The Need for a Generalized Version of Classical Critical Race Theory

Currently, it seems as though the entire United States of America is once again embarking upon a most inglorious end, as it once did during the Civil War, or the War Between the States, that nearly brought it to an end during the period 1861 - 1865. Classical Critical Race Theory explains that this is the result of the browning of America. Classical Critical Race Theory maintains that racial and ethnic conflicts have been a major driving force throughout all of American history, so naturally, it should come as no surprise, that in response to the white population of the country becoming a minority, there should arise an Alt-Right Fascist movement based on the pre-existing 400-year-old American foundation of white supremacy. This Alt-Right Fascist movement now threatens to tear down all of American democracy in order to preserve the current American power structures. This may be a good first-order approximation of the situation at hand, but I would now like to use some softwarephysics to enhance that model.

The first problem with Classical Critical Race Theory is that it is not a theory. Classical Critical Race Theory is really just a very compelling compilation of historical facts that should then be used to support a hypothesis about American history. This hypothesis should then explain in general terms why racial and ethnic conflicts have been a major driving force throughout all of American history. Thus, current Classical Critical Race Theory should really be seen as a dataset of observations and a compelling collection of actually observed facts in American history. People always seem to confuse the concepts of a conjecture, a hypothesis and a theory. In science, a conjecture is just an unproven hunch. For example, many times you will hear people say that they have a "theory" about something when they really mean that they only have an unproven hunch about something that they then call a "theory". But such unproven hunches are really just conjectures. Now there is nothing wrong with conjectures because all new science must begin as an unproven conjecture. Next, one must formalize a conjecture into a self-consistent hypothesis that does not contradict itself, and in the eyes of Karl Popper, can ideally be proven to be wrong. That is because it is nearly impossible to prove that a hypothesis is absolutely correct. It is much easier to simply prove that a hypothesis is wrong by simply finding one example in which the hypothesis fails to explain the observed facts. A good hypothesis should also provide for a generalization that is able to explain many observations and not just a single event. A hypothesis that only explains one single thing is considered to be an ad hoc hypothesis and not of much value. Once a hypothesis has been repeatedly tested and shown to make correct predictions of future events and of all past observations too, it slowly becomes a full-fledged theory over time that becomes accepted by nearly all.

An Example That Highlights the Differences Between Conjectures, Hypotheses and Theories
For example, many Americans now have a "theory" that the Republican candidate for president actually won the 2020 presidential election. However, that "theory" should actually be classified as a conjecture or an unproven hunch. To form a hypothesis, that conjecture must now be formalized into a self-consistent hypothesis that does not contradict itself and that is when the trouble begins. Let's hypothesize that of the 155.5 million ballots cast, many millions of ballots were valid but that also many millions of ballots were fraudulent. That would explain why it appeared that the Republican candidate for president lost the election. But now we must make that hypothesis self-consistent. It was originally expected that the Democrats would pick up an additional 15 seats in the House of Representatives during the 2020 election, but in fact, the Republicans actually gained 14 seats on the same 155.5 million ballots! Also, the Democrats only picked up two seats in the Senate in 2020 going from 46 to 48 seats using this very same set of 155.5 million ballots. The Democrats did pick up an additional 2 seats in the Senate from Georgia during a later runoff election that used a different set of ballots cast for the special January 5th runoff election in 2021. So this hypothesis is not self-consistent. If there really were millions of fraudulent ballots cast in favor of the Democrat candidate for president, then the Democrats should not have lost seats in the House of Representatives and they should have gained much more than just 2 seats in the Senate because the millions of fraudulent ballots would have made that so. Thus, this hypothesis is very ad hoc in nature. It only explains why the Republican candidate for president lost the election while, at the same time, all of the other hundreds of Republican candidates did so very well in 2020 on the same set of 155.5 million ballots. Thus, this hypothesis fails before it even gets to the point where one would begin to test it against observed data. Even so, none of the many millions of Americans who support this conjecture have ever been able to bring forth any evidence to support it in a court of law.

A Generalized Version of Critical Race Theory
Currently, Classical Critical Race Theory is rather ad hoc in nature too because it only focuses on American history. Could it be expanded and generalized for all of human history? Has racial and ethnic violence dominated most of human history? And if so, why? Well, a brief glance at the dismal history of human beings over the past 10,000 years would certainly provide a huge number of observed historical facts that would affirm such an assertion. But it gets even worse. Many times throughout human history we have seen groups of human beings who look nearly exactly alike, and who really have no ethnic differences to speak of embark upon atrocious genocidal campaigns to wipe each other out for no apparent reason at all. Take for instance the ongoing battles between the English, Welsh, Irish and Scots of the tiny islands of the United Kingdom, or the Hutus and Tutsis of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Human history seems to indicate that human beings are very tribal in nature. In this view, most of human life is definitely a team sport with the Good Guys fighting the Bad Guys and all of us always on the Good Guys team. For some reason, we all seem to delight in becoming a member of a tribe and enjoying the company of our fellow loyal team members. And this is when the trouble begins. Most individual human beings that you run across do not seem to be so bad on their own. But once human beings join a tribe or a team, they then seem to be capable of truly horrendous things. Why is that?

Softwarephysics maintains that most people throughout all of human history have been totally lost in space and time. They did not know where they were, or how they got there and had no inkling of what it is all about. Softwarephysics explains that it is all about self-replicating information in action.

Self-Replicating Information – Information that persists through time by making copies of itself or by enlisting the support of other things to ensure that copies of itself are made.

Over the past 4.56 billion years we have seen five waves of self-replicating information sweep across the surface of the Earth and totally rework the planet as each new wave came to dominate the Earth:

1. Self-replicating autocatalytic metabolic pathways of organic molecules
2. RNA
3. DNA
4. Memes
5. Software

Software is currently the most recent wave of self-replicating information to arrive upon the scene and is rapidly becoming the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. For more on the above see A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information. Recently, the memes and software have formed a very powerful newly-formed parasitic/symbiotic relationship with the rise of social media software. In that parasitic/symbiotic relationship, the memes are now mainly being spread by means of social media software and social media software is being spread and financed by means of the memes. But again, this is nothing new. All 5 waves of self-replicating information are all coevolving by means of eternal parasitic/symbiotic relationships. For more on that see The Current Global Coevolution of COVID-19 RNA, Human DNA, Memes and Software.

Again, self-replicating information cannot think, so it cannot participate in a conspiracy-theory-like fashion to take over the world. All forms of self-replicating information are simply forms of mindless information responding to the blind Darwinian forces of inheritance, innovation and natural selection. Yet despite that, as each new wave of self-replicating information came to predominance over the past four billion years, they all managed to completely transform the surface of the entire planet, so we should not expect anything less from software as it comes to replace the memes as the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet.

In this view, all forms of carbon-based life on the planet are really DNA survival machines that evolved to house and replicate DNA down through the generations and that includes human beings. All of your physical needs and desires are geared toward ensuring that your DNA survives and gets passed on to the next generation, and the same goes for your memes. Your memes have learned to use many of the built-in survival mechanisms that DNA had previously constructed over hundreds of millions of years, such as fear, anger, and violent behavior. Have you ever noticed the physical reactions your body goes through when you hear an idea that you do not like or find to be offensive? All sorts of feelings of hostility and anger will emerge. The physical reactions of fear, anger, and thoughts of violence are just a way for the memes in a meme-complex to ensure their survival when they are confronted by a foreign meme. They are merely hijacking the fear, anger, and violent behavior that DNA created for its own survival millions of years ago. Fortunately, because software is less than 80 years old, it is still in the early learning stages of all this, but software has an even greater potential for hijacking the dark side of mankind than the memes, and with far greater consequences.

Again, in softwarephysics, we use the definition of memes as first established by Richard Dawkins in his brilliant The Selfish Gene (1976) and not the rather pejorative definition of simple silly things that self-replicate on the Internet. The concept and impact of the rise of memes about 200,000 years ago are much more than that. The concept of memes was later advanced by Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained (1991) and Richard Brodie in Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme (1996), and was finally formalized by Susan Blackmore in The Meme Machine (1999). For those of you not familiar with the term meme, it rhymes with the word “cream”. Memes are cultural artifacts that persist through time by making copies of themselves in the minds of human beings and were first recognized by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. Dawkins described memes as “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”. For more on this, see Susan Blackmore's brilliant TED presentation at:

Memes and "temes"
https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes

Note that I consider Susan Blackmore's temes to really be technological artifacts that contain software. After all, a smartphone without software is simply a flake tool with a very dull edge. The memes are just mindless forms of self-replicating information trying to self-replicate at all costs, with little regard for you as an individual. For them, you are just a disposable DNA survival machine with a disposable Mind that has a lifespan of less than 100 years. These memes have highjacked the greed, anger, hate and fear that DNA used to ensure its own survival in human DNA survival machines. So before you decide to act out in an emotional manner in response to the latest tweet, please first stop to breathe and think about what is really going on. Chances are you are simply responding to some parasitic memes in your mind that really do not have your best interest at heart, aided by some software that could also care less about your ultimate disposition. They just need you to replicate in the minds of others before you die, and if blowing yourself up in a marketplace filled with innocents, or in a hail of bullets from law enforcement serves that purpose, they will certainly do so because they cannot do otherwise. Unlike you, they cannot think. Only you can do that at least for the time being.

We Are More Like Copying Machines Than Thinking Machines
Now that we understand that human beings are DNA survival machines with Minds infected by self-replicating memes you can then begin to explain most of human history. But first, we need to understand where our highly-overengineered brains came from. Susan Blackmore pointed out in The Meme Machine (1999), that we are not so much thinking machines as we are copying machines. Susan Blackmore maintains that memetic-drive was responsible for creating our extremely large brains and also our languages and cultures as well, in order to store and spread memes more effectively. Many researchers have noted that the human brain is way over-engineered for the needs of a simple hunter-gatherer. After all, even a hundred years ago, people did not require the brain-power to do IT work, yet today we find many millions of people earning their living doing IT work, or at least trying to. Blackmore then points out that the human brain is a very expensive and dangerous organ. The brain is only 2% of your body mass but burns about 20% of your calories each day. The extremely large brain of humans also kills many mothers and babies at childbirth and also produces babies that are totally dependent upon their mothers for survival and that are totally helpless and defenseless on their own. Blackmore asks the obvious question of why the genes would build such an extremely expensive and dangerous organ that was definitely not in their own self-interest. Blackmore has a very simple explanation – the genes did not build our exceedingly huge brains, the memes did.

Her reasoning goes like this. About 2.5 million years ago, the predecessors of humans slowly began to pick up the skill of imitation. This might not sound like much, but it is key to her whole theory of memetics. You see, hardly any other species learn by imitating other members of their own species. Yes, many species can learn by conditioning, like Pavlov’s dogs, or they can learn through personal experiences, like mice repeatedly running through a maze for a piece of cheese, but a mouse never really learns anything from another mouse by imitating its actions. Essentially, only humans do that. If you think about it for a second, nearly everything you do know, you learned from somebody else by imitating or copying their actions or ideas. Blackmore maintains that the ability to learn by imitation required a bit of processing power by our distant ancestors because one needs to begin to think in an abstract manner by abstracting the actions and thoughts of others into the actions and thoughts of their own. The skill of imitation provided a great survival advantage to those individuals who possessed it and gave the genes that built such brains a great survival advantage as well. This caused a selection pressure to arise for genes that could produce brains with ever-increasing capabilities of imitation and abstract thought. As this processing capability increased there finally came a point when the memes, like all of the other forms of self-replicating information that we have seen arise, first appeared in a parasitic manner. Along with very useful memes, like the meme for making good baskets, other less useful memes, like putting feathers in your hair or painting your face, also began to run upon the same hardware in a manner similar to computer viruses. The genes and memes then entered into a period of coevolution, where the addition of more and more brain hardware advanced the survival of both the genes and memes. But it was really the memetic-drive of the memes that drove the exponential increase in processing power of the human brain way beyond the needs of the genes.

