I’ve referred to Quanta Magazine articles in a number of my previous posts. For example in Quantum computing and the quantum quacks I referred to a 2019 article by Natalie Wolchover called How Space and Time Could Be a Quantum Error-Correcting Code. In The black hole charlatans I referred to a 2020 article by George Musser called The Most Famous Paradox in Physics Nears Its End. In Quantum entanglement is scientific fraud I referred to a 2022 article by Natalie Wolchover called Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer:

Screenshot of Quanta magazine video by Kim Taylor, see Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer

Take a look at their About Quanta web page. They say Quanta Magazine is “an editorially independent online publication launched by the Simons Foundation in 2012 to enhance public understanding of science”. They also say they used the name Quanta because Albert Einstein called photons quanta of light, and Quanta’s goal is to illuminate science. It all sounds reasonable enough, and since they give a view of what’s happening in physics at the moment, I thought I’d write about them. Check out their physics section, where you can find about half a dozen articles a month by various authors. You can select stories via topic tags such as particle physics or cosmology, but I looked at them chronologically.

How is science even possible?

The latest Quanta article as I write is How Is Science Even Possible? dated June 20th 2024. It’s by Steven Strogatz, and it’s a transcript of a podcast. I don’t like podcasts myself, I think they’re somehow self-important, but I don’t mind a transcript. Anyway, Strogatz was talking to Nigel Goldenfeld, a physics professor at the University of California in San Diego. Goldenfeld said this: “What’s crazy is that you can really understand almost everything there is to know about electricity and magnetism with the help of those equations and some clever math”. Unfortunately that isn’t true. Most physicists don’t understand electromagnetism. Especially since Maxwell’s equations are really Heaviside’s equations, and because Maxwell’s vortex and screw concepts are missing from contemporary textbooks. Goldenfield then talked about the general theory of relativity, saying it explains gravitation to a higher accuracy than Newton’s law of gravitation. That isn’t true either. What’s presented as general relativity nowadays doesn’t actually explain how gravity works, and it contradicts Einstein in various ways. For example Einstein described a gravitational field as a place where space was neither homogeneous nor isotropic, not a place where spacetime is curved. On top of that, Einstein’s variable speed of light is totally missing. Strogatz and Goldenfeld then talked at length about magnets, but it’s clear that they don’t have a clue about how a magnet works. Thereafter there’s some waffle about emergence, finishing up with machine learning, AI, and ChatGPT. Groan. This feels like a stocking-filler article. Like it’s holiday season, and Quanta needed some padding.

The Enduring Mystery of How Water Freezes

The next article is The Enduring Mystery of How Water Freezes dated June 17th 2024. It’s by Elise Cutts, and I was thinking it was another piece of holiday filler. Maybe it was, but either way I thought it was interesting. That’s because like a lot of people I thought water freezes at zero degrees Celsius. I didn’t know that a bottle of distilled water in a deep freeze can remain a liquid down to minus forty degrees C, but will freeze if you shake it. Cutts gave a great analogy saying freezing usually doesn’t happen at zero degrees C for much the same reason that backyard wood piles don’t spontaneously combust. She told us that “To get started, fire needs a spark. And ice needs a nucleus – a seed of ice around which more and more water molecules arrange themselves into a crystal structure”.

Screenshot of movie S4 from a paper by Debdas Dhabal, Rajat Kumar, and Valeria Molinero, see Quanta

Cutts then talked about work by Valeria Molinero, a physical chemist at the University of Utah, and Konrad Meister, a biophysical chemist at Boise State University. They’ve been collaborating “to unravel the secrets of nature’s best snow makers – bacteria and fungi whose proteins interact with water in ways that promote ice nucleation”. It would seem that certain bacteria and fungi contain proteins which promote ice nucleation. And that “many of these organisms are plant pathogens, and it’s possible that their ice-nucleating proteins evolved to cause frost damage”. I didn’t know that. Or that ski-slope snow guns spray water containing an ice-nucleator in the form of Pseudomonas syringae bacteria. Cool. Whilst this isn’t the fundamental physics I’m into, and maybe isn’t actually physics, I thought it was good science. Can you imagine if you found a way to water the deserts of North America? Or the Outback? Or the Arabian desert. Or the Sahara?

