Trouble with physics

Quantum entanglement history I

The 2022 Nobel prize in physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science". Hamish Johnston gave a brief account in Physics World on October 4th. He said the three laureates performed the key experiments that established the quantum property of entanglement. That’s quantum entanglement, which is often described as spooky action at a distance. The idea is that you produce two photons from one event, and when…

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The race to invent new particles is pointless

Sabine Hossenfelder had an article in the Guardian last month. As you will doubtless know, she’s the author of the Backreaction blog. It used to be a physics blog with a bad reputation for comment censorship. Now it’s a YouTube blog, and there are no comments*. That’s because Hossenfelder is a “follow me on Twitter” type who talks at you, not to you. She’s never been interested in what anybody had to say. Moreover it’s crystal clear she’s never read the Einstein digital papers or the…

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Physics is dead, long live physics

I was pleased to read about the launch of the James Webb space telescope on Christmas Day. I do hope everything goes smoothly. It will take about a month to get on station, about three months before it’s cold enough to function, and about six months before it’s commissioned. Unlike Hubble, which was in a low Earth orbit, Webb will be in a “halo” orbit around the L2 Lagrange point a million miles from Earth. Along the way there are 3 burns and 50 deployments with…

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The leptoquark hype

There was an article in The Daily Telegraph last week. The title was Key step to unlocking mysteries of the universe. The subtitle was Hearts ‘set racing’ at site of Large hadron Collider as experiments hint at a new force of nature. You can find an online version at Key to how universe works may have been discovered. Both the print and the online versions were written by science editor Sarah Knapton, and whilst the title and illustrations are a little different, the content is the…

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The trouble with physics

Many years ago I gave evidence at the Old Bailey. It was a fraud trial, and I was an expert witness for the prosecution. During the case I got to know DI Frank Cooper of Holborn nick. He told me about his "copper's nose", and what bank robbers and the like are really like. He said I shouldn’t think of them as lovable rogues like in the old movies. He said “They’re career criminals, they’re contemptuous of people like you”. Or words to that effect. Along…

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Propaganda and censorship in physics

Last time, I was talking about propaganda and censorship in politics. As most people know, things have been getting rather Orwellian recently. Free speech is under attack. People have lost their jobs because “all lives matter” is somehow racist. Left-wing activists are pushing for censorship on the pretence that all opposing views are hate crimes. On top of that certain so-called journalists are peddling fake news and doublespeak “fact checks” in a patent blatant fashion. I’d say Bari Weiss’s resignation letter is a sign of the…

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How to tell science from pseudoscience

I have to wait for something at the moment, so I thought I’d have a read of Sabine Hossenfelder’s latest blog post. Then I thought I’d say something about it. Hossenfelder is green: Is the earth flat? Is G5 is a mind-control experiment by the Russian government? What about the idea that COVID was engineered by the vaccine industry? How can we tell apart science from pseudoscience? This is what we will talk about today. Well, it isn’t the Russians trying to track me on my…

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Something is rotten in the state of QED

Check out something is rotten in the state of QED. It’s a paper by Oliver Consa, who has done some excellent detective work on the history of quantum electrodynamics (QED). He has delved deep into the claims that QED is the most precise theory ever, and what he’s come up with is grim: Consa says the much-touted precision of QED is based on measurements of the electron g-factor, but that “this value was obtained using illegitimate mathematical traps, manipulations and tricks”. I think he’s right. I…

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The theory of everything

I think when you’ve absorbed a lot of material, especially the old material, you get a handle on the theory of everything. The Einstein digital papers are important for this. That’s where you learn how gravity works. You learn that light curves because the speed of light is spatially variable. Not because it follows the curvature of spacetime. You learn that a gravitational field is a place where a space is neither homogeneous nor isotropic in a non-linear fashion. Hence when you plot your metrical measurements…

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Even physicists don’t understand quantum mechanics

Check out Sean Carroll’s New York Times article Even Physicists Don’t Understand Quantum Mechanics. I thought it was great. And I just loved that subtitle: Worse, they don’t seem to want to understand it. Carroll started by quoting Feynman, who said this: “I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics”. That’s a good start. Feynman was known as the great explainer, but he couldn’t explain how a magnet works. Or how gravity works. Moreover he was a major contributor to quantum electrodynamics,…

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