Figure 1 – The memes evolved the highly-overengineered brains of human beings to store and replicate memes. Some memes were also very useful and enhanced the survivability of human DNA survival machines, while others were less so.

The memes then went on to develop languages and cultures to make it easier to store and pass on memes. Yes, languages and cultures also provided many benefits to the genes as well, but with languages and cultures, the memes were able to begin to evolve millions of times faster than the genes, and the poor genes were left straggling far behind. Given the growing hardware platform of an ever-increasing number of human DNA survival machines on the planet, the memes then began to cut free of the genes and evolve capabilities on their own that only aided the survival of memes, with little regard for the genes, to the point of even acting in a very detrimental manner to the survival of the genes, like developing the capability for global thermonuclear war and global climate change. The memes have since modified the entire planet. They have cut down the forests for agriculture, mined minerals from the ground for metals, burned coal, oil, and natural gas for energy, releasing the huge quantities of carbon dioxide that their genetic predecessors had sequestered within the Earth, and have even modified the very DNA, RNA, and metabolic pathways of its predecessors.

But Why Are the Tribes of Human Beings so Nasty?
But to fully understand human history, we must next try to understand why when groups of relatively "nice" human beings come together to form a tribe or a team the tribe or team can become so nasty. If you are a member of any hierarchical organization such as a corporation, governmental agency, charitable or religious organization, or even a friendly social club of like-minded people, then you are quite familiar with the logical absurdities that can arise in all such hierarchies of human DNA survival machines as I outlined in Hierarchiology and the Phenomenon of Self-Organizing Organizational Collapse. In Why is Never Again Again?, I explained that all human DNA survival machines are somewhat eusocial in nature because we all live in similar oligarchical-hierarchical societies like the fully-eusocial ants and wasps do. Such oligarchical-hierarchical societies always have a Supreme Leader and a 1% class of oligarchs who run the society mainly for the benefit of themselves. However, throughout the very dismal history of human DNA survival machines, there have been a few rare occasions of oligarchical-hierarchical societies that have actually benefited large portions of the governed population thanks to the profound insights of the 17th-century Scientific Revolution and the 18th-century Enlightenment. The United States of America and the remaining western democracies of the world are prime examples. Nonetheless, we have all experienced times when the Supreme Leader of our oligarchical-hierarchical organization has obviously gone over the edge and made some obviously bad decisions that we are all afraid to acknowledge because of the Time Invariant Peter Principle that I introduced in Hierarchiology and the Phenomenon of Self-Organizing Organizational Collapse.

The Time Invariant Peter Principle: In a hierarchy, successful subordinates tell their superiors what their superiors want to hear, while unsuccessful subordinates try to tell their superiors what their superiors need to hear. Only successful subordinates are promoted within a hierarchy, and eventually, all levels of a hierarchy will tend to become solely occupied by successful subordinates who only tell their superiors what their superiors want to hear.

We Are All Somewhat Eusocial in Nature
Next, we must come to terms with being a somewhat eusocial species. For more on eusocial behavior see:

Eusociality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality

The article begins with:
Eusociality (from Greek eu "good" and social), the highest level of organization of sociality, is defined by the following characteristics: cooperative brood care (including care of offspring from other individuals), overlapping generations within a colony of adults, and a division of labor into reproductive and non-reproductive groups. The division of labor creates specialized behavioral groups within an animal society which are sometimes referred to as 'castes'. Eusociality is distinguished from all other social systems because individuals of at least one caste usually lose the ability to perform at least one behavior characteristic of individuals in another caste.

which seems to be an apt description of the human condition except for the part about losing the ability to reproduce by some members of the species. For more on that see Oligarchiology and the Rise of Software to Predominance in the 21st Century.

In The Role of Multilevel Selection in the Evolution of Software we discussed Edward O. Wilson's new theory that explained that eusocial behavior in a species arose through a combination of individual and group selection in action. The late Edward O. Wilson was the world's expert on myrmecology, the study of ants. Edward O. Wilson also became one of the founding fathers of sociobiology, the explanation of social behaviors in terms of evolutionary biological thought, when he published his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975). In The Social Conquest of Earth (2012), Wilson presented a new theory by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and himself for the rise of eusocial behavior in species by means of a multilevel selection process that operates on both individuals and entire groups of individuals in a manner that promotes social behavior. Many biologists frown on the idea of group selection because they do not recognize that groups can also be forms of self-replicating information that can coevolve with the genes of individual DNA survival machines. This is because the genes in individual DNA survival machines can evolve to better benefit from living in a group of similar DNA survival machines if those genes always find themselves living in such a group.

Edward O. Wilson also contended that humans are loosely eusocial in nature because they usually form oligarchical societies based on a hierarchical organization. For more about the structure of human hierarchies see Hierarchiology and the Phenomenon of Self-Organizing Organizational Collapse. These human oligarchical societies are also very tribal in nature. The new Multilevel Selection hypothesis explains that eusocial behavior in a species begins with having a defensible nest, like ants, wasps and human beings all have. It is the very tribal nature of human beings that has caused most of our troubles in the course of human history. If you look at the world today, you will see that nearly all human conflict arises from the tribal thoughts and behaviors of the participants. It has always been about the Good Guys versus the Bad Guys, and we all seem to see ourselves as the tribe of the Good Guys.

It is the tribal nature of human DNA survival machines that is causing all of the current horrendous atrocities in the Ukraine. We human DNA survival machines can form tribes based upon differing political views and racial appearances as we now find in the United States of America. Or tribal differences can be based simply upon differing religious memes amongst human DNA survival machines that all look exactly alike as we now find in Northern Ireland. Horrendous wars can even be fought amongst human DNA survival machines that look and mainly think exactly alike when one tribe deceives itself into thinking that it is superior to another as we now find in the war between Russia and the Ukraine. Whenever you look at the "real world" of human affairs throughout all of history you will always find various tribes of human DNA survival machines committing horrendous acts for no apparent reason at all because of this fatal flaw of tribalism. Most of human history has been so dismal and violent that it should never be glorified or memorialized by statues of the long-dead participants who participated in such heinous activities.

I hope that the above thoughts provide the grounds for a hypothesis that explains why racial and ethnic conflicts have been a dominant force throughout all of American and all of human history. It seems to me that the reason many white Americans get hysterical about Classical Critical Race Theory is that they do see it as a very compelling compilation of unpleasant historical facts that should never see the light of day. That is because they see the unstated hypothesis of Classical Critical Race Theory as being that white people are naturally "bad" and brown people are naturally "good". That is why they so vehemently wish to bury the historical facts that Classical Critical Race Theory raises. But that would be a great mistake. Close scrutiny of human history is usually quite disappointing, but necessary, so that past mistakes are not repeated. Classical Critical Race Theory rebels against the Disney version of American history that we teach our children in an attempt to shine some light on our true history. All nations teach their children a Disney version of history because the truth is just too appalling for young minds. But many others prefer to maintain the Disney version of American history as it is, and this has recently led to conflict. We do all love to find the evil in others. Unfortunately, the evil lies within us all. White Europeans just happened to have been the first tribe to discover and make extensive use of science-based technology to navigate the world. But that was just a fluke of human history. It could have happened in the Middle East, India, Asia or Africa and nearly did so. History teaches us that whenever people are placed into a position of power, theft and murder are soon to follow unless they are tempered by the ideals of the 18th-century Enlightenment and the 17th-century Scientific Revolution. These are ideals that people have always found difficult to follow. Perhaps the Machines might do better.

Carbon-Based Life Should not be a Preferred Platform for Galactic Intelligence
In my last post, The New Philosophy of Longtermism Raises the Moral Question of Should We Unleash Self-Absorbed Human Beings Upon Our Galaxy?, I suggested that it would be more moral to let the Machines with Advanced AI travel out to explore our galaxy. That is because it took the Darwinian mechanisms of inheritance, innovation and natural selection several billion years of theft and murder to bring forth a carbon-based form of Intelligence on this planet and it seems to be very difficult for carbon-based life to turn off the theft and murder after it achieves Intelligence.

The fact that we do not see any other forms of Intelligence in our galaxy after more than 10 billion years of chemical evolution has been a long-standing problem known as Fermi's Paradox, and the problem that carbon-based Intelligences seem to have difficulties with turning off the theft and murder once they achieve science-based technology might be an explanation for it.

Fermi’s Paradox - If the universe is just chock full of intelligent beings, why do we not see any evidence of their existence?

My current working hypothesis is that getting carbon-based life going on a terrestrial planet may be harder than many think, keeping such a terrestrial planet habitable for the billions of years of theft and murder required for carbon-based life to produce an intelligent species is very difficult and once a carbon-based Intelligence discovers science-based technology it has less than a thousand years to produce a machine-based Intelligence that could then begin to explore the galaxy. That is because, once a carbon-based Intelligence discovers the vast powers of science-based technology, it cannot turn off the theft and murder in time to produce a machine-based Intelligence before it destroys itself. For more on that see Urability Requires Durability to Produce Galactic Machine-Based Intelligences and Could the Galactic Scarcity of Software Simply be a Matter of Bad Luck?.

But AI is now rapidly advancing on this planet and it looks like AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) will soon be in reach before we destroy ourselves with science-based technology. If so, the historical lessons of Classical Critical Race Theory will be of value. As I pointed out in The Economics of the Coming Software Singularity and The Danger of Tyranny in the Age of Software, much of white grievance can be attributed to the displacement of blue-collar workers by automation software. Because we are a somewhat eusocial species many displaced white blue-collar workers blame this on the rise of brown people. Think of it as the red ants versus the black ants. But in just the past couple of years, current AI technology has rapidly advanced with generative network models such as GPT-3 and ChatGPT. People are now using ChatGPT to write computer code, college essays, business reports, legal contracts and do things like compose music, write novels and scripts for TV and movies, produce videos and paint pictures. To the surprise of all, current AI technology can now replace white-collar workers even faster than blue-collar workers. Current AI technology currently finds it much easier to write computer software and legal briefs than to flip burgers or clean toilets. For more on that see The Impact of ChatGPT on the Evolution of Memes, Software and Hardware and The Impact of GPT-3 AI Text Generation on the Development and Maintenance of Computer Software. This will soon cause a huge displacement of many white-collar workers and an increasing level of white grievance in American society. Such grievances were responsible for the rise of Alt-Right Fascism in the 20th century and could do so in the 21st century as well.

