Category: Read You Tweed

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Book Review: Quantum Enigma by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner

[I love books. All kinds of books. So, when a publicist for a publisher asked me if I would be willing to review a book on my blog, there was absolutely no way I could refuse. Of course I told the publicist that I could not guarantee that my review would be positive, but I’d be happy to receive a free copy of the book and read it and put up my thoughts. And guess what, I got a free copy of the book! Woot! Here is the review.]
There are many different interpretations of quantum theory. I’ve been reading about these different interpretations for as long as I can remember and, at various times in my life, I’ve thought one or another of the interpretations worked for me. (A statement, I think, which is at times to cavalier for my opinion about the foundations of quantum theory, but is, at other times, not cavalier enough!) And at times I’d even say that multiple interpretations worked for me (joke about one for each universe deleted.) But there has always been one form of interpretation which I’ve avoided. And that is any interpretation which brings human consciousness into the picture. But I’m not one who likes to leave holes in what I’ve experienced, so I was delighted when I was asked to read and review Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner (both from UC Santa Cruz.)
“Quantum Enigma” is basically a popular science book explaining in a nice way the “mysteries” of quantum theory with a slant towards the idea that maybe “consciousness” has something to do with these mysteries. It covers what you might expect from such a book, the two slit experiment, Schrodinger’s cat, EPR, and Bell’s theorem, many with an good dose of humor which makes the book fun to read. The final chapters of the book are devoted to the question of whether consciousness plays a role in quantum theory. Even in these chapters the humor remains:

In class one day, I (Bruce) casually commented that any human could easily pass a Turing test. One young woman objected: “I’ved dated guys who couldn’t pass a Turing test!”

I’m a nitpicker when it comes to popular science, and I will say that the book did tickle some of my nitpicking nerves, but a lot less than the average popular science quantum theory book. On the other hand it did tickle a lot of my “why I don’t like consciousness interpretations” nerve (that one is located on my foot, I think. Some people vote with their feet, apparently I think with my foot?)
Now on to the subject of the book: “consciousness” and quantum theory (sorry I’m going to keep those little quotes around that word because I have no idea what it means.) The book does a fairly good job of pointing out that whenever they bring up “conscinousness” they are venturing into a territory in which most physicists would get up and leave. Indeed the authors have little sympathy for movies such as “What the Bleep do we Know?” and the related mysticism of the Deepak Chopra crowd, which is good, in my humble opinion. Of course the authors could never put in enough caveats to satisfy most physicists on this matter, but I think their honesty and effort helps the book considerably. For example, I doubt there could be enough caveats in the book to satisfy Bob Park, who in one of his recent “What’s New” columns wrote, “In physics, unfortunately, the word “consciousness” is invariably followed by bullshit.” (Ouch.) So putting this question of physicists reaction to “consciousness” on the backburner, the real question, or the one I think is most interesting, is why the authors, in examining the strange object that is quantum theory, come to the conclusion that “consciouness” is important for understanding quantum theory.
So why do they come to this conclusion (and why do I disagree, or at least find myself unsympathetic to their arguments?) Well the basic jist is the same stuff most of us are aware of: observation of a quantum system “creates” a real system, there is no “reality” in quantum theory (unless it is nonlocal), it is absurd to believe that Schrodinger’s cat is both dead and alive, etc. Okay for each of these I have caveats for how the authors present their material, but lets just have fun and go along and take the poison pill they have given us. Why, given this standard line of arguments, do the authors chase this chain of mystery all the way up the ladder to human consciosness (von Neumman’s ladder.)
Part of this, I think, rests upon the semantics we associate with the word observation. We believe (incorrectly I think) that at the human level we are observers par excellence. Somehow, our observations, are defined, ex post facto, as what is real. Thus it is natural that the observation of quantum theory should be connected to the observation we humans do everyday. A second reason that they try to connect “consciousness” with the mysteries of quantum theory is that both of these present problems whose solution (or even whose proper formulation as a question) we do not know, and both involve in a manner some for of observation (quantum theory in the measurement problem, and “consciousness” apparently in “self-awareness” or somesuch.) I call this “argument by similar mystery.”
But I personaly find both of these arguments not very compelling. Of course I am biased. Why am I biased? When I was growing up I used to spend many evenings in our backyard looking up at the stars. “Look at all of those stars,” my father would say. “To think that they are huge balls of plasma unfathomable distances away! And even more important think how many of them there are! We are pretty damn insignificant in the face of such a universe, don’t you think?” And from that time onwards, I’ve had a deep distrust of every philosophic or scientific explanation that invokes a special place for humans.
You should therefore not find it surprising that I have the biggest beef with the human “consciousness” being important for interpretations because I cannot fathom that we are special enough as to be central to a major component of how the universe opperates. Why must we always encounter human consciousness? Why not a rabit’s consciousness or a robots consciousness or a railroad track’s consciousness? The authors try to get around this question by proposing that any demonstration of a robot causing “the collapse of the wavefunction” (for want of better words) could necessarily be questioned as to whether this solved the quantum measurement problem because a human observor would always need to be involved. Quoting “Consider whether this robot-performed experiment avoids the encounter with consciousness from a human perspective, the only meaningful perspective.” This seems to me a particularly harsh for of solipsism for me to swallow. That a robot or a rabbit cannot be responsible for collapsing the wavefunction but that a human can, because the only meaningful question is what is real for humans? Bah! That doesn’t seem to me to be a logical argument, but more of a way of defining science in a narrow human centered sense.
So what do I come away from “Quantum Enigma” with? Well for one, I would recommend this book for any of the “What the Bleep” crowd as a way to ween them towards more reasonable discussions. As a popular science explanation of quantum theory the book succeeds. As a new revelation which convinces me that the answer to quantum theory lies down the road of “consciousness,” I’m not sold.
Update: Chad over at Uncertain Principles also received a review copy and his review is listed here.

