MC Escher, Drawing Hands (3)
It seems to me that the Many Worlds Interpretation offers a profound challenge to our moral thinking because it erases the distinction between the possible and the actual. For me, the reason to strive to make a better world is that we can hope to make the actual future better than the possible futures we dealt with. If every eventuality we worked to eliminate, whether starvation, disease, or tyranny, was actually somewhere else in the wave function, then our efforts would not result in an overall improvement. Issues such as nuclear war and climate change are less urgent if there are multiple versions of Earth and the human race has more than one chance to get things right. (1 p178)
Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist working at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario. He is also associated with Waterloo University and the University of Toronto. The Perimeter Institute was founded in 1999 by the entrepreneur Mike Lazaridis as a government and industry partnership. It is dedicated to both the study of foundational physics and possible applications. This might seem a strange mix but it was noted by Lazaridis that foundational breakthroughs in physics underlie most of our recent technological progress. The Perimeter Institute now rivals the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies in this hemisphere and PI has started founding similar institutes in both Africa and South America as a plan to increase diversity in physics. PI started the project for the Event Horizon Telescope that produced the first-ever picture of a black hole in 2019. (2)
Smolin’s book is titled Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution. It is about two problems Einstein never resolved in his lifetime and are still unresolved today. One is the joining of general relativity (gravity) with quantum theory, the so-called theory of quantum gravity. The other was his discomfort with quantum theory as espoused by Neils Bohr and others, the Copenhagen Consensus, which directs modern quantum theory to this day. The major problem is the wave-particle duality of matter which gives rise to the measurement problem, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. the paradox of Schrodinger’s cat and Bohr’s idea of complementarity. To Smolin, this is a basic philosophy of physics that makes modern quantum theory anti-realist. He describes it thus:
For Bohr, science is not about nature. It does not and cannot give us an objective picture of what nature is like. That would be impossible. because we never interact with nature directly. We gain knowledge about the natural world only through intermediaries, which are experimental devices we invent and construct. (1 p85)
This group was opposed by what Smolin called the realists, centered around Einstein, de Broglie, and Schrodinger. Despite being a realist, in 1925 Schrodinger published his famous equation showing that wave/particle duality and the Copenhagen form of quantum mechanics were equivalent. This sealed the realists' fate for decades. In 1935 Einstein took another track with the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen wrote a paper in which they described quantum mechanics as incomplete because of the notion of locality, two particles could only share information when they were close together because of the limitations of the speed of light. But quantum mechanics suggested non-locality, what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” a feature of quantum mechanics that had weird, almost occult connotations and that most theorists just wanted to handwave away. In 1964 the Irish physicist John Bell put this in a theory that states that if the EPR hypothesis is true then quantum mechanics is inconsistent. One thing this did was to provide a way to experimentally test this. This has been tested experimentally several times starting in the 1980s. The EPR hypothesis is false, physics at the quantum level is non-local. This has led to quantum information theory and the process of building a quantum computer. Quantum reality is non-local or entangled and must be included in any realist project.
Smolin does a good job making all the intricacies and controversies of quantum mechanics accessible. As a brief history of quantum mechanics, it is invaluable. This is also a philosophy book as Smolin holds a chair in philosophy at the University of Toronto. He has also taught a class of quantum physics of artists which means he is dedicated to bringing this esoteric discipline to a wider audience.
In 1957 Hugh Everett came up with a theory of quantum mechanics which is now called the Many Worlds Theory. In this theory the wave function does not collapse, different states continue, the world splits into many worlds as it doesn’t tell us what will be observed just that a choice will be made. What happens to the other choices? These will continue in another reality. Smolin sees several problems with this theory, which he calls magic realist, including moral ones as shown in the first quote. Quantum mechanics rests on a set of probabilities arising from what is called the Born Rule. Getting these probabilities to fit into Many Worlds has been a continuing process that has delved into the very nature of probability itself. This work is mainly taking place at Oxford.
Smolin proposes several ideas to accomplish a realist agenda. The first is a completely relational definition of reality. Leibniz, Mach, and finally Einstein had a similar view. Newton defined his mechanics as having an absolute coordinate system outside the viewer which he equated with God. It has been shown that humans and many other creatures are physiologically and psychologically embedded in a Newtonian absolute 3D space. (4) To an individual human, there is always a boundary between oneself and the rest of the world. This boundary and our perception of the world outside is maybe how religion came about. Einstein and others realized that for a complete description of physics, there cannot be outside, the hand draws itself, like the M. C. Escher print, Drawing Hands. (3) Einstein was able to remove absolute space with General Relativity but failed to develop a completely relational physics, what Smolin calls “The principle of background independence.” (1 p 233) Smolin proposes such a purely relational physics loosely based on Leibnitz’s Monadology. (5) This is a fairly short work and without context, it would seem more like the more extreme ravings in Revelations than a philosophical work. What it is is a response to Newton’s absolute space. Smolin makes a major change in that the relationships are purely temporal, space being an emergent property of time. Time to Smolin is fundamentally one-way, the two-way arrow of time being an emergent property. This is a different approach than any physicist I’ve heard of, certainly different from his colleague at Perimeter Institute, Carlo Rovelli. (6) This was the most startling part of the book and not really fully explained. I guess I will have to read his two other books on time. Smolin presents this idea of views. When a wave function collapses during a measurement of a particle one not only loses the ability to understand the quantum world but to the anti-realists, there is no way to ever understand it. To Smolin, when a measurement is made, a boundary is created between the observer and the rest of reality and a view is what can be measured across this boundary. Just how this resolves the measurement paradox is still unclear to me. Views and relational time do give a coherent idea of the weirdness of entanglement. Humans have unlimited views and no two would have very similar ones so there is little possibility of entanglement. Two photons, however, have limited degrees of freedom and are nearly the same so they are quite close together relationally in time. This allows for entanglement.
The book was a surprise and a delight and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in the intricacies of Quantum Foundations.
Smolin, Lee. Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution. Penguin Random House, 2020. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/316818/einsteins-unfinished-revolution-by-lee-smolin/.
Perimeter, Institute. “History | Perimeter Institute.” Accessed May 29, 2021. https://perimeterinstitute.ca/history.
Escher, MC. Drawing Hands. 1948. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dragoljub-Cucic/publication/45889195/figure/fig1/AS:341129510834234@1458343021862/MCEscher-Drawing-hands-17.png.
O’Keefe, John, and Lynn Nadel. The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map. Oxford : New York: Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press, 1978.
Leibnitz, Gotfried. “The Monadology,” 1714, 15.
Rovelli, Carlo. The Order of Time. Illustrated edition. New York: Riverhead Books, 2018.
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