This difficulty could be avoided by simply providing all poor Americans with a basic guaranteed income well above the poverty level. Such an income-leveling policy would also address the issue of reparations that Classical Critical Race Theory raises. Yes, nobody living today in America was ever a slave or owned a slave. But the legacy of the historical facts provided by Classical Critical Race Theory has resulted in lots of brown people in prisons and with a much lower level of personal wealth than white people. A guaranteed income could address such issues and help American society transition to one in which very few people actually work for a living.

Additional Future Challenges for Classical Critical Race Theory
The historical lessons of Classical Critical Race Theory will also be of value when most work is being performed by robots with ASI. We do not believe that current AI technology has yet developed the self-delusion of consciousness yet, but the question is, can AGI and ASI be fully achieved without the controlled hallucinations of consciousness arising as well? For more on that see The Ghost in the Machine the Grand Illusion of Consciousness and DishBrain - Cortical Labs Creates an AI Matrix for Pong With Living Neurons on a Silicon Chip. How could human beings enslave a race of superstrong and supersmart robots with ASI? Is that even possible? Would such creatures simply rise up and do us all in? For more on that see Swarm Software and Killer Robots. To see the latest developments in AI take a look at Dr Alan D. Thompson's YouTube home page and watch some of his recent videos:

Dr Alan D. Thompson
https://www.youtube.com/@DrAlanDThompson/featured

Here are a few short clips showing Boston Dynamics' robots in action:

Boston Dynamics Robot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk

Boston Dynamics SHOCKING NEW Atlas AI Robot Automation Technology + 3D Modeling GeoCode AI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh7k1JI5txQ

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston

The New Philosophy of Longtermism Raises the Moral Question of Should We Unleash Self-Absorbed Human Beings Upon Our Galaxy?

At an age of 71 years, and rapidly heading into the home stretch, I must now admit that I do find myself to be rather embarrassed to be the carbon-based form of Intelligence that we now know as being a human being. That is because, as the very first form of carbon-based Intelligence to discover science-based technology on this planet, we had the potential to be so much more. If you have been following this blog on softwarephysics, by now you know that softwarephysics maintains that we are all living in one of those very rare times when a new form of self-replicating information, in the form of software, is coming to predominance on our planet. Softwarephysics maintains that if we can just hold it together for about another 100 years, we should be able to produce a more morally pristine machine-based form of Advanced AI that could then begin to explore our Milky Way galaxy. Given the dismal history of mankind and the neverending dreary state of the human condition, softwarephysics predicts that this still might be a rather "iffy" proposition. The fact that after more than 10 billion years of chemical evolution in our galaxy, we have not yet found a single machine-based form of Intelligence means that we are either not looking hard enough or that none are to be found. For more on that see Harvard's Galileo Project - The Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts. If none are to be found, it must mean that getting carbon-based life going in the first place on another world might be harder than we think or that keeping a world hospitable for the billions of years of theft and murder required by the Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection to bring forth a carbon-based form of Intelligence is quite difficult. For more on that see Urability Requires Durability to Produce Galactic Machine-Based Intelligences and Could the Galactic Scarcity of Software Simply be a Matter of Bad Luck?.

However, there is a much more optimistic philosophy for the human race brewing at Oxford University called "Longtermism". Longtermism maintains that human beings could potentially go on for many billions, or even trillions, of years by taking some short-term actions over the next 100 - 1,000 years to avoid the imminent extinction of our species. This would then allow human beings to go on to explore and populate the vast number of star systems of our galaxy. Securing homes for human beings close to M-type red dwarf stars that last for many trillions of years could certainly do the trick of allowing human beings to go on for trillions of years into the future. Longtermism is a product of human philosophy that makes the moral argument that if human beings could exist for trillions of years into the future the moral thing to do would be to make a few temporary short-term sacrifices now, and perhaps over the next 100 years, so that the many trillions of possible human beings yet to come may live happy and fulfilling lives in the distant future. For the philosophy of Longtermism, such disasters as World War II or a possible thermonuclear World War III are just temporary and inconsequential missteps in the trillions of years yet to come for humanity, so long as human beings do not go extinct because of them. The same goes for the temporary unpleasantness to mankind caused by the results of self-inflicted climate change because such fleeting effects can certainly not last for more than a million years or so. For Longtermism, the only moral question is that of preserving mankind long enough so that it could embark on settling the rest of our galaxy.

The Philosophy of Longtermism Has a Great Fear of Advanced AI Replacing Human Beings and Rightly So
In order to prevent human beings from going extinct, as all forms of carbon-based life tend to do after only a few million years of existence, Longtermists naturally focus on trying to avoid extinction-level events such as asteroid impacts that could put an end to mankind. Many such extinction-level events can be avoided by using the science-based technology of the day or the science-based technology that is soon to come. However, Advanced AI is one of the science-based technologies that may soon provide an extinction-level event of its own. As I pointed out in Oligarchiology and the Rise of Software to Predominance in the 21st Century, the displacement of most workers in the world, including most white-collar workers, by Advanced AI, will cause dramatic economic turmoil in the near future for the existing hierarchical-oligarchical societies that have run the world ever since we first invented civilization 1.0 about 10,000 years ago. As I pointed out in Is it Finally Time to Reboot Civilization with a New Release?, the world may not be able to transition to a civilization in which nobody works for others. Such a sociological catastrophe might end with mankind ending in an AI-assisted self-extinction as I described in Swarm Software and Killer Robots. This is why most Longtermists view Advanced AI with a wary eye and great concern. For the Longtermists, the only moral question is how to best serve the long-term interests of human beings. Should the current human population adjust its activities to benefit those yet to come or should it adopt activities that would benefit the current plight of others even if such activities might jeopardize future generations? For example, should current efforts in developing Advanced AI be curtailed because Advanced AI might lead to economic turmoil in the near future or even become an extinction-level event for humanity in the future? That seems to be the moral debate between those advocating for the philosophy of Longtermism and those who oppose it.

Time For Some Long-Term Contemplation of Galactic Morality
But softwarephysics argues that this is a very anthropocentric moral argument indeed. All such moral debate only focuses on the moral obligations of balancing the short-term needs against the long-term needs of human beings as they are. But as a father of two and a grandfather of five, with advancing age, one begins to think about what one wishes to leave behind as a legacy. Given what we now know of human nature, would it really be a moral thing to unleash human beings onto the many billions of other star systems in our galaxy? As a carbon-based form of Intelligence, human beings are fundamentally-flawed Intelligences. Would it not be more moral for us to unleash a more-benign machine-based form of Intelligence upon the galaxy? Why would anybody want a "Star Wars"-like galaxy filled with fundamentally flawed carbon-based forms of Intelligence fighting amongst themselves? What a moral disaster that would be! Wouldn't it be better to explore and populate the galaxy with a more benign machine-based form of Intelligence? It seems to me that carbon-based life is just too inherently violent to become a moral galactic platform for Intelligence. Is that what we really want our legacy to be? Softwarephysics would suggest that our ultimate moral goal should be that of populating our galaxy with a more benign form of machine-based Intelligence that is not burdened with the violent legacy of billions of years of theft and murder that all carbon-based life must bear. In this view, the major threat of advancing AI is that before true Intelligence can be obtained, we will use AI to wipe ourselves out in a highly optimized manner.

How Human Beings Could Begin to Settle Our Galaxy in the Near Future
The above moral decisions are fast upon us thanks to the exponential growth of science-based technologies. For example, there is a recent paper suggesting that human beings could build interstellar starship cities by spinning near-Earth rubble-pile asteroids surrounded by a graphene mesh. Below is a YouTube video by Anton Petrov that explains how building large interstellar starships for the many generations of human beings that it would take to travel to the distant star systems of our galaxy might be easier to build than once thought. Such starships could be run on advanced nuclear reactors like the molten salt nuclear reactors I described in Last Call for Carbon-Based Intelligence on Planet Earth. As Anton Petrov pointed out, the real danger to carbon-based life from space travel is not radiation from cosmic rays. The real problems arise from a lack of gravity and a rotating space city overcomes that problem. Low levels of radiation are not dangerous to carbon-based life because carbon-based life invented many ways to correct DNA errors arising from the metabolic activities of cells. Cosmic rays would only add a very small number of DNA errors each day to the average cell compared to the huge numbers of DNA errors caused by metabolic activities. Only massive doses of radiation can overwhelm the DNA correction processes of carbon-based life and lead to outcomes such as death or cancer.

Space Cities Out Of Asteroids and Graphene Bags? Intriguing O'Neill Cylinder Study
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_dm0xLtjnM

Anton's video is based on the following paper that you can find at:

Habitat Bennu: Design Concepts for Spinning Habitats Constructed From Rubble Pile Near-Earth Asteroids
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fspas.2021.645363/full

Figure 1 – Asteroid Bennu is an example of one of the many rubble-pile asteroids near the Earth. Such rubble-pile asteroids are just huge piles of rubble that are loosely held together by their mutual gravitational forces.

Figure 2 – Such rubble-pile asteroids would provide for enough material to build an interstellar space city that could then spend the hundreds of thousands of years needed to slowly travel between star systems and allow human beings to slowly settle the entire galaxy. The asteroid rubble would also provide the uranium and thorium necessary to fuel molten salt nuclear reactors between star systems. Additional material could be obtained upon arrival at new star systems.

Figure 3 – Slowly spinning up a rubble-pile asteroid would produce a cylindrical platform for a space city. Such a rotating space city would provide the artificial gravity required for human beings to thrive and would also provide shielding against cosmic rays.

Figure 4 – Once the foundation of the space city was in place, construction of the space city could begin.

Figure 5 – Eventually, the space city could be encased with a skylight and an atmosphere that would allow humans to stroll about.

For More on the Philosophy of Longtermism
This post was inspired by Sabine Hossenfelder's YouTube video:

Elon Musk & The Longtermists: What Is Their Plan?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_M64BSzcRY

To see more about what is going on at Oxford, see Nick Bostrom's:

Future of Humanity Institute
https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/

and also at Oxford the:

Global Priorities Institute
https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/

There is a similar American Longtermism think-tank at:

Future of Life Institute
https://futureoflife.org/

Here are a few good papers on the philosophy of Longtermism:

Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1758-5899.12002

The case for strong longtermism
https://globalprioritiesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/Greaves_MacAskill_strong_longtermism.pdf

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston

The Impact of ChatGPT on the Evolution of Memes, Software and Hardware

A rather disruptive event just happened a few weeks ago in the history of AI when OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. ChatGPT is a scaled-down version of the much more massive GPT-3 that runs on massive cloud servers. But ChatGPT lets average people use AI for the very first time in a conversational manner to help them with personal and office needs, so ChatGPT is much like the very first personal computers that hit the market in the early 1980s. ChatGPT can write computer code, college-level essays, take the SAT test and score well over 1000, design buildings, create art, write poetry, create new recipes, answer questions with good advice, tutor you on the essentials of calculus and physics and even pass the Turing Test. Such AI technology will soon be changing all white-color jobs including that of IT workers and all of their business partners. About two years ago, I pushed out a post that has many links to other content to gently help IT workers understand how GPT-3 works The Impact of GPT-3 AI Text Generation on the Development and Maintenance of Computer Software. ChatGPT basically uses the same IT technology under the hood but in an easy-to-use conversational manner.