The New Math of How Large-Scale Order Emerges

The next article was The New Math of How Large-Scale Order Emerges by Philip Ball dated June 10th 2024. It’s all about emergent phenomena. Ball gave examples such as the firing of billions of neurons in your brain which deliver “your unique and coherent experience of reading these words”. In other words, consciousness. Other examples are self-organising non-colliding streams of pedestrians on a crowded sidewalk, and Jupiter’s Great Red Spot:

Screenshot of Quanta magazine video by Equinox Graphics, see The New Math of How Large-Scale Order Emerges

Ball said the world is full of such emergent phenomena, but there’s no agreed scientific theory to explain emergence. He talked about work by Jim Crutchfield, a physicist at the UC Davis, Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, and Fernando Rosas, a complex systems scientist also at Sussex. These scientists talked about a theoretical framework wherein a complex system is comprised of a hierarchy of levels which operate independently, and where emergence can be thought of as a kind of “software in the natural world”. They also talked about a “mathematical formalism called computational mechanics“, about concepts labelled as computational closure and causal states, and about a thought-experiment device called an epsilon machine. Again there are references to machine learning and artificial intelligence. This time however they come with “new ideas” which “touch on the issue of free will”, which “may be rescued by the formalism of higher-level causation”. Again this isn’t the fundamental physics I’m into, but again I think it’s good science.

Mathematicians Attempt to Glimpse Past the Big Bang

I didn’t think that about the next article. It was Mathematicians Attempt to Glimpse Past the Big Bang by Steve Nadis dated May 31st 2024. Nadis talked about work by Ghazal Geshnizjani of the Perimeter Institute, Eric Ling of the University of Copenhagen, and Jerome Quintin of the University of Waterloo. They wrote a paper On the initial singularity and extendibility of flat quasi-de Sitter spacetimesi which was published by the Journal of High Energy Physics. I’m afraid to say I thought it was bad science. Not because it involved the application of mathematics to gain an understanding of what happened before the Big Bang. Mathematics is a vital tool for physics, and to make progress I think we should use everything we’ve got. I don’t have an issue trying to understand what happened before the Big Bang either. That’s something I whole-heartedly applaud. I have a particular aversion to the lies-to-children claim that time began with the Big Bang, therefore it doesn’t make sense to ask what banged.

Quanta “before inflation” image by Nico Roper, see Mathematicians Attempt to Glimpse Past the Big Bang

Instead, I thought it was bad science because the authors assumed that inflation was correct, and that the MTW concept of black holes was correct. My sentiment is that Geshnizjani, Ling, and Quintin will never get anywhere with The Big Bang when they’re weighed down by all the usual misconceptions in gravitational physics. I have no issue with anybody likening the expanding universe to a black hole in reverse. But if you ignore the crucial point that the event horizon is a place where the speed of light is zero and nothing moves, everything else is a waste of time. Especially if you think the expansion of the universe is gravity in reverse. Especially if you fall in love with curvature singularities and the FLRW metric, even though Einstein described a gravitational field as a place where space was neither homogeneous nor isotropic. Especially if you’ve fallen for inflation hook line and sinker. Even though the monopole problem misses the crucial point that the electron has an electromagnetic field, the flatness problem misses the crucial point that homogeneous space is space without a gravitational field, and the horizon problem misses the crucial point that the universe may have started with no temperature at all. The end result is that you can get “lost in maths”, then pursue the wrong avenue, then end up going nowhere. I’m afraid to say I think that’s what happened here. The paper is also available on the arXiv, and is 48 pages long. Good luck wading through it. I only hope that Ling meant what he said when he said in order to make sense of the universe “we first need to understand classical physics as well as we can”. Meanwhile this Quanta article isn’t illuminating science, it’s peddling bullshit orthodoxy to a gullible public.

Physicists Puzzle Over Emergence of Strange Electron Aggregates

The next article was Physicists Puzzle Over Emergence of Strange Electron Aggregates by Daniel Garisto dated 29th May 2024. He started by saying “in the 127 years since the electron was discovered, it has undergone more scrutiny than perhaps any other particle. As a result, its properties are not just well known, but rote, textbook material”. That’s something else that isn’t true. Back in the 1920s the realists like de Broglie and Schrödinger talked about the electron as a wave in a closed path. See for example Charles Galton Darwin’s 1927 Nature paper on the electron as a vector wave. However the Copenhagen school wilfuly ignored all this. Hence nowadays a particle physicist will tell you, with a straight face, that the electron is a point partcle. Despite the wave nature of matter. The rest of Garisto’s article is about electron quasiparticles, along with the integer and fractional quantum Hall effects, and the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect. It ended up talking about “the potential of non-abelian anyons for quantum computing”. I’d say it’s all rather pointless if you have no actual understanding of the electron.

