The 2nd episode of The Wise of Heart: A Modern-Day Re-Imagining of the Scopes Monkey Trial is now live.

https://tinyurl.com/4e9e3wjj

Brandon Sanderson is right about Audible.
https://www.brandonsanderson.com/state-of-the-sanderson-2022/

The scientism religion that everyone has been defaulted into elevates the scientist to the position of priest and clergy. The effects of this, are self-evident.

Chad Moment

From the unintended consequences department, a requirement to label "sesame" as an allergen means it's easier to just add sesame than to ensure its absence.

https://www.fox9.com/news/new-us-food-label-law-unintended-effect-sesame-more-foods

🎅 🇷🇺 Russia releases anti-western propaganda video portraying Putin as Santa Claus who replaces girly items for ones suitable for boys, gets rid of LGBT propaganda books, and replaces a picture of the boys' two dad's with a picture of a mom and dad.

📎 speckzo 🇻🇦 YE24

Unfortunately he had all the shots and had received one not too long ago and this barely 37-year-old had a heart attack just afterward and drop dead leaving friends and family absolutely shocked not understanding how this could happen at such a young age. https://www.thewrap.com/dax-tejera-abc-this-week-executive-producer-dies-at-37/

The Russians are outdoing themselves in the propaganda department.

https://youtu.be/cM-hvzHTtiA

IRS pauses rule requiring people to report PayPal, Venmo transactions over $600

“The IRS said the upcoming tax year will be a ‘transition period’ for the platforms that were due to adopt the now-suspended reporting requirements, including Venmo, PayPal and CashApp.”

https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/irs-pauses-rule-requiring-people-to-report-paypal-venmo-transactions-over-600-heres-what-went-wrong-11671825162

@ChiefNerd

Elon Musk on his involvement in the WEF…

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1606559431881285632

@ChiefNerd

Yesterday, I shared this excellent overview of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) based on Oliver Consa's "Something is rotten in the state of QED."

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xaC_aKqjCXU

If you prefer the paper to a video, here it is: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338980602_Something_is_rotten_in_the_state_of_QED

I got to talking with someone about it, and thought my reply might be of general interest.

I presented a paper that shows how supposedly independent experimental measurements and theoretical predictions of the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron (g-factor) have repeatedly been made to align with each other only to be remeasured and recalculated to align perfectly again outside the earlier bounds. Maybe today's perfect alignment between theory and agreement really does mean that while all those earlier agreements were erroneous (if not outright fraudulent) that today, everything is fine. But the fact that the same approach that works for the electron moment fails to predict the muon moment suggests there's something else going on there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon_g-2

But what really fascinates me is that you "refuted" the argument of the paper by arguing the (non-native English speaker) author misused accuracy and precision and with your claim:

"All of the physicists for decades felt this way, and eventually accepted quantum behavior bc it was right in front of them, and no one could come up with deterministic models that reached the same conclusions that lab experiments did."

Now if you'd said something like "SOME physicists thought deterministic models could work, OTHERS didn't, and the latter prevailed over the former," I could still quibble, but at least that would be a defensible argument.

Planck is an OK place to start. You could read Thomas Kuhn's Black Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912, but I found it dry and only made it about half-way through. The best single source is probably Paul Foreman's 1971 paper "Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918-1927: Adaptation by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual Environment"

https://www.jstor.org/stable/27757315

If you read that, what you'll discover is that the adoption of acausality in physics preceded the quantum discoveries of the 1920s. It wasn't that everyone was deterministic and QM made them abandon determinism for acausality. Instead many of the leading physicists of the era were explicitly acausalists, and they insisted on interpreting quantum mechanics in an acausal manner.

My introduction to this came in a discussion I had with John A. Wheeler when I was in grad school. Famous guy, studied with Bohr, was Feynman's thesis advisor, and he was on my thesis committee, too. He was retired/emeritus by the time I got to work with him, and he was very generous with his time. I asked Wheeler about his own travels to Bohr’s Copenhagen Institute, his work with Bohr developing the theory of nuclear fission, and his efforts to understand quantum mechanics. “Any place I could look [for answers to quantum mechanics], I will,” Wheeler assured me. "How come the quantum?" was his motto. He had a gift for pithy terms and for instance, he coined the term "black hole."

Wheeler was one of the leading guys (at least still around and active in the 1990s) from that first generation of quantum physicists. He also advised Hugh Everett - the guy who came up with the "Many Worlds" interpretation, yet another "deterministic" model for quantum mechanics. Wheeler was working on something he dubbed "it from bit," the notion that information itself was prior to and more fundamental than matter, kind of an extension upon Wigner's observer dependency notions.

A couple days after I'd gotten up to speed with Wheeler on his current QM notions, I asked Wheeler about Bohm, the guy who rediscovered deBroglie's pilot wave notions in the 1950s. Wheeler described recruiting Bohm from Berkeley to Princeton (I hadn't realized he'd had past history with Bohm). So here's the guy who hired Bohm and must have

a really good background understanding his work. I asked Wheeler his opinion of the pilot wave concept. “The screwdriver theory of the double slit experiment,” he called it. I wasn’t sure what Wheeler meant by his “screwdriver theory” quip, so I pressed him for more details. He replied, “I never really studied into that business, and I really should, so I can see what’s wrong with it.”

It may be difficult to grasp for people with those idealized notions of the perfection of the scientific method and the rigor of scientific analysis, but many of even the most brilliant physicists, like Wheeler, never seriously questioned the conventional wisdom of the Copenhagen Interpretation and the consensus of their peers. As a grad student, talking to Wheeler, I was better informed and had spent more time and energy looking into pilot waves than the guy who was Bohr's intellectual heir and one of the leading lights of quantum measurement theory.

More recently, I discovered that Oppenheimer held a seminar on pilot waves at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton back in the 1950s. Participants spent hours trying to prove Bohm and the pilot wave theory wrong. When they failed, Oppenheimer was reported to have said, "Well, since we can't prove Bohr wrong, we'll just have to agree to ignore him."

All the stuff that was used to "prove" indeterminism and acausality say at Solvay in 1927 has been shown to explainable in deterministic terms by either pilot waves or many worlds. Now the goalpost has shifted and the challenge is to understand quantum entanglement, because there's still no good model for how that works.

In any event, I'm genuinely interested in understanding how and why you adopted that erroneous position because (1) it is very commonly held and (2) shaking people out of it is part of the reason I'm working on my book, Fields & Energy.

So I'd love to discuss it with you. And maybe you might learn a little something to update your priors.

But if you'd rather not take the time, that's fine, too.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

https://soundcloud.com/john-bradley-298288478/sets/christmas

Where does the Santa Claus live according to each European country? 🎅🏽

This is what happens when you give your camera to an eagle 🦅 Bird’s eye view – literally.

National Geographic

34 years ago today, Sgt. Al Powell helped stop a terrorist attack at Nakatomi Plaza in Los Angeles. May his bravery never be forgotten.

@police_frequency