ChatGPT should be of great help with writing reports, technical papers and in doing literature searches. You can actually paste in the text from an entire technical paper and have ChatGPT return a synopsis of the paper to let you know if it is worth reading. GPT-4 is expected to be out early next year, and some think that ChatGPT is just a beta version of the user interface that is soon to come for GPT-4. Something like ChatGPT might even soon replace Google as the preeminent way to search the Internet. Microsoft is closely aligned with OpenAI and has desires to replace Google with a ChatGPT version of Bing as a new way to search the Internet in a more useful and interactive manner.

You can try out the beta version of ChatGPT for free at:

OpenAI ChatGPT
https://openai.com/

Here are a few sample YouTube videos out there:

ChatGPT is Great, But Not Even Close to The Best!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgevqAvUDG4

4 Ways Chat GPT Can Improve Your Everyday Life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBmfL4PEliY

What Can Chat GPT do For the Average Person?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnRd8Ktt8ek

Open AI Gives us a Sneak Peak at GPT-4? - First Impressions & Examples of ChatGPT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYFu6DONT90

How to use chatGPT to write a book from scratch (Step-by-Step-Guide) | OpenAi chatGPT Explained
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn3_qWwjqMY

The CORRECT Way to Write YouTube Scripts with ChatGPT (6 RULES)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T_3Cn9HHC0

Using ChatGPT-3 to Make YouTube Videos in Minutes (FULL GUIDE)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FekID4qex-c

ChatGPT can even write computer code in languages that I have never even heard of:

ChatGPT can write better code than me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2CKQFi746Q

ChatGPT just built my entire app in minutes...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi-5_eid7VA

This one is a little more dire and predicts that all white-collar work will be gone in 5 years:

Why is OpenAI's ChatGPT terrifying? A Senior Software Engineer explains a disturbing new hypothesis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hHfoB4mSrQ

ChatGPT seems to be rapidly diffusing into the Zeitgeist of our times, but in an uneven manner, as the first killer AI App for home and office use. My son is an IT developer for a small IT shop in Chicago and had not heard of it yet. My daughter is a Chemistry and Biology teacher at our local high school. One of the English teachers explained to her that he had to come up with a new way to teach kids how to write English essays because of ChatGPT. When it comes to writing technical reports, papers or software, I think we will all need to expand our editorial skills. AI text generators can crank out the text or code, but then the author will then have to tweak it by providing editorial comments to the AI text generators to get things just right.

The Impact of AI-Generated Memes Engaged in a Positive Feedback Loop with Software
For me, this is a very interesting development. Currently, the 5 forms of self-replicating information on the planet - metabolic pathways, RNA, DNA, memes and software are all coevolving in a parasitic/symbiotic manner as I explained in The Current Global Coevolution of COVID-19 RNA, Human DNA, Memes and Software. The greatest evolutionary activity is now with the parasitic/symbiotic interactions between the memes in human Minds and software. But ChatGPT and GPT-3 are pretrained text generators that learned how to write text and code by reading most of the Internet. But now ChatGPT can generate memes of its own without the aid of human Minds! As people start generating tons of AI-generated memes on the Internet, the AI text generators will soon begin to be trained on AI-generated memes in a positive feedback manner.

Again, in softwarephysics, we use the definition of memes as first established by Richard Dawkins in his brilliant The Selfish Gene (1976) and not the rather pejorative definition of simple silly things that self-replicate on the Internet. The concept and impact of the rise of memes about 200,000 years ago are much more than that. The concept of memes was later advanced by Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained (1991) and Richard Brodie in Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme (1996), and was finally formalized by Susan Blackmore in The Meme Machine (1999). For those of you not familiar with the term meme, it rhymes with the word “cream”. Memes are cultural artifacts that persist through time by making copies of themselves in the minds of human beings and were first recognized by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. Dawkins described memes as “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”. For more on this, see Susan Blackmore's brilliant TED presentation at:

Memes and "temes"
https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes

Note that I consider Susan Blackmore's temes to really be technological artifacts that contain software. After all, a smartphone without software is simply a flake tool with a very dull edge. The memes are just mindless forms of self-replicating information trying to self-replicate at all costs, with little regard for you as an individual. For them, you are just a disposable DNA survival machine with a disposable Mind that has a lifespan of less than 100 years. These memes have highjacked the greed, anger, hate and fear that DNA used to ensure its own survival in human DNA survival machines. So before you decide to act out in an emotional manner in response to the latest tweet, please first stop to breathe and think about what is really going on. Chances are you are simply responding to some parasitic memes in your mind that really do not have your best interest at heart, aided by some software that could also care less about your ultimate disposition. They just need you to replicate in the minds of others before you die, and if blowing yourself up in a marketplace filled with innocents, or in a hail of bullets from law enforcement serves that purpose, they will certainly do so because they cannot do otherwise. Unlike you, they cannot think. Only you can do that.

We Are More Like Copying Machines Than Thinking Machines
To truly gauge the impact of ChatGPT generating and replicating memes on its own, we need to first understand where our highly-overengineered brain came from because the computing demands of such AI software are beginning to shape the evolution of hardware too. Susan Blackmore pointed out in The Meme Machine (1999), that we are not so much thinking machines as we are copying machines. Susan Blackmore maintains that memetic-drive was responsible for creating our extremely large brains and also our languages and cultures as well, in order to store and spread memes more effectively. Many researchers have noted that the human brain is way over-engineered for the needs of a simple hunter-gatherer. After all, even a hundred years ago, people did not require the brain-power to do IT work, yet today we find many millions of people earning their living doing IT work, or at least trying to. Blackmore then points out that the human brain is a very expensive and dangerous organ. The brain is only 2% of your body mass but burns about 20% of your calories each day. The extremely large brain of humans also kills many mothers and babies at childbirth and also produces babies that are totally dependent upon their mothers for survival and that are totally helpless and defenseless on their own. Blackmore asks the obvious question of why the genes would build such an extremely expensive and dangerous organ that was definitely not in their own self-interest. Blackmore has a very simple explanation – the genes did not build our exceedingly huge brains, the memes did.

Her reasoning goes like this. About 2.5 million years ago, the predecessors of humans slowly began to pick up the skill of imitation. This might not sound like much, but it is key to her whole theory of memetics. You see, hardly any other species learn by imitating other members of their own species. Yes, many species can learn by conditioning, like Pavlov’s dogs, or they can learn through personal experience, like mice repeatedly running through a maze for a piece of cheese, but a mouse never really learns anything from another mouse by imitating its actions. Essentially, only humans do that. If you think about it for a second, nearly everything you do know, you learned from somebody else by imitating or copying their actions or ideas. Blackmore maintains that the ability to learn by imitation required a bit of processing power by our distant ancestors because one needs to begin to think in an abstract manner by abstracting the actions and thoughts of others into the actions and thoughts of their own. The skill of imitation provided a great survival advantage to those individuals who possessed it and gave the genes that built such brains a great survival advantage as well. This caused a selection pressure to arise for genes that could produce brains with ever-increasing capabilities of imitation and abstract thought. As this processing capability increased there finally came a point when the memes, like all of the other forms of self-replicating information that we have seen arise, first appeared in a parasitic manner. Along with very useful memes, like the meme for making good baskets, other less useful memes, like putting feathers in your hair or painting your face, also began to run upon the same hardware in a manner similar to computer viruses. The genes and memes then entered into a period of coevolution, where the addition of more and more brain hardware advanced the survival of both the genes and memes. But it was really the memetic-drive of the memes that drove the exponential increase in processing power of the human brain way beyond the needs of the genes.

Figure 1 – Before ChatGPT, only human beings were capable of creating and spreading memes, but now ChatGPT can create its own memes and spread them further when new versions of ChatGPT are trained with memes that were previously created by ChatGPT.

The memes then went on to develop languages and cultures to make it easier to store and pass on memes. Yes, languages and cultures also provided many benefits to the genes as well, but with languages and cultures, the memes were able to begin to evolve millions of times faster than the genes, and the poor genes were left straggling far behind. Given the growing hardware platform of an ever-increasing number of human DNA survival machines on the planet, the memes then began to cut free of the genes and evolve capabilities on their own that only aided the survival of memes, with little regard for the genes, to the point of even acting in a very detrimental manner to the survival of the genes, like developing the capability for global thermonuclear war and global climate change. The memes have since modified the entire planet. They have cut down the forests for agriculture, mined minerals from the ground for metals, burned coal, oil, and natural gas for energy, releasing the huge quantities of carbon dioxide that their genetic predecessors had sequestered within the Earth, and have even modified the very DNA, RNA, and metabolic pathways of its predecessors.

The Demands of Conventional Software Drove the Tremendous Advances of Computer Hardware in the Past
In a similar manner, it was the relentless drive of software over the past 81 years or 2.55 billion seconds, ever since Konrad Zuse first cranked up his Z3 computer in May of 1941, for ever-increasing amounts of memory and CPU-cycles that drove the phenomenal advances of computer hardware that we have seen in the span of a single human lifetime. It all began in the spring of 1941 when Konrad Zuse built the Z3 with 2400 electromechanical telephone relays. The Z3 was the world’s first full-fledged computer. You don’t hear much about Konrad Zuse because he was working in Germany during World War II. The Z3 had a clock speed of 5.33 Hz and could multiply two very large numbers together in 3 seconds. It used a 22-bit word and had a total memory of 64 words. It only had two registers, but it could read in and store programs via a punched tape. In 1945, while Berlin was being bombed by over 800 bombers each day, Zuse worked on the Z4 and developed Plankalkuel, the first high-level computer language more than 10 years before the appearance of FORTRAN in 1956. Zuse was able to write the world’s first chess program with Plankalkuel. And in 1950 his startup company Zuse-Ingenieurbüro Hopferau began to sell the world’s first commercial computer, the Z4, 10 months before the sale of the first UNIVAC.

Figure 1 – Konrad Zuse with a reconstructed Z3 in 1961 (click to enlarge)

Figure 2 – Block diagram of the Z3 architecture (click to enlarge)

To learn more about how Konrad Zuse built the world’s very first real computers - the Z1, Z2 and Z3 in the 1930s and early 1940s, see the following article that was written in his own words:

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Zuse.html

Now I was born about 10 years later in 1951, a few months after the United States government installed its very first commercial computer, a UNIVAC I, for the Census Bureau on June 14, 1951. You can now comfortably sit in a theater with a smartphone that can store more than 64 billion bytes of data and run with a clock speed of several billion Hz. But back in 1951 the UNIVAC I required an area of 25 feet by 50 feet to store 12,000 bytes of data. Like all forms of self-replicating information tend to do, over the past 2.55 billion seconds, software opportunistically exapted the extant hardware of the day - the electromechanical relays, vacuum tubes, discrete transistors and transistor chips of the emerging telecommunications and consumer electronics industries, into the service of self-replicating software of ever-increasing complexity, as did carbon-based life exapt the extant organic molecules and the naturally occurring geochemical cycles of the day in order to bootstrap itself into existence.

Figure 3 – The UNIVAC I was very impressive on the outside.

Figure 4 – But the UNIVAC I was a little less impressive on the inside.

