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Journal of marine Technology and Environment

"HURDLES IN APPROACHING SCIENCE AND IN SOLVING CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENT ISSUES"

Cătălin Silviu Nuțu

Published Mar 6, 2023• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

"Showing complicate issues in science, like the strange facts and realities pertaining to the quantum world, this paper explains why it is so difficult to understand and to solve those complicate issues. This paper also stresses the important fact, that in order to understand these strange realities pertaining to the quantum phenomena but also in order to solve other complicate problems of science such as the climate change issues, one should give up the traditional way of thinking of the science and should also renounce the false idea of the rationalism, stating that the entire reality can be known and understood by using scientific reasoning."

DOI
10.53464/jmte.01.2023.04

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Aharonov, Popescu, and Tollaksen reply: We thank the letter writers for their interest and for the opportunity to better clarify our ideas.Michael Nauenberg and Art Hobson make essentially the same point—namely, that our ideas are completely wrong. To put their criticism in the right context, we point out that the outcome of our research program is twofold. First, we have discovered an entirely new class of quantum effects; second, we present a new way of thinking about quantum mechanics.The fact that quantum mechanics predicts the effects we discovered is just that, a fact. The effects are computed using standard quantum mechanics, without additions or modifications. As such, their prediction by quantum mechanics is beyond doubt (unless one suspects algebraic mistakes). Furthermore, many of our effects have been verified experimentally; in particular, different versions of our amplification method have been used as novel technological tools. Both Nauenberg and Hobson completely ignore our effects. But one should not ignore them. They are novel and they are strange. Even more, they don’t appear in isolation, but they form a well-structured pattern. Surely there is a lesson here that quantum mechanics wants to teach us; one ignores it at one’s peril.On the other hand, our way of looking at quantum mechanics is certainly unconventional; it introduces new concepts, and it approaches old concepts in a new way. That is essentially what the two letter writers point out, Hobson most emphatically when he writes that our article “is riddled with errors.” We are criticized for thinking in a different way and for asking new questions. But our way of thinking leads to the same predictions as the conventional way, so as far as experiments are concerned they are completely equivalent. As Richard Feynman says in his book The Character of Physical Law (Modern Library, 1994), suppose we have “two theories” that “have all the consequences . . . exactly the same. . . . How are we going to decide which one is right? There is no way by science, because they both agree with the experiment to the same extent.” So the criticism is baseless.At the same time, if our approach is completely equivalent to the standard one, why bother? Again Feynman gives the best answer: “For psychological reasons . . . , these two things may be far from equivalent, because one gives a man different ideas from the other. . . . There will be something, for instance, in theory A that talks about something, . . . but to find out what the corresponding thing is . . . in [theory] B may be very complicated—it may not be a very simple idea at all.” As a consequence, a new way of thinking allows one to ask new questions that, although they could be asked in the old theory as well, would have been very difficult to even envisage. That is precisely what we did. First, we raised the issue of the physics in pre- and postselected ensembles. And to reply to Hobson, no, there is nothing “erroneous” in the process of postselection. Postselection is a question about results of experiments, and every question about the results of actual measurements is legitimate. Subsequently, we discovered the concept of weak measurements, which in turn led us to discover the various effects we presented. Since the power of any new approach is given by its ability to predict new effects, one should conclude that ours is strong indeed.Furthermore, as many physicists agree, an intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics is still missing. That is why quantum physicists are surprised over and over again by the discovery of strange and unexpected fundamental effects. We hope that our new way of thinking is a step toward the long-sought intuition. Even more important, the new way of thinking may give us new ideas about what to change, if experiments ever turn out to contradict quantum mechanics and therefore require its modification. In particular, since we tinker with the idea of time— one of the most important concepts in physics—starting the change from there may be a very potent method.Shaul Mukamel refers to our experiment in which the component along some given axis of a spin-1⁄2 particle is found, by a weak measurement, to have the value √2‾/2 which is √2‾ times larger than the largest eigenvalue. He suggests an alternative explanation based on a classical vector model of spin. According to his explanation, values up to √3‾/2 should be possible. However, we presented the experiment showing √2‾/2 only because it was mathematically simple; by choosing a different postselection, we could have obtained, as results of weak measurements, values as large as we wanted. Hence the above simple classical-vector view doesn’t work.Robert Griffiths points out that there are two other time-symmetric formulations of quantum mechanics besides ours—“consistent histories” and “decoherent histories.” In particular, Griffiths is right when he emphasizes a major difference in spirit between our theory and consistent histories. The main goal of consistent histories is to find an explanation for the (apparent?) collapse of the wavefunction during a quantum measurement; although that solution is hotly disputed, as are all other solutions to the collapse problem, it is certainly a very ingenious one. However, an answer to the collapse problem is not our primary interest (though we are starting to see glimmers of an alternative answer to it using our approach).The letter by Griffiths, however, runs the risk of being misread as implying that solving the collapse problem will by itself clarify most or all of the counterintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics. That conclusion would be wrong. Quantum mechanics is strange and unusual and defies intuition in many ways; solving the collapse problem is by no means its only interesting fundamental issue. Nor can the solution of that one problem lead to a complete understanding of quantum phenomena. That particles tunnel in the first place is surprising by itself; even more so is the fact that, as we showed, perfectly good measuring devices, working with arbitrarily high precision, indicate consistently that the tunneling particles have negative kinetic energy. Equally surprising is that we can arrange a situation in which perfectly good measurements, made with as high a precision as we want, indicate that spin-1⁄2 particles have arbitrarily large spin. And these are only two examples. As far as we are aware, none of the many proposed solutions to the collapse problem make these effects seem less surprising, let alone predict them.© 2011 American Institute of Physics.