The S-Matrix Is the Oracle Physicists Turn To in Times of Crisis

Next came The S-Matrix Is the Oracle Physicists Turn To in Times of Crisis by Matt von Hippel dated 23rd May 2024. The S-matrix is of course the scattering matrix, which for example gives decay-product probabilities.

Quanta “S-matrix” image by Nico Roper, see The S-Matrix Is the Oracle Physicists Turn To in Times of Crisis

Hippel started by talking about Werner Heisenberg in 1943 pondering a crisis in quantum theory, wherein predictions were giving nonsensical infinite results. Hippel said “these infinities led Heisenberg to distrust the way quantum physics was depicting reality”. Yet again it’s not true. Anybody who has read the history knows full well that Heisenberg was a “Copenhagen school” physicist. They adopted Yakov Frenkel’s 1926 paper on the electrodynamics of rotating electrons, which said the electron will thus be treated simply as a point. Again, they did this because their realist rivals such as de Broglie and Schrödinger talked about the electron as a wave in a closed path. For another example see Born and Infeld’s 1935 paper on the quantization of the new field theory II. Note page 12 where they said this: “the inner angular momentum plays evidently a similar role to the spin in the usual theory of the electron. But it has some great advantages: it is an integral of the motion and has a real physical meaning as a property of the electromagnetic field, whereas the spin is defined as an angular momentum of an extensionless point, a rather mystical assumption”. Heisenberg would have known about all this, and when you do, you know that the rest of this Quanta piece is yet more bullshit orthodoxy, featuring Higgs bosons, W bosons, quarks, and gluons. None of which have actually been observed. Sigh. I will have write an entire physics detective article to explain all this. Mañana.

Will Better Superconductors Transform the World?

There are many more Quanta articles, such as He Seeks Mystery Magnetic Fields With His Quantum Compass. The subtitle was this: “Alex Sushkov is updating an old technology with new quantum tricks in hopes of sensing the magnetic influence of dark matter”. Since I think dark matter is just space with a higher energy-density, I think the guy is wasting his time and our money trying to detect axions via NMR. The next article was Will Better Superconductors Transform the World?. That’s where Janna Levin interviewed Siddharth Shanker Saxena, a condensed-matter physicist at the University of Cambridge. It was another podcast transcript, but I think it was worth reading because superconductors could indeed transform the world. Next was Dogged Dark Matter Hunters Find New Hiding Places to Check. It started by saying “perhaps dark matter is made of an entirely different kind of particle than the ones physicists have been searching for”. Yeah, and perhaps dark matter isn’t made of particles at all. It ended by saying one more possibility is that the prevailing theory of gravity isn’t quite right. That’s the theory where Einstein said “the energy of the gravitational field shall act gravitatively in the same way as any other kind of energy”. There’s also AI Starts to Sift Through String Theory’s Near-Endless Possibilities. All I shall say about that is that string theory is a dead duck.

Quanta “AI string theory” image by Kouzou Sakai, see AI Starts to Sift Through String Theory’s Near-Endless Possibilities
Caption: What macroworld emerges from string theory depends on how six small spatial dimensions are bundled up.

There’s also Can Information Escape a Black Hole? where Janna Levin interviewed Leonard Susskind about the information paradox. She said Susskind was “widely regarded as the father of string theory”. It’s yet more bullshit orthodoxy. So was What Is the Nature of Time? where Frank Wilczek says “We can really travel in time”. No Frank, we can’t, because time is merely a cumulative measure of motion. Then there’s In a ‘Dark Dimension’, Physicists Search for Missing Matter. That isn’t bullshit orthodoxy, it’s just bullshit.

That’s where Quanta colluded with Nature to peddle fairytale woo

All in all, I’d say there’s way too much of this sort of crap on Quanta, even if we haven’t seen too much of Natalie Wolchover of late. Even Peter Woit, the Standard Model pimp who censors all criticism, was appalled by Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer. That’s where Quanta colluded with Nature to peddle fairytale woo. Hence I’d say that Quanta aren’t illuminating science, they’ve gone over to the dark side. They’re promoting bad science and peddling pseudoscience propaganda from quacks and charlatans. In particular they’re upholding the mainstream orthodoxy that will not admit that the electron is a wave in a closed path, and will not admit that a gravitational field is a place where space is neither homogeneous nor isotropic. That’s because such admissions would demonstrate that contemporary particle physics and cosmology are badly wrong in multiple ways. What an irony that the Simons Foundation, which has a mission “to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences“, are paying for the exact opposite.