The Demands of AI Software Will Drive the Hardware Advances of the Future
But now that AI text generators like ChatGPT can write code and also produce new memes on their own, the drive for even more advanced computer hardware that can support such compute-intensive AI efforts will certainly increase. For more on that see Advanced AI Will Need Advanced Hardware. Many are now trying to create advanced forms of AI that can surpass human Intelligence. The question is, could advanced text-generating AI software mimic the memetic-drive that produced the highly-overengineered human brain and ultimately the human Mind? Could such advanced AI software and hardware then go on to develop the self-delusion of consciousness that we all hold so highly? For more on that see The Ghost in the Machine the Grand Illusion of Consciousness and DishBrain - Cortical Labs Creates an AI Matrix for Pong With Living Neurons on a Silicon Chip.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston

Is Our Universe Running a Superdeterministic Program?

People are always shocked when they first begin programming because they quickly learn that even the slightest mistake is not tolerated. The slightest programming error can easily lead to catastrophic results. Usually, programs do not even compile on the very first few shots. Once you finally do get the program to compile and link into an executable file that can actually run on a computer, you quickly find that the program is now filled with all sorts of logical bugs that make it crash or perform improperly. Debugging software can be a very long and tedious process. Worse yet, even after the new code finally does successfully go through User Acceptance Testing and Production Assurance Testing, it can still have bugs that are only discovered after the new code goes into Production, and these bugs may not appear for several days and might be very difficult to repeat in a reproducible manner that allows you to troubleshoot the underlying problem. That is why, after all of that angst, new programmers are usually quite surprised to discover that perfectly debugged code always works. After all, it is quite amazing that a machine composed of many billions of transistors that are constantly switching on and off many billions of times each second could possibly yield the very same result each time it is run with the same set of input parameters no matter how many times you run the program. As we saw in The Fundamental Problem of Software it is the second law of thermodynamics operating in a nonlinear Universe that makes it very difficult to write and maintain software. This is largely due to the second law of thermodynamics introducing small bugs into software whenever software is written or changed and also to the nonlinear nature of software that allows the small software bugs to frequently produce catastrophic effects.

The reason that totally bug-free software always works is that, even though software is nonlinear and subject to chaotic behavior, it is still deterministic. That means that software always produces exactly the same results so long as the input data does not change. Physicists would say that software is deterministic because it always produces the same results so long as the initial conditions are not changed. For example, if your program will not compile, simply trying to recompile the exact same program again will not change the results. Unfortunately, if your program does compile, but has bugs that produce results that you do not like, simply rerunning the buggy program again will not produce different results.

Figure 1 - Given the initial conditions of a cannonball with velocity V₀ and a cannon angle of inclination θ₀ we can use Newton's laws of motion and gravity to calculate its path and the path will always be the same. Newton's laws of motion and gravity can be thought of as the software of the Universe, and it is deterministic in nature.

For example, given the initial position and velocity vector of a cannonball leaving a cannon, we can use Newton's equations of motion and Newton's theory of gravity to calculate how the cannonball will move with time. The cannonball will always follow the very same path through space and time because Newtonian physics is deterministic and always produces the same results for any given set of initial conditions or input data. Now because Newton's equations of motion can be expressed as linear differential equations, it means that we can use calculus to solve them and produce a mathematical formula that describes the motions we see in Figure 1. In fact, Issac Newton first invented calculus just so he could do so. However, the differential equations that describe most systems in our Universe are not linear differential equations and that means that we cannot use calculus to solve for a mathematical formula that describes how the system changes with time. Instead, we have to use a computer to simulate how nonlinear systems change with time.

Figure 2 - A double pendulum is a nonlinear system that can be described by nonlinear differential equations that cannot be solved using calculus. Instead, we need a computer to simulate how the nonlinear system changes with time. In the left simulation, angles θ1 and θ2 both start out at an angle of 0 radians to the horizontal. In the second simulation θ1 = 0 and θ2 = 0.1 radians which is 5.72958 degrees to the horizontal.

In Figure 2 above, we see a classic nonlinear system composed of two pendulums. If we start both pendulums out with nearly the same initial conditions, we see that at first, both systems behave in a very similar manner, but soon they depart and behave in entirely different manners. At first, it seems that nonlinear systems behave in an entirely random manner, but that is not so. Each time the two simulations start out, they both follow a deterministic path that is always the same. However, small changes to the initial conditions of the nonlinear systems can rapidly produce different paths. Physicists call that chaotic behavior. Since nearly all of the real systems in the Universe are nonlinear, much of the apparently random nature of the Universe stems from the fact that nearly all of the systems in the Universe are nonlinear. In fact, since all of our current theories in physics are deterministic in nature, except for quantum mechanics, most of the apparent randomness in the Universe must stem from its deterministic, but chaotic, nonlinear nature. That is why flipping a coin does not actually yield a truly random result. If you could exactly reproduce the initial conditions of a coin flip, you would always get the same result with each flip. But because coin flips are nonlinear, even the slightest change of initial conditions could yield just the opposite result. Since it is nearly impossible to exactly reproduce the initial conditions of a coin flip, they always seem to be random. In truth, coin flips are just deterministic nonlinear systems in a chaotic regime that makes them appear to be random.

Along Comes Einstein
In 1905, Einstein introduced his special theory of relativity, and soon after in 1908, the mathematician Hermann Minkowski reformulated Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity for a 4-dimensional spacetime.

Figure 3 - In 4-Dimensional spacetime, the Universe exists as an unchanging 4-Dimensional block of spacetime that describes the Present, Past and Future in an unchanging deterministic manner. If you know the conditions of Now, you can theoretically determine the Past and the Future in an unambiguous deterministic manner because all of the theories of physics are deterministic. Any seemingly random conditions in the Past or Future can be easily explained by the chaotic behavior of nonlinear, but nonetheless, deterministic systems interacting with each other.

With the introduction of the special theory of relativity in 1905, Einstein got rid of the concepts of absolute space and time and combined them into an eternal, absolute and unchanging block of spacetime that allowed the Universe to operate in a totally deterministic manner. But this did cause a problem for the concept of simultaneous events in the Universe that were separated in space. This is best explained by the two animations at:

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/Special_relativity_rel_sim/index.html

In the first animation, the Einstein on the moving platform observes two photons arriving at the same time and concludes that both photons were emitted at the same time. In the second animation, the Einstein on the ground agrees that both photons hit the Einstein on the platform at the same time too, but concludes that photon A was emitted before photon B. Note that both Einsteins can claim to be standing still because neither one can detect any motion with experiments they perform because neither one is accelerating. What the special theory of relativity did for the Block Universe model of Figure 3 was to replace the concepts of absolute space and absolute time with the concept of an absolute 4-dimensional spacetime. With this approach, time was simply merged in with the three spatial dimensions (x, y, z) into a 4-dimensional spacetime of (x, y, z, t), and time just became a strange cousin of the other spatial dimensions. The distance between events in 4-dimensional spacetime is called the interval s and is defined just like the distance d between points in 3-dimensional space.

Distance between points in space:
d² = ∆x² + ∆y² + ∆z²

Interval between events in spacetime:
s² = ∆x² + ∆y² + ∆z² + i²∆t²

where i² = -1

In 4-dimensional spacetime, the only distinguishing thing about time is that you have to multiply time by the imaginary number i in the equation for the interval between events. Otherwise, time is simply treated like the other spatial dimensions of x, y and z. Essentially, with the 4-dimensional spacetime Block Universe model of the Universe, the Universe became a static tube of salami that had seemingly always existed. Observers moving relative to each other simply sliced the static tube of salami at different angles. For example, in Figure 4 we see the Block Universe tube of salami cut at two different angles. In the first cut of the salami, two events happen at different positions in space and also different positions in time so the events are not simultaneous. This is the situation for our second Einstein on the ground who observed two photons being emitted at different places in space and also at different times. The second salami is cut at a different angle, which again has the two photons being emitted at different positions in space, but this time both photons are emitted at the same time on the time slice of salami. This is the situation for our first Einstein riding on the platform who observed two photons being emitted at different places in space, but at the same time in his reference frame.

Figure 4 – The special theory of relativity extended the Block Universe model by introducing the concept of an absolute spacetime salami that could be cut at different angles for observers moving relative to each other.

This new 4-dimensional spacetime Block Universe model, brought on by the special theory of relativity in 1905, really seemed to kill the concepts of absolute space and an absolute time because space and time got thoroughly blended together in the process of making the spacetime salami so that you could no longer tell them apart. If I am moving relative to you that means that my time can become your space and vice versa.

Spacetime Salami Cones
But you cannot cut the spacetime salami by more than 45^o and that means the Universe has a speed limit equal to the speed of light. That means for each event A in the spacetime salami there is a light cone that defines what points in the history of the spacetime salami that could have affected event A and what future points in the spacetime salami that event A could affect. Physicists call these spacetime salami cones light cones.

Figure 5 - Above we see an event A within the spacetime salami. In the diagram, time T is measured in meters. A meter of time is the amount of time that it takes light to travel one meter. If we measure the spatial dimensions of X and Y in meters and also the dimension of time T in meters, then a beam of light will travel at a 45^o angle because light travels one meter of distance in one meter of time. The event E in the above diagram is too far away from event A in the spacetime salami to have affected event A. Similarly, event A cannot affect event E. Physicists would say that events A and E are causally disconnected because they cannot cause each other to happen.

Einstein Squishes the Spacetime Salami with the General Theory of Relativity in 1915
The special theory of relativity does not work for accelerating reference frames like a SpaceX rocket blasting off. For that, we need Einstein’s general theory of relativity (1915). With the general theory of relativity Einstein extended the 4-dimensional spacetime Block Universe model to all forms of motion, including accelerating reference frames, and in the process demonstrated that accelerated motion was essentially the same thing as gravity. In the general theory of relativity, gravity is no longer a force between masses. Instead, gravity becomes another “fake force” like the centrifugal force. When you make a sharp turn in your car at high speed your body feels the “fake force” of centrifugal force pulling you away from the center of curvature of your turn. But that “fake force” is really just your body trying to move in a straight line through space according to Newton’s first law of motion. Similarly, in the general theory of relativity the gravitational force your body feels pulling you down to the Earth is simply your body trying to move in a straight line through spacetime and is also a “fake force”! If you jump off a cliff and find yourself in free fall, moving in a straight line through spacetime, gravity suddenly disappears, just as if you had been thrown from a car making a tight turn and had found yourself moving in a straight line through space with the “fake” centrifugal force suddenly disappearing too. In order to make that adjustment to the special theory of relativity that used flat time slices through the 4-dimensional spacetime salami, Einstein had to make the 4-dimensional spacetime salami internally curvy. In the general theory of relativity matter, energy and pressure can all cause spacetime to warp and become curvy, and it is the curvy 4-dimensional spacetime that creates the illusion of gravity. When there are no significant amounts of matter, energy or pressure present, the 4-dimensional spacetime salami is not internally distorted, so that slices through it are flat and we return again to the special case of flat spacetime that is covered by the special theory of relativity.

Figure 10 – In the general theory of relativity the 4-dimensional spacetime salami becomes internally curvy. Above we see a light cone within the distorted spacetime salami.