Physics Today•May 1, 2011•7 citations
"Showing complicate issues in science, like the strange facts and realities pertaining to the quantum world, this paper explains why it is so difficult to understand and to solve those complicate issues. This paper also stresses the important fact, that in order to understand these strange realities pertaining to the quantum phenomena but also in order to solve other complicate problems of science such as the climate change issues, one should give up the traditional way of thinking of the science and should also renounce the false idea of the rationalism, stating that the entire reality can be known and understood by using scientific reasoning."
The paper is showing the strange facts and realities pertaining to the quantum world and is explaining why it is so difficult to understand and to work with them. The paper is also stressing the important fact, that in order to understand these strange realities pertaining to the quantum phenomena, one should give up the traditional way of thinking of the science and should also renounce the false idea of the rationalism, that the reality can be known and understood only by scientific reasoning according to the limited present stage of science and knowledge.
The facts and phenomena pertaining to the quantum world are some of the most weird and not understood phenomena in the present days’ science. Therefore, any additional scientific material and any new ideas and approaches of this topic can be useful to grasp better these phenomena. The book addresses these challenges by offering new ways to look at and understand the quantum phenomena. The book is concerned with the detection of links between normal scale and small scale phenomena, namely the link between the quantum world and the real world and it shows that many of the quantum world rules are applying also for real world systems. The approach of the book is to explain in the first instance, in a more descriptive way, what are the reasons lying behind the writing of the book and the similarity between the quantum world and the normal scale world, analyzing and explaining why the restrictive limitations of the pure rationalism should be abandoned and replaced by newer, more modern and more adapted kinds of thinking. The next part is representing the prescriptive part of the book, being more scientific and more technical, is concerned with providing and finding solutions, explanations and theory based prediction methods for the quantum world phenomena, as well. Since there are serious limitations caused by our limited senses, perceptions and thinking (that is to say there are existing hidden dimensions for us, humans), another issue to be approached is to retrieve the information pertaining to those dimensions hidden to our senses and abilities. The competitive advantages and the benefits the book offers to its readers, are: explanation of the thinking ways used to understand the quantum phenomena; providing methods to model the quantum phenomena; linking the normal and quantum world phenomena going out from both: the particularities of normal scale systems and those of quantum world phenomena
Why should anyone think that what is so deeply puzzling about the quantum world is really a matter of logic? Why should anyone think that studying the logic of quantum mechanics should be a route to a proper understanding of quantum mechanics? There is a tradition in the philosophy of quantum mechanics, a tradition stronger among philosophical commentators than among physicists, which sees the subject as the business of understanding quantum mechanical language and the way that language relates to the world. It is an idea more strongly held by philosophers – it comes much more naturally to them – because the analytic tradition, in which most Anglo-American philosophers of science are raised, is generally much exercised about words and how they hook on to things. The analytic tradition in the philosophy of quantum mechanics is not unreasonable. Everyone admits that we cannot picture the microphysical world, that a graphic or iconic representation of quantum systems is impossible. Therefore understanding quantum mechanics must be a matter of understanding the logic of the words and the mathematics of quantum mechanics. If this seems implausible, it is because of an ambiguity in our use of the verb ‘to understand’. We understand the physical world, and we understand physics. But physics is not the physical world. It is something of an entirely different sort, a human product, a way of representing the world.
Despite scholarly consensus on the empirical facts, ever since its inception in the 1920s there has been deep disagreement about how to interpret quantum theory. “To interpret a physical theory is to say what the world would be like, if the theory were true.” All scientific theories require interpretation, since strictly speaking what they describe are our experiences of the world rather than the world itself. Thus, whether we are trying to explain or merely describe the world, we are always engaged in inference. To make inferences we need a context for interpretation. For any given claim this context is provided locally by related theories, more broadly by disciplinary paradigms, and ultimately by worldview claims about the nature of reality. The challenge in interpreting scientific theories is to integrate them into this hierarchy of knowledge. Usually this is not too difficult. New theories often require adjustments to nearby theories, but in doing so we can rely on paradigms to make them cohere. More rarely paradigmatic assumptions are themselves challenged, but in that case scientists can fall back on their worldview to make sense of the needed changes. By implication, the most difficult interpretive problems arise when our worldview is called into question, which leaves us without any frame of reference on which to fall back. Quantum theory poses a worldview problem. Prior to the quantum revolution the classical worldview could not be tested scientifically and so it was essentially metaphysical. Even though it corresponded to our experience of material objects, we lacked proof that it adequately represented the deep structure of reality. By giving us access to that deep structure for the first time, quantum mechanics made it possible to do such a test, or “experimental metaphysics.” Unfortunately, the results seemed to contradict classical assumptions, at least on the sub-atomic level.
