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It is not *literally* true that every time I open Adam Becker's /What Is Real?/, I find an error of physics, history or philosophy, but it is true to an excellent approximation. My colleague Chris Fuchs noticed some problems: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.05147
Tom Siegfried found some that both Chris and I had missed: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/beyond-weird-and-what-real-try-make-sense-quantum-weirdness
And I have pages more. tl;dr Becker needed a villain and chose Niels Bohr.
Sheldon Glashow also wrote a review for /Inference/, an online periodical he edits: https://inference-review.com/article/not-so-real
TBH, I wasn't all that impressed by Glashow's piece, so when the offer to write a reply bounced from colleague to colleague until landing with me, I drafted up an essay that took issue with both.
OK, now for the weird part.
Becker wrote a piece for /Undark/ claiming that /Inference/ was funded by Peter Thiel: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/29/report-on-peter-thiels-jun.html
... and more-than-insinuating that the negative review of his book was payback for his investigating them. ("It’s odd that Inference would want me to write for them shortly after my book was published, then decide to pan it a few months later, after they knew I was investigating them.")
I have a credible source that the reprisal business is bullshit and that Glashow had panned Becker's book well before Becker had asked them any questions about their operation.
Becker writes that Glashow "said the book displays my ignorance of quantum physics and “it is a matter of regret” that I do not understand quantum theory despite my Ph.D. in physics." This might be an attempt to make Glashow sound absurd...
... But it's just a plain fact that you can have a physics PhD and know jack squat about the philosophy of physics, the details of its history, and quantum foundations --- the subjects of Becker's book.
So, what do I do? I had a draft ready, carefully crafted to shake up a crew of old white male egos with pro-socialism quips in with the physics, but now the story is in goddamn Boing Boing that /Inference/ is beyond the gray area of academic centrism/contrarianism.
I was willing to overlook a couple sketchy dudes being on their editorial board for the sake of getting my own beat-poetry physics into their stuffy pages, but now, any contribution I make will be seen as me lending credibility to all kinds of wretched behavior.
And, of course, my further criticisms of Becker's book (I have buckets) will be dismissed as political revenge.
... Does anyone want the contra-Becker-and-Glashow-but-mostly-Becker piece I wrote?
... Miscellaneous problems in Becker's /What Is Real?/: Hans Reichenbach was not a positivist. Becker credits Paul Feyerabend as one of the demolishers of positivism, and he paints the "Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics" as hopelessly positivistic ... but Feyerabend *defended* the "Copenhagen interpretation" as provisionally useful: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/
("The Copenhagen Interpretation" is a term we should discard: https://www.sunclipse.org/?p=2640)
In 1932, John von Neumann presented what he claimed was a proof that quantum uncertainties could not be explained away as merely our being ignorant of a deeper, classical-type layer of reality. His mathematics was correct, but one of his assumptions was unwarranted, a fact first pointed out by Grete Hermann, a philosopher, mathematician and socialist organizer. Hermann's observation was, however, ignored for many years, and it's tough to say why. https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.10311
... She was a woman, a philosopher trying to talk to physicists (though she earned praise from von Weizsäcker and Heisenberg), and a socialist. Take your pick, I suppose. It is also worth noting that the set of people who *cared* about the philosophical foundations of quantum theory was, in 1935, pretty darn small. When the pioneers of the subject did not yet trust it in their bones (https://www.sunclipse.org/?p=2640), why would they waste time philosophizing?
... To his credit, Becker raises the possibility that Hermann's work languished in obscurity because of sexism. But his assertion is so brief that I almost wish it weren't made at all. Two points:
1. While she had correctly taken down von Neumann's "proof" that no "hidden variables" can underlie quantum physics, Grete Hermann herself did not believe in hidden variables! She had her own reasons, due to her own philosophical concerns about causality. Becker says nothing about this!
... It's hard to take a man seriously when he says he wants to promote the cause of women in science, and he doesn't even describe what the most important woman in his story actually did. Hermann's "interpretation" of quantum mechanics seems to have been akin to Bohr's, and perhaps even more radical --- but Bohr is the great villain of Becker's book, and nothing that lends him respectability can be allowed.