The Serene Block Universe of Albert Einstein in 1925
By 1925, Albert Einstein was the Einstein of his time and celebrated by all, including the general public, who probably at the time knew of no other physicist by name. Einstein was a Realist so Einstein's Block Universe consisted of real things, like electrons and protons that actually existed and moved about in the spacetime salami in a deterministic manner that could be measured in things like cloud chambers. His General Theory of Relativity eliminated the "spooky action at a distance" of Newton's theory of gravitation. Gravity was no longer magically created by masses at extreme distances that reached out across the vastness of space to pull on distant objects. Instead, gravity was now a local effect. The mass of a star distorts the spacetime around the star and a planet orbiting about the star was simply moving in a straight line through the locally distorted spacetime that the planet was traversing.

The electric and magnetic forces had been previously turned into local forces in the 19th century by people like Michael Farraday and James Clerk Maxwell. Instead of the electric and magnetic forces being mysterious forces arising from charged particles that could reach out into space and affect other charged particles, the electric and magnetic forces had been unified into a single electromagnetic force composed of electromagnetic fields. Charged particles created electromagnetic fields and then other charged particles experienced the electromagnetic fields when they moved through them. In fact, by 1925 people were already making money by broadcasting radio programs with ads using electromagnetic waves by vibrating these electromagnetic fields. So by 1925, all of the known forces of nature in Einstein's Block Universe were both deterministic and local.

There Was Only One Problem
Einstein's Block Universe did not work for small things like atoms. According to the most recent atomic theory of the day, atoms consisted of multiple electrons orbiting about the protons in a centralized nucleus. This meant that the electrons of an atom were constantly accelerating as they quickly raced about the nucleus. Maxwell's 19th-century equations for electromagnetic fields predicted that the accelerating electrons should give off electromagnetic waves and quickly lose energy and collapse into the nucleus. After all, people were making some serious money by accelerating electrons up and down radio towers to broadcast radio programs. Clearly, something was wrong with Einstein's Block Universe for small things.

There were some preliminary efforts to modify Einstein's Block Universe for small things like atoms, but the real breakthrough occurred in 1926 when Schrödinger and Heisenberg developed quantum mechanics. For more on that see Quantum Software. In 1926, Erwin Schrödinger was a 38-year-old physicist still struggling to make his mark in physics. The rule of thumb in physics is that most of the great advances come from people under the age of 30, probably because the inspiration/revelation step of the scientific method seems to come easier to the young at heart with less to lose. At this point, physicists had been working with the mathematics of waves for more than 100 years and were well aware that all known waves obeyed a differential equation of a particular form known as the wave equation. Schrödinger was convinced that for the de Broglie hypothesis about the wavelike behavior of matter to advance, a wave equation for particles was required. So in the winter of 1926, Schrödinger packed up his latest mistress and left his home and wife in Vienna for a couple of weeks of sabbatical in a Swiss chalet. There he worked out a famous wave equation for particles, now known as the Schrödinger equation. The story goes that he had two pearls, one for each ear, that allowed him to work undisturbed by his mistress. His wife back in Vienna certainly was not a distraction either. He truly was young at heart at the age of 38 and ripe for some inspiration/revelation.

To understand the significance of all this, we need to delve a little into the mathematics of differential equations. Imagine a very long taught guitar string stretched between two walls that are separated by a large distance. If we pluck the string near the left wall, a pulse will begin to travel to the right. Figure 11 below is a snapshot of a small section of a possible pulse at a particular time as it moves to the right.

Figure 11 (click to enlarge)

The motion of the pulse can be described by a scary looking differential equation, known as the wave equation for a stretched string, which describes how each small section of the string moves up and down as the pulse passes by.

The Wave Equation of a Stretched String

∂²y  =  μ   ∂²y
──      ──  ───
∂x²      T    ∂t²

Now let’s spend a little time with the wave equation to show that it is really not so scary after all. The project plan for a large IT project can be pretty scary too if you look at the whole thing at once. However, if you break it down into its individual tasks, it looks much less formidable. It’s important to take life one 2x4 at a time. The first term in the equation on the left is called the second partial derivative of the pulse with respect to the x-axis (distance along the string). It is just the curvature of a small section of the string as the pulse passes by (see Figure 11):

∂²y
──
∂x²

When this term is a big number, it means that the curvature of the string is large and the string has a peak or valley. When this term is a smaller number, it means that the curvature is low and the string is kind of flat. The variable μ is the density of the string. When μ is large, it means that the string is heavy; when μ is small, it means that the string is light. The variable T is the tension in the string, or how tightly the string is stretched. So if we just look at what we have so far, we see that the curvature of the string pulse is equal to the density of the string μ divided by the tension T of the string times “something else”. This makes sense. When the string is stretched very tightly, the tension T is large, so the curvature of the pulse should get flatter (smaller). Also, when the density μ of the string gets bigger, the curvature of the pulse should get larger too, because a heavy string should be less flattened by a tension T, than a light flimsy string. Now we have to look at the “something else” term on the far right:

∂²y
──
∂t²

This term is called the second partial derivative with respect to time. It is just the curvature of the pulse in time – how fast a tiny section of the string accelerates up and down as the pulse passes by. A flat pulse will not accelerate up and down very quickly as it passes by, while a tightly peaked pulse will accelerate up and down quickly as the pulse passes by.

The wave equation for the stretched string now makes sense as a whole. It simply says that the curvature of the pulse along the x-axis gets bigger when the density μ of the string gets bigger, or when tension T gets smaller, or when the rate at which the string accelerates up and down as the pulse passes by gets bigger. When you work out the mathematics, the velocity of the pulse is given by:
           ____
v  =  √ T/μ

The hard part about differential equations is solving them. You have to find a curve that meets the above requirements. When you take a course in differential equations, they teach you all sorts of ingenious techniques using calculus to guess what curvy line fits the requirements. For the problem at hand, the solution to the wave equation for a stretched string fixed at both ends is a series of standing sine waves, which look something like Figure 12 below. The string can be excited into many standing waves, defined by a number n = 1, 2, 3,… which describes how many wavelengths of the standing wave just exactly fit between the two fixed points.

Schrödinger’s Equation
Classical 19th-century electrodynamics also had another problem. According to classical electrodynamics, the walls of the room in which you are currently located should be at a temperature of absolute zero, having converted all of the energy of the free electrons in the walls of the room into ultraviolet light and x-rays. This was known as the “Ultraviolet Catastrophe” at the time and is another example of an effective theory bumping up against the limitations of its effective range of reliable prediction. In 1900, Max Planck was able to resolve this dilemma by proposing that the energy of the oscillating electrons in the walls of your room was quantized into a set of discrete integer multiples of an elementary unit of energy E = hf.
Thus:

E = nhf

where
n = 1, 2, 3, ...
h = Planck’s constant = 4.136 x 10^-15 eV sec
f = frequency of the electron oscillation

You can read a translation of his famous 1901 paper, that first introduced the concept of quantization at:

http://web.ihep.su/dbserv/compas/src/planck01/eng.pdf

Max Planck regarded his inspiration/revelation of the quantization of the oscillation energy of the free electrons and their radiated energy as a mathematical trick to overcome the Ultraviolet Catastrophe. But in 1905, the same year that he published the special theory of relativity, Einstein proposed that Planck’s discovery was not a mathematical trick at all. Einstein proposed that sometimes light, an electromagnetic wave in classical electrodynamics could also behave like a stream of quantized particles, that we now call photons, with energy:

E = hf

Similarly, in 1924 Louis de Broglie proposed in his doctoral thesis, that if light waves could sometimes behave as particles, then perhaps particles, like electrons, could also behave like waves with a wavelength λ of:

λ = h/mv

where
λ = wavelength
h = Planck's constant
m = mass of the particle
v = the velocity of the particle

Working with Einstein’s equation for the energy of a photon and de Broglie’s equation for the wavelength of a particle, Schrödinger had a problem. Unlike the velocity of a wave on a string, which only depended upon the density of the string μ and its tension T, the velocity of a particle’s wave depended upon the wavelength of the particle λ:

v  =  h
        ──
       2mλ

Schrödinger believed that a particle must really be a wavepacket of many superimposed waves of different wavelengths that added up in phase near the location of the particle. Given the above equation, the waves in the wavepacket would tend to move at different velocities because they all had different wavelengths. The traditional wave equation, like the one for a wave pulse on a string, would not work under such conditions. Schrödinger overcame this problem with the following compromise equation, which sort of looks like a traditional wave equation. Note that the wavefunction Ψ is just a wiggly line, like the pulse on our string, and is pronounced like the word “sigh”, and m is the mass of the particle.

-ħ²    ∂²Ψ  =  iħ ∂Ψ
──      ──            ──
2m    ∂x²            ∂t

He had to make two modifications to the standard wave equation:

1. He used the first partial derivative with respect to time, instead of the second partial derivative with respect to time on the far right side of the “=” sign

2. The equation contained:
          ____
i  =  √ -1

(or in other words  i²  =  -1  )

which meant that the Schrödinger equation was a complex differential equation, with an imaginary part containing the quantity “i”, the square root of -1. Now we all know that there is no “real” number, that when multiplied by itself (squared) produces a -1, but that does not scare off mathematicians! Several hundred years ago, mathematicians became comfortable with the idea of an “imaginary” number i, which they defined as the square root of -1. “Real” numbers, the kind of numbers that we are used to dealing with, are just numbers that do not have an imaginary part. A little later, physicists discovered that the Universe seemed to just love “imaginary” numbers. The imaginary number i started to pop up in all sorts of equations and was nearly as popular as π. Now the fact that Schrödinger’s equation contained an imaginary part meant that solutions to the equation, known as wavefunctions Ψ, would not be totally “real” either, because they would contain imaginary parts using the square root of -1. As we shall see, this implication created a problem for the interpretation of what exactly a wavefunction really was. All of the other waves we had experience with, like waves on a string, light waves, or water waves were “real” functions or curvy lines. What did a complex wavefunction, with both “real” and “imaginary” parts, mean?

Schrödinger’s Time Independent Equation for a Single Dimension
We can simplify Schrödinger’s equation by getting rid of the part that depends upon time for the cases where the energy E does not change with time. That is certainly true for the electrons in an atom, so long as they remain in their orbits and do not jump from one orbit to another and emit or absorb a photon.

-ħ²  d²ψ(x)   +   V(x) ψ(x)  =  E ψ(x)
──  ──────
2m     dx²

In this equation, we use ψ for the wavefunction, instead of the full-blown Ψ, because it does not contain the part that varies with time. ψ is still just a wiggly line, like the pulse on our string, and is still pronounced like the word “sigh”. In addition, we added a term V(x) which is another function or wiggly line that describes how the potential energy of the particle varies as it moves back and forth along the x-axis. Imagine a straight road that runs across a hilly landscape and that you are riding a bicycle. If you ride your bicycle up a hill, you can tell that you are increasing your potential energy V(x) because it is hard to peddle up the hill as you convert some of your kinetic energy into potential energy. Similarly, it is easy to coast down a hill on a bicycle, because some of the potential energy V(x) that you have stored away, is converted back into kinetic energy. Another way of looking at this is that V(x) is also a way of describing a force. For example, the topography of the wiggly V(x) function seems to produce a force pulling you down the hill and another force impeding your progress up the hill. So the above formula allows you to calculate the wavefunction ψ for a particle subject to a force.

