The Ventures play the theme from Hawaii Five-O

To take a break from the heavy-duty stuff about quantum mechanics, here is a clip of The Ventures playing the theme from the TV program Hawaii Five-O.

I never get tired of this clip. Apart from the fact that The Ventures are one of the great guitar instrumental groups, this one features not one but two drummers driving the beat. One is their regular drummer but here he is joined by the legendary Max Weinberg.

It is astonishing how the two drummers stay synchronized throughout the complex song, even the drum solo.

Consciousness, measurement, and quantum mechanics – Part 2

(See Part 1 here. Also I am going to suspend the limit of three comments per post for this series of posts because it is a topic that benefits from back and forth discussions.)

It looks like I may have not been sufficiently precise in my first post, leading to some confusion, so I am going to take a slight detour from my series of posts on this topic to address an issue that came up in the comments about the nature of the probability and statistics that is used in quantum theory and how it differs from what we use in everyday life, in particular, the nature of the uncertainty in predicting outcomes. (As always with quantum mechanics, since the phenomena involved are invisible to our senses and often counter-intuitive, we have to use analogies and metaphors to try and bring out the ideas, with the caveat that those never exactly represent the reality.)

Let’s start with classical statistics that we use in everyday life in a situation where the results of a measurement are binary. Suppose that we want to know what percentage of a population has heights less that five feet. If we measure the height of a single person, that will be either more or less than five feet. It will not give us a probability. How do we find that? We take a random sample of people and measure their heights. From those results, we can calculate the fraction of people less than five feet by dividing the number in that category by the size of the sample. That fraction also now represents the probability that if we pick any future person at random, that person will be shorter than five feet. When we pick a random person, we do not know which category they will fall into but we do know that it will be either one or the other. What we also believe is, that in the classical world, each person’s height was fixed before we measured it. We just did not know it beforehand.
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Consciousness, measurement, and quantum mechanics – Part 1

My link to a video of a discussion between physicist Bernard Carr and Robert Lawrence Kuhn generated a request for me to to clarify what was being said about the possible role of consciousness in quantum measurements. With me, you have to be careful about what you wish for because as so often happens, my attempts to explain difficult physics concepts leads to multi-part posts because of all the subtleties involved. I hope that readers will think and discuss each part and clarify it in their minds before moving on to the next section.

Since this is a tricky topic, before I give my views, let me state my background in this area so that you can judge for yourselves whether to give any credibility to my opinions. I have worked all my professional life in the area of quantum physics, and thought and read about the measurement problem a lot and have even taught about it as part of quantum mechanics courses. But I have not published any papers in this particular area of quantum mechanics. I also apologize in advance for some oversimplifications that I will make in order to make the subject more intelligible to people without a background in quantum mechanics or even physics. I will also, where appropriate, include the technical terms for various processes. It is not important that you know this jargon. I only include it so that people who read other articles that use those terms will have a better idea of what is being talked about.
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A cautionary tale

Back in August, I discussed a long New Yorker article that looked at the world of wealthy anti-aging activists, also known as biohackers, especially one Peter Diamandis, who go to extraordinary lengths to try and increase their lifespans and even seek immortality. Since they are so rich, they can afford to spend vast sums of money on these efforts and can propagate their ideas in the media.

But ordinary people who try to follow their practices can find themselves in difficulties, as can be seen from this letter to the editor that appeared the following month in which the correspondent Matigan King described her own experience.

I enjoyed Tad Friend’s witty and entertaining piece about the fascinating world of anti-aging (“Live Long and Prosper,” August 11th). I’m particularly grateful to Friend for pointing out that some of the trendy life-style interventions advocated by health influencers, such as intermittent fasting, affect women differently than they do men.
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China raises the stakes

Relations between China and the US have been tense ever since Trump started his mercurial behavior with tariffs, raising and lowering and raising them again so frequently that I gave up trying to keep track. Trade relations between the US and the rest of the world seem more and more like a poker game in which the US starts out with a huge pile of chips and keeps raising the stakes, forcing out the smaller players, the countries that cannot afford to go toe-to-toe with the economic giant, so that they fold. The one exception is China which does have the resources to stay in the game. Up until now, they seem to have been content to be in a reactive mode, matching the US as it raises the ante.

But in a surprising development, China took the lead in raising the stakes, imposing new measures that would enable them to restrict the export of rare earth materials that are crucial for electronics.

