Matt Leifer

Update: All seems to be well at the arXiv site now. Still no word about what happened.

This morning I read a tweet from Daniel Lemire saying that some papers have gone missing from arXiv.org, the primary repository for preprints in physics and some areas of mathematics and computer science. I checked and it seemed that a lot of more recent papers were missing in several searches that I tried.

Just now, I heard from Martin Roetteler that arXiv.org is redirecting to a random mirror site, e.g. the Australian, Brazilian or Chinese mirror. At the time of writing, at least the mirror sites seem to be working correctly.

Speculation is that perhaps the arXiv has been hacked, but at the very least least they are having some pretty major problems with the main servers at Cornell. It comes as a big shock because the arXiv has always been one of the most stable sites that I use regularly and the physics community depends on it. I can’t remember anything like this having happened before.

At the time of writing there is no official comment from the arXiv.

Update: Stenger’s book has been reviewed by Steve Esser.

I interrupt the current hiatus of this blog for news of what I think is an important new quantum foundational book.

One of the ways that I follow the latest hot topics in Quantum Schmantum is via a carefully crafted Google Alerts feed, which is quite good at throwing up articles that are getting attention in the mainstream science press. It does need to be carefully crafted though, because a basic search on the word “quantum” is dominated by a James Bond movie, a video game, a 1990′s television series and, worst of all, a whole lot of quantum mystical mumbo jumbo influenced by things like What the Bleep Do We Know, The Secret, Deepak Chopra, etc. Unfortunately, this sort of stuff seems to be more popular than ever and is even getting celebrity endorsment from the likes of Carmen Elektra

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Unfortunately, however carefully crafted your search is, quite a lot of quantum nonsense will always make it through, so I usually just ignore links with suspect titles. Recently though, the feed has been turning up a lot of links with titles like “Quantum Physics and God”, so much so that I was eventually tempted to click through to see what all the fuss was about. It turns out that these articles were all referring to a new book Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness by Victor Stenger who is perhaps best known for his nu athieism book God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. Amongst other things, the new book is aimed at debunking the claims of the quantum mystics.

For a long time, I have thought that a book that clearly sets out the case against the quantum mystics is a good idea. I don’t imagine that many people who actually believe in this stuff will read the book, although some may get drawn in by the fact that the title does not suggest that the ideas are going to be debunked. More importantly, however, this is ammunition for scientifically literate people, who may not be well versed in quantum theory, to use when they come up against quantum nonsense.

I have not read the book yet, and I am unlikely to do so in the near future due to my current illness. I would like to add it to my carefully curated Amazon Store of books about quantum theory, but I have a policy of not including any books that I haven’t read, since there are a lot of bad expositions of quantum theory in the popular literature. My main concern is whether Stenger manages to clearly separate the argument against quantum mysticism from his more general concerns about whether or not science is compatible with new age mystical beliefs. In my view, it is one thing to hold a set of new age mumbo jumbo beliefs and quite another thing to believe they are supported by quantum theory. The latter is clearly false, independently of the general debate about new age ideas. For one thing, a large part of the message of things like The Secret and What The Bleep… seems to be that you can make good things happen by the power of positive thinking. I can certainly imagine that this is true to an extent in the realm of human affairs, but that is a matter of psychology and sociology rather than quantum physics. I am encouraged by the fact that Stenger is also the author of a 1997 article from the Skeptical Inquirer, which was my previous go to link for people in need of some quantum debunking. Since I think this is likely to be an important book, I may decide to relax my policy and add the book anyway, provided enough of my trusted colleagues and commenters tell me that the book is accurate. So go out and read!

I’ll leave you with a confrontation between Richard Dawkins and Deepak Chopra, which I couldn’t resist adding to this post.

I am a grammatical pedant. Therefore, for the record, here is the definitive style guide to using “we” in your scientific writing.

There are three different common uses of “we”. Only one of them is evil. Writers on this subject do not usually distinguish them properly, so the discussion often gets horribly confused. I don’t know the correct grammatical terminology (I’m not that much of a pedant), so I’ll just make up my own.

• “We” used correctly as a pronoun: If there is more than one author on the paper and you are describing something that you actually did as a group, then this is an unambiguously correct usage of “we”.
  Examples:

  “We placed the beaker on the tripod and turned on the bunsen burner.”

  “We ran a numerical optimization algorithm to generate the data in fig. 1.”

  I don’t think there is any problem with this usage of we. If you want to eliminate it then you have to write in the past passive tense, e.g. “The beaker was placed on the bunsen burner and the tripod was turned on.” This might be what you were told to do in high school, but it just makes the text sound cumbersome and boring. Modern style guides do not recommend this any more. The era of past passive tyranny is long gone and I say good riddance!

• The Royal “we”: There is only one author of the paper and you are describing something that you actually did. The examples are exactly the same as in the previous case.

  I’m not a big fan of this sort of “we”, as it makes you sound like Queen Victoria. Personally, I make a point to use “I” in this context. It sounds funny to me, but a lot of people do it and it is not a very big deal.

• “We” as in “you and I, dear reader”:
  Examples:

  “In section 20, we show that quantum theory is even weirder than we thought before”

  “Substituting eq. (5) into eq. (4), we see that Newton’s second law is obtained.”

  “If we plot luminosity against distance from the Earth, we obtain fig. 3.”

  This is the evil “we” and should be eliminated at all costs. Eliminating them does not make your writing sound more passive. In fact, the opposite is true because it usually forces you to bring the object to the beginning of the sentence. Most people, including myself, use a lot of “dearest reader we’s” when writing a first draft. OK, maybe it’s not a big crime to let one slip occasionally, but in general I think it is a sign of lazy writing. You will find your sentences shorter, punchier and more direct if you eliminate them completely. In case you don’t believe me yet, here are the de-”we”d examples:

  “Section 20 shows that quantum theory is even weirder than previously thought.”

  “Newton’s second law is obtained from substituting eq. (5) into eq. (4).”

  “Fig. 3 shows a plot of luminosity against distance from the Earth.”

You may be thinking that this post is rather aggressive. If so, I apologize. My Ph.D. thesis advisor made me remove every single “we” from every paper I wrote with him, so I still have some scars from that process.

WARNING: Do not write a comment unless you have understood the distinction between the three uses of “we” described above.

The website has not been updated for a long time due to recent illness.  There are two new preprints (see below) and the publications section has been updated.

‘Tis the season to get employed as a foundations researcher.  Perimeter Institute is currently advertising vacancies for Junior Faculty positions in Quantum Foundations.  See here for more details.  Deadline for applications is Jan 15th.