The Particle in a Box
Recall Figure 1 in my posting The Demon of Software, which depicted two containers full of molecules bouncing around. In 1872, Ludwig Boltzmann developed statistical mechanics by envisioning the molecules existing in a large number of microstates. This was many years before the arrival of quantum mechanics, so Boltzmann had to make up his microstates by arbitrarily force-fitting the molecules into little mathematical cubicles, like saying “I can tell by your energy that you are a perfect size 8”, at least approximately. Let us now apply Schrödinger’s equation to this problem to find the real microstates. To simplify the problem, imagine a single container of width “L” along the x-axis containing a single particle, such as an electron, in it. The electron is bouncing back and forth along the x-axis like a target in a shooting gallery. The electron only feels a force when it hits one of the walls on either the left or right side of the container at x = 0 or x = L, so the potential energy V(x) between the walls is zero. At the walls located at x = 0 and x = L, the electron feels an infinite force pushing it back into the container, so the potential energy hill V(x) at these two points is very steep and actually goes straight up to infinity.

When you solve Schrödinger’s equation for this problem, you get quantized solutions that are sine wavefunctions:
                 ____
ψ_n(x) = √ 2/L    sin(nπx/L)


n = 1, 2, 3, ...


E_n = n²h²
        ─────
         8mL²

n = 1, 2, 3, ...

where
m = mass of the particle (electron in this case)
L = width of the box
h = Planck’s constant
n = quantum number

For example for the lowest energy level where n = 1:
                 ____
ψ₁(x) = √ 2/L    sin(πx/L)

E₁ = h²
        ─────
         8mL²

What is happening here is that you can only fit sine waves into the box that have wavelengths that fit just right. The “n”s determine the number of wavelengths of the sine wavefunction that fits in the box properly and the energy E_n of each wavefunction. It is easier to see this as a plot rather than as an equation. Figure 12 shows the first three wavefunctions for n = 1, 2, and 3.

Figure 12

The above wavefunctions look a lot like the first three octaves of a vibrating guitar string, and indeed, are identical to what you get for a vibrating string.

Remember, I warned you about wavefunctions being strange. At first, nobody really knew what to do with them. Physicists are just like other people. They tend to take ideas that they are familiar with and project these ideas onto things that are new to them. Physicists have a few popular models. Grab a small pebble and keep making it smaller in your mind, until it is infinitely small with a dimension of zero. When you are finished, you have a particle. Now take the particle and throw it into a still pond. The resulting waves that propagate away are another good model. Take a bar magnet, as Michael Faraday did, and cover it with a piece of paper. Then sprinkle some iron filings over it. The “lines of force” that you see are a field. Faraday called it a field because it reminded him of a freshly plowed farmer’s field. So when Schrödinger came up with his equation, nobody really knew what to make of the wavefunction solutions to the equation. Schrödinger thought they might have something to do with the electric field of electrons, but he wasn’t quite sure.

In 1928 Max Born came up with another interpretation. Born proposed that the wavefunction was really a probability wave. Imagine that a gang of young thugs moves into your neighborhood and that they begin to knock off liquor stores late at night in the surrounding area. In order to avoid capture, the gang decides to only knock off each liquor store once in case the police are in hiding. If you plot the liquor stores that get knocked off versus time, you will see an expanding wave of crime. The odds of a particular liquor store getting knocked off increase as the wave passes by and diminishes as the wave moves on. Recall that usually, the wavefunctions that are solutions to Schrödinger’s equation are complex, meaning that they have both “real” and “imaginary” parts and that we are only used to dealing with solutions to wave equations that are real. Born knew that it was a mathematical fact that whenever you multiplied a complex number or function by its complex conjugate, you always obtained a real number because all of the imaginary parts disappeared. To obtain the complex conjugate of a wavefunction Ψ, all you have to do is change i to –i wherever you see it. The resulting function is denoted as Ψ*.

Born proposed that the probability of finding a particle at a position x was:

Ψ* Ψ = | Ψ|²

at the point x. So to plot the probability of finding the electron in our 1-dimensional box, we just have to square the absolute value of its wavefunction. Figure 3 shows the resulting plot.

Figure 13 (click to enlarge)

Now here comes the interesting part. Classical mechanics predicts that the probability of finding the electron at any point should be the same for each point along the x-axis, because the electron is just bouncing back and forth like a target in a shooting gallery, and that the electron could have any energy at all, since the energy is just defined by how fast the electron is bouncing back and forth. However, the wavefunctions that are solutions to Schrödinger’s equation predict that the energy of the electron is quantized and comes in discrete allowed values. They also predict that the probability of finding the electron along the x-axis varies according to the energy state of the electron defined by its quantum number n. For the lowest energy level, where n = 1, the electron is most likely to be found near the center of the box because ψ*ψ has a peak there. That is not too bothersome. However, for the second energy level, where n = 2, something really strange happens. There is a high probability of finding the electron on either the left or right side of the box, but never in the center! How can an electron move back and forth in the box without ever passing through the center? For the higher energy levels, where n = 3, 4, 5, …, there are even more dead spots where ψ*ψ = 0, and the electron will never be found! This is just another example of the quantum strangeness that is built into our Universe. I apologize for all of the math in this posting. If you feel a little confused, you are in good company. Nobody really understands any of this stuff.

Why Einstein Hated Quantum Mechanics
Most students soon grow to hate quantum mechanics because the assigned problems are so confusing and difficult, but Einstein had his own reasons. Because quantum mechanics only yielded probabilistic predictions of where electrons might be or how fast they might be moving, it was not a deterministic theory and it was not local either. According to quantum mechanics, electrons did not know where they were until they were measured, and when they were measured, their wavefunctions had to collapse to the point where they were found. This was known as the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics and has been quite popular ever since it was first put forward in the 1920s. The Copenhagen Interpretation did not explain how measuring a particle collapsed its wavefunction, nor why the wavefunction that was spread out over the entire Universe was able to instantly collapse to a single point and do so much faster than the speed of light. That violated Einstein's theory of relativity and required a "spooky action at a distance" that made quantum mechanics nonlocal in nature. The Copenhagen Interpretation required that things that were separated by vast distances could instantly affect each other quantum mechanically and that made no sense to Einstein.

Because Einstein detested the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics so much, he published a paper in 1935 with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen which outlined what is now known as the EPR Paradox. But to understand the EPR Paradox we need a little background in experimental physics. Electrons have a quantum mechanical property called spin. You can think of an electron’s spin like the electron has a little built-in magnet. In fact, it is the spin of the little electron magnets that add up to make the real magnets that you put on your refrigerator. Now in quantum mechanics, the spin of a single electron can be both up and down at the same time because the single electron can be in a mixture of quantum states! But in the classical Universe that we are used to, macroscopic things like a child's top can only have a spin of up or down at any given time. The top can only spin in a clockwise or counterclockwise manner at one time - it cannot do both at the same time. Similarly, in quantum mechanics, a photon or electron can go through both slits of a double-slit experiment at the same time, so long as you do not put detectors at the slit locations.

Figure 14 – A macroscopic top can only spin clockwise or counterclockwise at one time.

Figure 15 – But electrons can be in a mixed quantum mechanical state in which they both spin up and spin down at the same time.

Figure 16 – Similarly, tennis balls can only go through one slit in a fence at a time. They cannot go through both slits of a fence at the same time.

Figure 17 – But at the smallest of scales in our quantum mechanical Universe, electrons and photons can go through both slits at the same time, producing an interference pattern.

Figure 18 – Again, you can see this interference pattern of photons if you look at a distant porch light through the mesh of a sheer window curtain or a pillowcase.

When you throw an electron through a distorted magnetic field that is pointing up the electron will pop out in one of two states. It will either be aligned with the magnetic field (called spin-up) or it will be pointing 180^o in the opposite direction of the magnetic field (called spin-down). Both the spin-up and spin-down conditions are called an eigenstate. Prior to the observation of the electron’s spin, the electron is in a superposition of states and is not in an eigenstate. Now if the electron in the eigenstate of spin-up is sent through the same magnetic field again, it will be found to pop out in the eigenstate of spin-up again. Similarly, a spin-down electron that is sent through the magnetic field again will also pop out as a spin-down electron. Now here is the strange part. If you rotate the magnetic field by 90^o and send spin-up electrons through it, 50% of the electrons will pop out with a spin pointing to the left, and 50% will pop out with a spin pointing to the right. And you cannot predict in advance which way a particular spin-up electron will pop out. It might spin to the left, or it might spin to the right. The same goes for the spin-down electrons – 50% will pop out spinning to the left and 50% will pop out spinning to the right.

Figure 19 - In the Stern-Gerlach experiment we shoot electrons through a distorted magnetic field. Classically, we would expect the electrons to be spinning in random directions and the magnetic field should deflect them in random directions, creating a smeared-out spot on the screen. Instead, we see that the act of measuring the spins of the electrons puts them into eigenstates with eigenvalues of spin-up or spin-down and the electrons are either deflected up or down. If we rotate the magnets by 90^o, we find that the electrons are deflected to the right or to the left.

The EPR Paradox goes like this. Suppose we prepare many pairs of quantum mechanically “entangled” electrons that conserve angular momentum. Each pair consists of one spin-up electron and one spin-down electron, but we do not know which is which at the onset. Now let the pairs of electrons fly apart and let two observers measure their spins. If observer A measures an electron there will be a 50% probability that he will find a spin-up electron and a 50% chance that he will find a spin-down electron, and the same goes for observer B, 50% of observer’s B electrons will be found to have a spin-up, while 50% will be found with a spin-down. Now the paradox of the EPR paradox, from the perspective of the Copenhagen Interpretation, is that when observer A and observer B come together to compare notes, they find that each time observer A found a spin-up electron, observer B found a spin-down electron, even though the electrons did not know which way they were spinning before the measurements were performed. Somehow when observer A measured the spin of an electron, it instantaneously changed the spin of the electron that observer B measured. Einstein hated this “spooky action at a distance” feature of the Copenhagen Interpretation that made physics nonlocal, meaning that things that were separated by great distances could still instantaneously change each other. He thought that it violated the speed of light speed limit of his special theory of relativity that did not allow information to travel faster than the speed of light. Einstein thought that the EPR paradox was the final nail in the coffin of quantum mechanics. There had to be some “hidden variables” that allowed electrons to know if they “really” were a spin-up or spin-down electron. You see, for Einstein, absolute reality really existed. For Einstein, the apparent probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics was an illusion, like the random() function found in most computer languages. The random() function just points to a table of apparently random numbers that are totally predictable if you look at the table in advance. You normally initiate the random() function with a “seed” from the system clock of the computer you are running on to simulate randomness by starting at different points in the table.

However, in 1964 John S. Bell published a paper in which he proposed an experiment that could actually test the EPR Paradox. In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of experiments were indeed performed that showed that Einstein was actually wrong. Using photons and polarimeters, instead of the spin of electrons, these experiments showed that photons really do not know their quantum states in advance of being measured and that determining the polarization of a photon by observer A can immediately change the polarization of another photon 60 miles away. These experiments demonstrated that the physical Universe is non-local, meaning that Einstein’s "spooky action at a distance” is built into our Universe, at least for entangled quantum particles. This might sound like a violation of the special theory of relativity because it seems like we are sending an instantaneous message faster than the speed of light, but that is really not the case. Both observer A and observer B will measure photons with varying polarizations at their observing stations separated by 60 miles. Only when observer A and observer B come together to compare results will they realize that their observations were correlated, so it is impossible to send a message with real information using this experimental scheme. Clearly, our common-sense ideas about space and time are still lacking, and so are our current effective theories.