Aharonov, Popescu, and Tollaksen reply: We thank the letter writers for their interest and for the opportunity to better clarify our ideas.Michael Nauenberg and Art Hobson make essentially the same point—namely, that our ideas are completely wrong. To put their criticism in the right context, we point out that the outcome of our research program is twofold. First, we have discovered an entirely new class of quantum effects; second, we present a new way of thinking about quantum mechanics.The fact that quantum mechanics predicts the effects we discovered is just that, a fact. The effects are computed using standard quantum mechanics, without additions or modifications. As such, their prediction by quantum mechanics is beyond doubt (unless one suspects algebraic mistakes). Furthermore, many of our effects have been verified experimentally; in particular, different versions of our amplification method have been used as novel technological tools. Both Nauenberg and Hobson completely ignore our effects. But one should not ignore them. They are novel and they are strange. Even more, they don’t appear in isolation, but they form a well-structured pattern. Surely there is a lesson here that quantum mechanics wants to teach us; one ignores it at one’s peril.On the other hand, our way of looking at quantum mechanics is certainly unconventional; it introduces new concepts, and it approaches old concepts in a new way. That is essentially what the two letter writers point out, Hobson most emphatically when he writes that our article “is riddled with errors.” We are criticized for thinking in a different way and for asking new questions. But our way of thinking leads to the same predictions as the conventional way, so as far as experiments are concerned they are completely equivalent. As Richard Feynman says in his book The Character of Physical Law (Modern Library, 1994), suppose we have “two theories” that “have all the consequences . . . exactly the same. . . . How are we going to decide which one is right? There is no way by science, because they both agree with the experiment to the same extent.” So the criticism is baseless.At the same time, if our approach is completely equivalent to the standard one, why bother? Again Feynman gives the best answer: “For psychological reasons . . . , these two things may be far from equivalent, because one gives a man different ideas from the other. . . . There will be something, for instance, in theory A that talks about something, . . . but to find out what the corresponding thing is . . . in [theory] B may be very complicated—it may not be a very simple idea at all.” As a consequence, a new way of thinking allows one to ask new questions that, although they could be asked in the old theory as well, would have been very difficult to even envisage. That is precisely what we did. First, we raised the issue of the physics in pre- and postselected ensembles. And to reply to Hobson, no, there is nothing “erroneous” in the process of postselection. Postselection is a question about results of experiments, and every question about the results of actual measurements is legitimate. Subsequently, we discovered the concept of weak measurements, which in turn led us to discover the various effects we presented. Since the power of any new approach is given by its ability to predict new effects, one should conclude that ours is strong indeed.Furthermore, as many physicists agree, an intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics is still missing. That is why quantum physicists are surprised over and over again by the discovery of strange and unexpected fundamental effects. We hope that our new way of thinking is a step toward the long-sought intuition. Even more important, the new way of thinking may give us new ideas about what to change, if experiments ever turn out to contradict quantum mechanics and therefore require its modification. In particular, since we tinker with the idea of time— one of the most important concepts in physics—starting the change from there may be a very potent method.Shaul Mukamel refers to our experiment in which the component along some given axis of a spin-1⁄2 particle is found, by a weak measurement, to have the value √2‾/2 which is √2‾ times larger than the largest eigenvalue. He suggests an alternative explanation based on a classical vector model of spin. According to his explanation, values up to √3‾/2 should be possible. However, we presented the experiment showing √2‾/2 only because it was mathematically simple; by choosing a different postselection, we could have obtained, as results of weak measurements, values as large as we wanted. Hence the above simple classical-vector view doesn’t work.Robert Griffiths points out that there are two other time-symmetric formulations of quantum mechanics besides ours—“consistent histories” and “decoherent histories.” In particular, Griffiths is right when he emphasizes a major difference in spirit between our theory and consistent histories. The main goal of consistent histories is to find an explanation for the (apparent?) collapse of the wavefunction during a quantum measurement; although that solution is hotly disputed, as are all other solutions to the collapse problem, it is certainly a very ingenious one. However, an answer to the collapse problem is not our primary interest (though we are starting to see glimmers of an alternative answer to it using our approach).The letter by Griffiths, however, runs the risk of being misread as implying that solving the collapse problem will by itself clarify most or all of the counterintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics. That conclusion would be wrong. Quantum mechanics is strange and unusual and defies intuition in many ways; solving the collapse problem is by no means its only interesting fundamental issue. Nor can the solution of that one problem lead to a complete understanding of quantum phenomena. That particles tunnel in the first place is surprising by itself; even more so is the fact that, as we showed, perfectly good measuring devices, working with arbitrarily high precision, indicate consistently that the tunneling particles have negative kinetic energy. Equally surprising is that we can arrange a situation in which perfectly good measurements, made with as high a precision as we want, indicate that spin-1⁄2 particles have arbitrarily large spin. And these are only two examples. As far as we are aware, none of the many proposed solutions to the collapse problem make these effects seem less surprising, let alone predict them.© 2011 American Institute of Physics.