2. Sexism in science is a tangle of thorns now, and I'd say it was the same then. Scientific men are great believers in meritocracy --- "We judge the work, and the work alone" --- so much so that they cannot conceive the possibility that, even if the playing field were level, not everybody gets to join the game. A two-sentence toss-off does no justice to this problem. If you're not willing to see beyond mustache-twirling, why are you even talking?
Becker goes into roof-raising passion about how von Neumann's proof was uncritically accepted for years, and how those no-good Copenhageners used it to shut down all discussion of possible alternative positions. His proof? A passage in a book by Mara Beller, who selectively quotes the autobiography of Feyerabend, who (decades after the fact) recalled one meeting where he, an outsider, read the room and thought Bohr's supporters were invoking von Neumann to win the argument.
... "I found this very strange," Feyerabend wrote, "but was relieved to remember that Bohr himself had never used such tricks."
(/Killing Time/, p. 78)
... In those years when, according to Becker, von Neumann's flawed proof was uncritically accepted, it was (you can tell where this is going) found unsatisfactory by multiple authors, among them Reichenbach. This is all described in Jammer's /The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics/ (1974), which Becker has supposedly read, since it's listed in his bibliography. Various folks also found von Neumann's axiomatization of quantum mechanics unsatisfying; it's not like the man was deified.
... There are more problems with Becker's book, like when he goes off on tangents about the physics of gravity, that blend "huh? why did you choose to write about *that*?" with "are you trying to do *anything* except carry out character assassination on Niels Bohr?".
That last part isn't true, of course.
He's also being lazy and giving too much credit to Richard Feynman. But that's a genre convention by now: https://www.sunclipse.org/?p=2454
... OK, screw it: Here's the draft review/response-to-review of Adam Becker's /What Is Real?/ that I probably won't be able to publish, for the sleazily political reasons given upthread:
https://www.sunclipse.org/wp-content/downloads/2019/01/inference.pdf
tl;dr Becker needed a villain and chose Niels Bohr.
Continuing our look at Becker's /What Is Real?/, a book about quantum physics, by a man who, to be honest, should not have written a book about quantum physics. He writes, "hardly any women or people who aren't white appear anywhere in this story at all."
People that he could have mentioned, but didn't:
Huzihiro Araki
Karen Barad
Satyendra Nath Bose
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Paulette Destouches-Février
Susan Haack
Mary Hesse
Jun Ishiwara
Hantaro Nagaoka
Masahiro Nakamura
...
... Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider
Maria Pia Solèr
Hisaharu Umegaki
Mutsuo Yanase
... and that's just me checking the references I had close at hand. If you're trying to "bust myths", to shatter the illusions of moder physics, then you can't sit back and rely on the same old list of big names. Otherwise, you'll end up portraying physics as an even whiter shade of male than it really was.
Becker professes great concern about biases in physics, while perpetuating them.
Notice Chandrasekhar on that list? That's because Becker goes off on a tangent about gravitational physics, where he mentions some work that Oppenheimer and colleagues did on the gravitational collapse of dead stars (the "Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit"). This struck me as a weird thing to mention. It wasn't even the only work that Oppenheimer did on the problem in that year! Why select it for special attention?
By 1939, gravitational collapse was already a well-established controversy. Eddington was troubled by the possibility of endless collapse as early as 1924. In 1935, he said, "The star has to go on radiating and radiating and contracting and contracting until ... gravity becomes strong enough to hold in the radiation, and the star can at last find peace." He loathed this so much that he wanted "a law of Nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way!"
Eddington rejected Chandrasekhar's conclusion that too-massive white dwarfs would collapse under their own gravity, and his influence delayed the acceptance of Chandrasekhar's work by some years. This is, I'd say, a far better example of a cult of personality holding back scientific progress than any of the events that Becker makes much hay of. Why not include it in your book about the flaws of physics?
Well (you can tell where this is going) Bohr was on Chandrasekhar's side.