Bad Philosophy and Bad Statistics

Ritam Bhaumik, Benoît Cogliati, Jordan Ethan +1 more

Han J.F. Geurdes

Recently, Carlo Rovelli wrote an essay about bad philosophy hampering the progress of physics [1]. That, of course, can be true. Nevertheless, my letter will present a definite proof that bad statistics hampers that progress as well. Here we show that erroneous statistical underpinnings of a key experiment to demonstrate the absence of Einstein data in the empirical reality, disallows a serious conclusion from an experiment. The experiment [2] is paradigmatic for a whole array of similar experiments. We mention e.g. Weihs et al [3]. The presentation of the flaw is done without much reference to random variables and detailed probability violations. It is based on an integral expression to make it easier for not statistically schooled readers who are interested in philosophy of physics. It is however statistical methodology of experiments in foundational physics. The derived result implies that Einstein data may still exist in the empirical reality. The general context of this result is not only philosophical or foundational. It affects quantum technology as well. Quantum security, more in particular entanglement based quantum key distribution, may not be safe at all when Einsteinian variables exist and can be manipulated.

Jeff Crook

Tony Leggett

The last decade has seen a proliferation of books which attempt to explain the conceptual paradoxes of quantum mechanics in a non-technical way. This latest contribution, by David Albert, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, is brash, readable, provocative and at times breathtakingly naive and ill-informed. It will probably cause mild apoplexy, for both good reasons and bad, in a sizeable fraction of the professional quantum measurement community.

Tetsuo Ogawa

The statistical noise properties of the laser radiation in a low-Q (bad) cavity are theoretically investigated. The bad-cavity laser system is shown to be exactly equivalent to the stochastic Toda oscillator (STO) in the case of negligible polarization noise. Transforming the STO Langevin equation to the Fokker-Planck equation with a position-dependent diffusion coefficient, analytical expressions of the probability distribution are obtained as particular solutions in a stationary state with the aid of the expansion into a complete orthogonal set. We predict novel statistical features of the laser light, e.g., a power tail of the intensity distribution function, non-Gaussian nature of the field fluctuation, and super-Poissonian photoelectron statistics. General solutions are also given in a closed form in terms of the matrix continued fraction to compare with the particular solutions. The good-cavity case is reanalyzed in our formalism to root out differences between them.