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New Cormac McCarthy Book

Cormac McCarthy has a new book coming out at the end of September: The Road. Amazon.com’s describes it as “a searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece” and Publisher’s Weekly says “McCarthy establishes himself here as the closest thing in American literature to an Old Testament prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human emotion to create a haunting and grim novel about civilization’s slow death after the power goes out.” Since I have quite a sweet spot for postapocalypic stories, I can’t wait for this one!

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New Pynchon

Jud writes in to tell me that there will be a new Thomas Pynchon novel out this December. Here is a link to Amazon.com’s page. There is a blurb in the comments section on Amazon.com describing what this book is supposed to be about. However, the authenticity of this blurb is currently in doubt.
Sweeeeet!

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Not the Library of Babel

This weekend I entered my entire library into librarything. Why would I do this? I don’t really know, but I’ve always been curious how many books I own. The number, as of today, appears to be 858 (including seven duplicates.) For those wishing to see what trash I read, you can find the catelog at this page.

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What Men Are Poets Who Can Speak of Jupiter…

Daneil Dennet’s new book “Breaking the Spell” was reviewed by Leon Wieseltier in the New York Times a few weeks ago. The review was not very favorable, to say the least. Further, the review was not very well thought out. What proof of this do I have? Well, this last weekend, the entire letter section of the Sunday New York Times Book review was filled with letters opposing the review of Wieseltier. Ouch. But really I’m only writing this blog post because I really really liked one of the letters. Here it is:

In his review of “Breaking the Spell,” Leon Wieseltier couldn’t resist the reflexive accusation that building a worldview on a scientific base is reductive, and as is often the case, he trotted out the existence of art to capture our sympathies. As a composer, I am weary of being commandeered as evidence of supernatural forces. Unlike Wieseltier, I do not find it difficult to “envisage the biological utilities” of the “Missa Solemnis”; it merely requires a chain with more than one link. Art, particularly religious and nationalistic art, has powerful social effects. Human beings have achieved their stunning success by becoming master cooperators, and emotions that drive us toward shared experience are prominent among the inspirations and outcomes of everything from grand public art to intimate love songs. Our emotion-filled social lives are the direct result of biologically endowed capacities for communication, from language to the delicate network of expressive muscles in our faces, and even our private imaginations bear the imprint. Awareness that I’m participating in this chain of capabilities in no way deprives music of its wonder; it enhances it.
SCOTT JOHNSON
New York

“As a composer, I am weary of being commandeered as evidence of supernatural forces.” Awesome.

