-woo beliefs, however, is one for which I have no sympathy whatsoever, and that's "laziness."  Practitioners of woo-woo often end up there because they are too mentally indolent to be bothered to learn the basics of scientific induction, or, in fact, any science at all.  Once you start delving into scientific explanations, and learning how to construct a rational argument, most woo-woo beliefs simply fall apart at the seams.  But science is hard; and the crystals-and-Tarot-cards set, it seems, would prefer the easy road of doing no real work to earn their understanding of the universe.

I ran into a spectacular example of this from our pal, frequent Skeptophilia flyer Diane Tessman, just yesterday.  Tessman, you might recall, is the one who believes that clouds are created by UFOs as camouflage, that the Higgs boson was predicted in Mayan prophecy and is responsible for consciousness, and that there is a superintelligent alien being called "the God Cloud" that is going to usher in a New Age of Enlightenment really soon.  So anything that Tessman has to say is bound to be worth reading, wouldn't you think?

Thus my excitement when I saw yesterday that she'd weighed in on the subject of Quantum Entanglement.  Here's a bit of what she had to say:

Quantum entanglement, which we humans are just now beginning to comprehend to some small degree, may explain many of the deepest, most sacred secrets of the cosmos, and open vistas to us of which we could only dream, before.

The first thing to realize: Quantum entanglement, although it sounds like one has been enveloped in an evil alien butterfly net, can be and often is – a good thing...

The second thing to realize: I believe there is general quantum entanglement and specific quantum entanglement; the latter is the kind of entanglement which aliens might use to reach individuals.

General quantum entanglement: We can look at love – particularly unconditional love – as the most powerful and ubiquitous form of general quantum entanglement. You love your daughter, unconditionally. You “get a feeling” when she does not come home on time after a date, that something is wrong. You have been involved with this other soul since her birth. Is it just genetics? No, it is all the crazy memories, all the times you protected her, all the special moments; you have become entangled with this other mind (this other being), beyond any undoing...  I believe there is a morphic (quantum) field which winds between two people like an electric spider web.

I feel quantum entanglement is one of the basic methods by which the universe electrically conveys evolution. Intelligence travels on the electromagnetic webbing, it travels in the quantum field of particles, waves, and strings. 

It all sounds pretty... nice, doesn't it?  We're all connected, and a Quantumly Entangled Field conveys to us all such things as love and caring and special moments and warm fuzzies.  The Sacred Secrets Of The Cosmos are available to everyone because we're linked through a mysterious Electromagnetic Webbing.  Everything is all New-Agey and cosmic and dreamy.

But the problem is, is that really what physicists mean by the term quantum entanglement?  Well, let's do some actual work and find out.  First stop, the Wikipedia article on the phenomenon:

Quantum entanglement occurs when particles such as photons, electrons, molecules as large as buckyballs, and even small diamonds interact physically and then become separated; the type of interaction is such that each resulting member of a pair is properly described by the same quantum mechanical description (state), which is indefinite in terms of important factors such as position, momentum, spin, polarization, etc. According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, their shared state is indefinite until measured.  Quantum entanglement is a form of quantum superposition. When a measurement is made and it causes one member of such a pair to take on a definite value (e.g., clockwise spin), the other member of this entangled pair will at any subsequent time be found to have taken the appropriately correlated value (e.g., counterclockwise spin). Thus, there is a correlation between the results of measurements performed on entangled pairs, and this correlation is observed even though the entangled pair may have been separated by arbitrarily large distances. 

Quantum mechanical framework:  Consider two noninteracting systems and , with respective Hilbert spaces and . The Hilbert space of the composite system is the tensor product

If the first system is in state and the second in state , the state of the composite system is

States of the composite system which can be represented in this form are called separable states, or (in the simplest case) product states.
Not all states are separable states (and thus product states). Fix a basis for and a basis for . The most general state in is of the form

.

This state is separable if yielding and It is inseparable if If a state is inseparable, it is called an entangled state.
For example, given two basis vectors of and two basis vectors of , the following is an entangled state:

.

If the composite system is in this state, it is impossible to attribute to either system or system a definite pure state. Another way to say this is that while the von Neumann entropy of the whole state is zero (as it is for any pure state), the entropy of the subsystems is greater than zero. In this sense, the systems are "entangled". This has specific empirical ramifications for interferometry.  It is worthwhile to note that the above example is one of four Bell states, which are (maximally) entangled pure states (pure states of the space, but which cannot be separated into pure states of each and ).
Now suppose Alice is an observer for system , and Bob is an observer for system . If in the entangled state given above Alice makes a measurement in the eigenbasis of A, there are two possible outcomes, occurring with equal probability:

1. Alice measures 0, and the state of the system collapses to .
2. Alice measures 1, and the state of the system collapses to .

If the former occurs, then any subsequent measurement performed by Bob, in the same basis, will always return 1. If the latter occurs, (Alice measures 1) then Bob's measurement will return 0 with certainty. Thus, system B has been altered by Alice performing a local measurement on system A. This remains true even if the systems A and B are spatially separated. This is the foundation of the EPR paradox.
The outcome of Alice's measurement is random. Alice cannot decide which state to collapse the composite system into, and therefore cannot transmit information to Bob by acting on her system. Causality is thus preserved, in this particular scheme. For the general argument, see no-communication theorem.

Had enough yet?  I certainly sympathize if you have.  This stuff is difficult.  I was a physics major, fer cryin' in the sink, and I have a hard time with this subject; the math is frankly beyond me, and just the concepts are tough to wrap your brains around even if you've read your share of Brian Greene and Stephen Hawking.  I get that.  To learn what the scientists are talking about requires some serious effort.

But at least try, for heaven's sake.  Find out a little bit of what the physicists actually mean by the word "quantum" before you start using it.  Read a couple of good books (by actual working physicists) on the subject.  At least do a damn Google search.  With sources like Wikipedia available to everyone who has a computer, there is no excuse whatsoever for the kind of mental laziness that the woo-woos seem to embrace.

The universe is weird, wonderful, mysterious, and beautiful.  But it is also complex, deep, and requires effort to comprehend.  Falling for Diane Tessman's "electromagnetic web of love and quantum consciousness" is taking the easy way out, accepting a wrong answer regarding how the universe works just because (1) it sounds nice, and (2) it takes less mental work.  Take the time to learn a little actual science; learn how the actual scientists do what they do.  You'll be amazed at how quickly whole worlds of new and astonishing knowledge will open up for you.  And even if you have to give up the comforting children's stories of Quantum Spiritual Energies Linked By Love And Light, you'll have gained insight into the actual workings of the cosmos.

And I consider that to be a fair trade.