China’s Ministry of Commerce on Thursday unveiled its most expansive rare earth export controls to date, allowing Beijing not only to restrict shipments of raw materials and magnets — as it has in the past — but also any devices that incorporate those elements. Because Chinese rare earths are embedded in everything from iPhones and electric vehicle motors to fighter-jet sensors, the rules effectively give Beijing potential veto power over vast swaths of global manufacturing.

The vast potential reach of China’s action, and the U.S.’s counteraction, was on display Friday: Trump’s tariff announcement sent stocks tumbling, with the S&P 500 dropping more than 2 percent, its worst day since April.
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New Trump slogan: Make America Sick Again!

In previous government shutdowns, federal employees were furloughed and not paid during it but when the shutdown ended, they were brought back and given their back pay. This time Trump first said that they may not get any back pay and then upped the ante by saying that he will begin firing them. He and the Republicans seem to think that this will put pressure on the Democrats to acquiesce to their demand to approve a short-term spending bill that will result in cutting health care subsidies under Obamacare that made health insurance premiums more affordable.

Over the weekend, people started getting fired. It seems like the first firings are targeting health care workers and had been planned even before the shutdown.
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Trump will be mad that Nobel committee says, “No peace prize for you!”

This year’s Nobel peace prize was awarded to Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado and Trump will be mad that he did not get it.

The peace prize was tarnished when it was awarded to the war criminal Henry Kissinger and it did not redeem itself when it gave the prize to Barack Obama who had done nothing to deserve it. But Trump clearly feels that he too deserves it and has been campaigning hard for it.

While Trump has played down his chances to win the prize, he has been active behind the scenes, phoning Jens Stoltenberg, Norway’s finance minister, in Oslo this summer to tell him he wanted to discuss the “Nobel peace prize … and tariffs”. He regularly brings up the award; usually as he makes the tenuous claim to have ended six or seven wars since his return to the White House.

“If I were named Obama, I would have had the Nobel prize given to me in 10 seconds,” Trump said last year during the presidential race.

The obsession has become a running joke among foreign diplomats seeking to lobby their interests, including at a regular breakfast among European ambassadors where a common topic is how to keep Trump engaged in the support of Ukraine.

“Anytime he is talking about solving seven wars, he is really sending a message: give me the Nobel,” said one senior European diplomat based in Washington.
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Trump’s new push for a peace deal to end the [Gaza] war kicked into gear during last month’s UN general assembly, where he met with Arab leaders and then approved a 20-point peace plan that he announced during a White House summit with Benjamin Netanyahu in late September.

The timeline for the award has played an active role in trying to reach a deal this week, as officials have regularly said they believed a peace deal would be ready by Friday – the same day as the Nobel committee announces its choice.

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“Are observers fundamental to physics, or simply byproducts of it?”

I like this discussion because it does not try to hide the fact that the interplay of the observer and the wave function in quantum mechanics is a fundamental unresolved question in physics.

Are observers central to physics, or are they more accurately framed as bystanders to and byproducts of phenomena that exist independently of consciousness? In this interview from the long-running series Closer to Truth, Bernard Carr, an emeritus professor of mathematics and astronomy at Queen Mary University of London, traverses the double-slit experiment, the fine-tuning argument and more to explore what significance, if any, first-person observation holds in the realm of fundamental physics. In his conversation with the US presenter Robert Lawrence Kuhn, he doesn’t adopt a personal stance. Instead, he considers these persistent questions through a contemporary frame, assessing how discussions around them have evolved and where they stand among physicists today.

US policies are shifting global alliances

That India has for some time been a rising economic power, there can be no doubt. It has now surpassed China as the world’s most populous country and having a large domestic market undoubtedly helps in the creation of large businesses and industry. For the longest time, relations between US and India were cool, mainly because India, starting with its first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, pursued a non-aligned foreign policy that chose to not align itself with either of the then two main power blocs of the US and the USSR. As a result, The US tended to see India’s traditional rival Pakistan as more of an ally and favored it.

That changed quite dramatically with the rise to power of Narendra Modi as prime minister, a right wing Hindu chauvinist who assiduously cultivated good relations with the US, especially with Trump. And for a while, the two seemed to be best friends. But recently, there has been a dramatic cooling of relations, with Trump putting some of the harshest tariffs on imports from India.

Isaac Chotiner tries to understand the dramatic shift by talking with Milan Vaishnav, a senior fellow and director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. As Vaishnav says, the 50% tariff on India is a major blow to India..
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