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"A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein" by Palle Yourgrau

I have often heard it describe that to be a great philospher, one must grab ahold of a single idea, put on blinders to all opposing thoughts, and then run with it. This is not to accuse all philosophers of such maniacal tunnel vision, but there certainly is at least a grain of truth in this idea. And it is certain the one part of philosophy as practiced by philosophers which drives physicists absolutely nuts!
Why all of the sudden philosophy bashing? Well I just finished reading A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein by Palle Yourgrau. From the title you would guess that this book is a discussion solely of the friendship between Einstein and Gödel, but really the book is a vigorous argument that Gödel should be taken seriously as an important philosopher. In particular Yourgrau believes that Gödel’s work in general relativity and his argument “against time” have been overlooked by philosophers as is of great importance. The book, therefore, will be of more interest to those familiar with Kant and Wittgenstein than to those who are interested in the logic and the physics that Gödel and Einstein are usually associated with.
Now back to philosophers going overboard in one direction. Here I think that Yourgrau is so zealous in his defense of Gödel as a philosopher that he misinterprets the reason why physicists argue against the relevance of Gödel’s universe. Gödel’s universe is a cosmological solution to the equations of general relativity in which the universe is rotating. Interesting in this solution to the equations of general relativity there exist closed timelike curves. Now I won’t get into the reasons why Gödel is interested in this universe and I don’t object to the use of this universe in philosophical discussions about the nature of time, but I think that Yourgrau’s characterization of physicist’s reaction to solutions to Einstein’s equations with closed timelike curves isn’t quite right. In particular he bluntly dismisses the chronology protection conjecture as totally adhoc. Or, in his words

Just as David Hilbert tried at first to avoid the consequences of the incompleteness theorem by inventing a new rule of logical inference out of whole cloth, so too the relativistic establishment, in the person of Stephen Hawking, tried to get around the embarrassing consequences introduced by the Gödel universe. If the annoying Gödel universe was consistent with the laws of general relativity, why not change the laws? Hawking thus introduced what he called the “chronology protection conjecture” (though a better name would have been the “anti-Gödel amendment”), which proposed a modification of general relativity whose primary goal was to rule out the possibility of world models like Gödel’s, with their awkward chronologies premitting closed temporal loops and causal chains with no beginning. Despite having, as Russell noted in a different context, all the advantages of theft over honest toil, Hawking’s chronology protection conjecture has won few adherents, its ad hoc character betraying iteself.

This characterization of the chronology protection conjecture seems to me very misleading. Why? Because the chronology protection conjecture isn’t just an “add-on” to general relativity: it is the conjecture that general relativity when combined with the other laws of physics does not allow for closed timelike curves. This is different from arguing, as Yourgrau later does, that the objection is simply that Gödel’s universe is not our universe: it is arguing that the more complete laws of physics disallow closed timelike curves. Of course, if your blinders are on, like a good philosoher, then perhaps this distinction is not important. But as a physicist, where there is more than just general relativity to consider, the chronology protection conjecture is a different sort of statement and has considerable evidence in favor of it (and I think most phyisicsts don’t have much of a problem with the chronology protection conjecture, in constrast to Yourgrau who thinks that most people have a problem with it.)
So read “A World Without Time…” with your “physicist” or “scientist” mode shut off and you will be fine. Is it actually possible to turn off these modes? Only if you were a literature major like me 😉

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"Drawing Theories Apart : The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics" by David Kaiser

Some of you have accused me of Feynman hero worship. To which I plead guilty, but with exceptions! I certainly admire the guy for certain qualities, but like everyone, he was human and so comes along with all the lovely faults and trivialities that make up our entertaining species. But on to the subject at hand: I just finished reading Drawing Theories Apart : The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics by David Kaiser.
This book was once a thesis. Parts of it read like it was once a thesis. On the other hand, I really like reading theses. But still, there are times which I wish a little more editing had been done to lead to a more narrative tone.
That being said, I mostly recommend this book to the hard core affectionado of the early history of quantum field theory. But if you are such a rare beast (I suspect most physicsts are!), this book is very entertaining. The most interesting component of the first half of this book involves the “split” between Feynman and Dyson on their take on the diagrams (interestingly, early on, the diagrams were often referred to as Feynman-Dyson diagrams) and how this difference could be traced through the postdocs and graduate students who learned the techniques from either Feynman or Dyson. It is interesting how the rigor of Dyson and physical intuition of Feynman could be explicitly seen in how they drew the diagrams. Dyson would draw the diagrams always with right angles, clearly indicating that they were simply a tool for bookkeeping the perturbation theory. Feynman’s diagrams on the other hand, had tilted lines, much more suggestive of the path integral formulation of quantum theory which Feynman had in mind in coming up with the rules for the diagrams.
The second half of the book is dedicated to a study of Geoffrey Chew and his idea of nuclear democracy. I certainly wish that this part of the book had more details, as this story is fascinating, but on the whole the book gives a nice introduction to the S-matrix dispersion tools and the basic ideas of the bootstrap and looks at how diagramatic methods played a role in this work (no longer really Feynman diagrams.) Interestingly I learned that Chew was probably the first professor to resign in protest over the University of California’s requirement of an anti-communist oath. Good for Chew.

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"This is the Way the World Ends" by James Morrow

“This Is the Way the World Ends” by James Morrow is a classic black satire of nuclear proliferation in the cold war. In an interesting way this book did not resonate with me, but I still found it interesting as a window into the ideas and debates of proliferation and deterance during the cold war. So, as a window into so political satire of the cold war, I give it high marks. But as a captivating story which still seems relevant today, I give it low marks. Perhaps I should be scared that I’m not scared of nuclear proliferation. Or at least I’m not scared in the same way people were scared during the cold war.

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"An Introduction To Black Holes, Information And The String Theory Revolution: The Holographic Universe" by Leonard Susskind and James Lindesay

On the plane trip back from Washington DC I read the book An Introduction To Black Holes, Information And The String Theory Revolution: The Holographic Universe by Leonard Susskind and James Lindesay.
This is a pretty cool book, I must say. First of all, however, we should address the word “Introduction” in the title of this book. On page three of this text (the first full page after the preface) the Schwarzchild metric is written down. Now this sounds like less than an introduction, but really it is a red herring. The book is actually easily readable by anyone who has taken an introduction to general relativity and a good course in quantum theory. I’d say an advanced undergrad could easily grok this book. I make this judgement from the fact that I was able to go through the book in one planeflight.
So what about the quality of the book? There are, basically, three parts to this book. I’m betting that it is based on lecture notes from the two authors: there seems to be major differences in the writing styles for the different sections. Part 1 is “Black holes and mechanics” , part 2 is “Entropy bounds and holography”, and part 3 is “Black holes and strings.” Of these, Part 1 is the largest and takes up most of the book. Which is good, because this is the most interested and best part of the book. In part 1, at a level lacking deep rigor, but a level comfortable for many physicists, the authors introduce the basics of black hole geometry, quantum field time in curved spacetimes, entropy calculations in such spacetimes, black hole thermodynamics and the information paradox for black holes. All in slightly less than a hundred pages. Hence the word “introductory”! This is not a book for those who want to become experts in this stuff, but none-the-less, this is a very beatiful introduction to some really cool ideas. My only major issue with this part of the book is the notation and “words” used to describe quantum theory, and in particular density matrices. If there is one thing quantum information scientists can be proud of, it is their clean and clear notation and exposition about quantum information. I guess everytime I see someone talk about information in quantum theory nowdays, it feels strange if they aren’t using the language of quantum information science. Oh, and for some reason they call the no-cloning principle the no-xerox principle.
Parts 2 and 3 of this book are interesting, but are not as tight as the first part. The entropy bounds deserve a lot more time than is devoted here, I think. But still one gets the basic ideas. Part 3 is very strange because it is so small (less than twenty pages.) It explains, in a very very rudimentary manner, the AdS-CFT correspondence (that supergravity in a certain anti-de Sitter universe can be mapped to a conformal field theory on the boundary of that space.) It’s nice to see this exponsition, but too many details were left out for me to really feel that I got any intuition about this important correspondence.
In total, this is a very nice book and I would definitely recommend it to nonexperts who know the general relativity and quantum theory necessary to understand the book. Part 1 is pretty smooth, I must say. There is only one thing which really bothered me about the book, and that was the lack of references. One of the purposes a book like this can serve is to point the reader to the more rigorous papers dealing with this subject. Unfortunately, the book has only ten references. This is a real shame.
Oh, and by the way, Susskind is, of course, famous for his belief in the anthropic principle. Fortunately it doesn’t make it’s appearance in this book (not that I have strong feelings about this subject 😉 )
Oh, and I especially liked the candor in this passage from the conclussion:

The theory of black hole entropy is incomplete. In each case a trick, specific to the particular kind of black object under study, is used to determine the relation between entropy and mass for the specific string-theoretic object that is believed to represent a particular black hole. Then classical general relativity is used to determine the area-mass relation and the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. In no case do we use string theory directly to compare entropy and area. In this sense the complete universality of the area-entropy is still not fully understood.

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"No Country for Old Men" by Cormac McCarthy

Some of you may noticed that I’ve added a little reading list to the sidebar. I’m going to try to blog a little about these books as I finish them, and archive them on the book tab above. The first book I’ve completed on this list is Cormac McCarthy’s new book “No Country for Old Men.” First of all, I will tell you that I am biased about this book. Cormac occupied the office two doors down from me during my too brief stay at the Santa Fe Institute. Someday I will post the funny story about him and Bell inequalities (yeah, I said Bell inequalities.)
“No Country for Old Men” is the story of a sherriff, drugs, money, and death. Lots of death. Which might make you think that it’s just some sort of pulp novel, but, no, not even close.
The first thing that strikes you about the book is the writing style. Take, for example, this paragraph from page two:

They say the eyes are the windows to the soul. I don’t know what them eyes was the windows to and I guess I’d as soon not know. But there is another view of the world out there and other eyes to see it and that’s where this is goin. It has done brought me to a place in my life I would not of thought I’d of come to. Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I don’t want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work. I walked in front of those eyes once. I wont do it again. I wont push my chips forward and stand up and go out to meet him. It aint just bein older. I wish that it was. I cant say that it’s even what you are willin to do. Because I always knew that you had to be willin to die to even do this job. That was always true. Not to sound glourious about it or nothin but you do. If you aint they’ll know it. They’ll see it in a heartbeat. I think it is more like what you are willin to become. And I think a man would have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do that. I think now that maybe I never would.

(Note that those missing punctuation marks aren’t my typos!) Cormac has a true gift for storytelling and this book is beautiful in its simple use of language. Many times these days you find authors whose entire style seems to be aimed just to shout out “Look at me! Look how many words I know, and how strangely I can construct literary labryths!” Cormac has none of this. Instead the novel is filled with descriptions and turns of phrase and dialogue that are among the best I’ve ever read. No, this is not his greatest novel (I’m comparing it to the Border Trilogy, I’ve not read Blood Meridian.) But it is certainly an excellent book. It has about it an eerie silence, a sort of hush which settles over dramatic horrible events in the novel, in a way which is hard to explain and which is probably worth the price of the novel alone. Highly recommended. But then again, I’m biased 😉