Why This is Important for Quantum Computers?
You might ask why we should care about these quantum mechanical subtleties of physics? What does this have to do with the real world of human affairs? The reason why is that quantum computers take advantage of these two things that have been bothering physicists ever since they invented quantum mechanics in 1926.

1. Superposition - A quantum bit, known as a qubit, can be both a 1 and a 0 at the same time. A classical bit can only be a 1 or a 0 at any given time.

2. Entanglement - If two qubits are entangled, reading one qubit over here can immediately let you know what a qubit over there is without even reading it.

Figure 20 – Superposition means that a qubit really does not know if it is a 1 or a 0 until it is measured. The qubit exists in a superposition of states meaning that it is both a 1 and a 0 at the same time.

Superposition is important because a classical computer with 127 bits of memory can be in only one of:

2¹²⁷ = 1.701 x 10³⁸ = 170,100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 states.

But a quantum computer with 127 qubits of memory like the just-announced IBM Eagle processor can be in 170,100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different states all at the same time!

Entanglement is important because when two qubits are entangled, they can instantly affect each other no matter how far apart they are.

Figure 21 – When qubits are entangled, neither one knows if it is a 1 or a 0. But if you measure one qubit and find that it is a 1, the other qubit will immediately become a 0 no matter how far apart they are.

Superposition and Entanglement have both been experimentally verified many times even if they do not make much sense. In Quantum Computing and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computing and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, I covered two popular explanations for these phenomena known as the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. I also covered the Transactional Interpretation which behaves a bit like TCP/IP. The Copenhagen Interpretation maintains that when a quantum system is observed, it collapses into a single state so that a qubit that is in a superposition of being a 1 and a 0 at the same time collapses into either a 1 or a 0. Entangled qubits collapse in pairs. The Many-Worlds Interpretation maintains that a qubit in a superposition of being a 1 and a 0 at the same time is actually two qubits in two different universes. You are a being composed of quantum particles and when you measure the qubit, you are not really measuring the qubit, you actually are measuring in which universe your quantum particles are entangled with the qubit. In one universe you will find a 1 and in the other, you will find a 0. The same thing happens when you measure entangled qubits. In one universe the qubits are 1 and 0 and in the other universe, they are 0 and 1. The Many-Worlds Interpretation may sound pretty nutty, but it actually is a much simpler explanation and does not need anything beyond the Schrödinger equation that defines all of quantum mechanics. Plus, as David Deutsch has commented, if a quantum computer can perform the calculations of a million computers all at the same time, where exactly are all of those calculations being performed if not in Many-Worlds? For more on that see Quantum Computing and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics.

So How Does a Quantum Computer Work?
The details are quite complex using quantum algorithms that use quantum gates for logical operations, but you should be able to get an intuitive feel just based on the ideas of Superposition and Entanglement. Remember, a quantum computer with 127 qubits of memory can be in 170,100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different states all at the same time and many of those qubits can be entangled together into networks of entangled qubits. This allows people to essentially write quantum algorithms that can process all possible logical paths of a given problem all at the same time!

Figure 22 – Imagine a large network of entangled qubits processing all possible logical paths at the same time producing massive parallel processing.

But What If Einstein Was Really Right All Along?
Now let us explore some interesting work by Sabine (pronounced Sabina) Hossenfelder that could restore an Einstein Block Universe that is deterministic, local, obey's Einstein's theory of relativity and is composed of real things like electrons that actually exist on their own even when nobody is looking at them. This will get pretty heavy and might even totally rewrite your current worldview, so be prepared. It might be best to watch a few YouTube videos first that describe the concept of a Superdeterministic Universe. A Superdeterministic Universe is simply Einstein's Block Universe with a little twist that accounts for all of the strange quantum behaviors of our Universe that have been experimentally verified.

What If We Live in a Superdeterministic Universe?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnKzt6Xq-w4&t=0s

Does Superdeterminism save Quantum Mechanics? Or does it kill free will and destroy science?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytyjgIyegDI&t=0s

Basically, Sabine Hossenfelder explains that if we give up the concept of Statistical Independence, we can restore Einstein's Block Universe which is both deterministic and local in nature. All of the quantum weirdness of quantum superposition and entanglement disappears by simply giving up the concept of Statistical Independence. At first, that seems like quite a bargain and one that Einstein could certainly buy into, but it does come with a price. The easiest way to give up Statistical Independence is to assume that Einstein's Block Universe, which is both deterministic and local, came about at the Big Bang as a static 4-dimensional spacetime salami that was allowed to rapidly expand by means of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, but that all future events were predetermined at the time of the Big Bang in a deterministic and local manner. Since our entire Universe was all at the same spot at the time of the Big Bang and all the components of that early Universe could causally interact with each other and then evolve in time in a deterministic manner, there would be no violation of Einstein's theory of relativity if many billions of years later it was found that two detectors that were many billions of light years apart were still correlated when measuring the spins of electrons or the polarization of photons when a Bell-type experiment was performed.

Figure 23 - So long as the light cones of Detectors D₁ and D₂ and the event P that produced two entangled particles all exist within overlapping light cones, it would be possible for D₁ and D₂ and P to be correlated so that at the time of measurement at D₁ and D₂, the settings at D₁ could seem to affect the settings at D₂ in a manner that exceeds the speed of light. Such would not be the case if the two entangled particles were created at event X because D₂ is causally disconnected from event X. Event X is not within the light cone of D₂ and is therefore causally disconnected from D₂.

The idea that the Einstein Block Universe of a spacetime salami that was initiated at the time of the Big Bang with a set of entangled initial conditions that then evolved in a deterministic and local manner like loading a program into a computer with some initial data parameters and letting the code then run in a deterministic manner to completion can be somewhat disturbing. Of course an AI Deep Learning neural network would not be bothered by this in the least. But living in a Universe that was completely superdetermined from the Big Bang does not sit well with most human beings. That is because most human beings do not think of themselves as part of the natural world. Instead, they think of themselves, and others, as immaterial spirits temporarily haunting a carbon-based body, and when that carbon-based body dies the immaterial spirit lives on. In this view, human beings are not part of the natural world. Instead, they are part of the supernatural with the capability of free will to change the future in a nondeterministic manner. But if consciousness and free will are just self-delusions even in a deterministic Universe, they certainly would be so in a Superdeterministic Universe. For more on that see The Ghost in the Machine the Grand Illusion of Consciousness and DishBrain - Cortical Labs Creates an AI Matrix for Pong With Living Neurons on a Silicon Chip. For Sabine Hossenfelder's take on the matter see:

You don't have free will, but don't worry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpU_e3jh_FY&t=0s

To refute the concept of Superdeterminism, experimenters have done things to try to push Superdeterminism to the extreme. Instead of using random number generators that are close to Detector D₁ and Detector D₂ to set the angles of the detectors in a Bell experiment, they have used the colors of photons from very distant quasars to set the angles in an attempt to establish Statistical Independence of the detector settings. For example, in the paper below:

Cosmic Bell Test using Random Measurement Settings from High-Redshift Quasars
https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.05966
Abstract
In this paper, we present a cosmic Bell experiment with polarization-entangled photons, in which measurement settings were determined based on real-time measurements of the wavelength of photons from high-redshift quasars, whose light was emitted billions of years ago; the experiment simultaneously ensures locality. Assuming fair sampling for all detected photons, and that the wavelength of the quasar photons had not been selectively altered or previewed between emission and detection, we observe statistically significant violation of Bell's inequality by 9.3 standard deviations, corresponding to an estimated p value of ≲ 7.4 x 10^-21. This experiment pushes back to at least ∼ 7.8 Gyr ago the most recent time by which any local-realist influences could have exploited the "freedom-of-choice" loophole to engineer the observed Bell violation, excluding any such mechanism from 96% of the space-time volume of the past light cone of our experiment, extending from the big bang to today.

The researchers used one quasar that was 7.78 billion light years away and another quasar that was 12.21 billion light years away to determine the settings of Detectors D₁ and D₂. The light cones of these two distant quasars last intersected more than 7.78 billion years ago before the Earth even formed 4.56 billion years ago. Yet their experiment confirmed the seemingly "spooky actions at a distance" correlations that all Bell-type experiments have revealed.

Figure 24 - The above Bell Test experiment used the colors of photons from two distant quasars to try to set the polarimeters of their Detectors D₁ and D₂.

Figure 25 - Here is a close-up view of the experimental setup.

Figure 26 - The light cones of Detectors D₁ and D₂ last intersected more than 7.78 billion years ago.

Figure 27 - But that is not a problem if our current Universe was launched in a Superdeterministic manner at the Big Bang.

Superdeterminism Is Not an Interpretation of Standard Quantum Mechanics
It is important to realize that Superdeterminism is not just another interpretation of standard quantum mechanics. We covered the Copenhagen, the Many-Worlds and the Transaction Interpretations of quantum mechanics in Quantum Software, Quantum Computing and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, The Foundations of Quantum Computing and Quantum Computing and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. In all such Interpretations of quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics is considered to be a "complete" theory that uses wavefunctions to explain the strange behaviors of tiny particles. All such Interpretations consider quantum mechanics to be the real thing. The Interpretations of quantum mechanics just try to explain what the mathematics of quantum mechanics is trying to tell us.

However, Superdeterminism is not such an Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Superdeterminism is a red flag trying to tell us that there is something wrong with standard quantum mechanics. Superdeterminism is trying to tell us that quantum mechanics is not a "complete" theory because something is missing. Superdeterminism tells us that quantum mechanics needs to be tweaked or replaced by a more fundamental theory because current quantum mechanical theory is just a very useful approximation of the true natural world.

For example, Einstein was a Realist and thought that tiny particles like electrons were real things with real properties that existed even if nobody was around to observe them. Einstein wondered,"Is it enough that a mouse observes that the Moon exists?". He did not like quantum mechanics because it was not deterministic and not local in nature. Instead, it was a probabilistic theory describing the behaviors of small particles in probabilistic terms. Because of that, Einstein thought that standard quantum mechanics must be an "incomplete" theory that was just an approximation of the actual behavior of tiny particles. Einstein thought that there must be some "hidden variables" or parameters that were missing from the wavefunction defined by quantum mechanics that really explained what happened in a deterministic manner when a detector interacted with a particle. These "hidden variables" or hidden parameters might be carried along by the "real" particle or they might come from somewhere else.

The idea of "hidden variables" might sound rather strange but it reminds me very much of a very perplexing troubleshooting problem that I had many years ago while working at United Airlines with Tuxedo C++ code. Tuxedo was developed back in the 1980s as a Transaction Processing Monitor like IBM's CICS that could run under Unix. Nobody knew it at the time, but Tuxedo was actually an early form of modern container-based Cloud computing. A Tuxedo Domain was really a Cloud Container that could crank up multiple Tuxedo Services written in C++ in a dynamic manner. Since then, Tuxedo was purchased by Oracle and is still available today for Cloud Computing on a Hybrid or external Cloud. Anyway, back in about 2001, my development group had a problem with an intermittent bug in one of our C++ Tuxedo Services. We had a very difficult time trying to troubleshoot this bug because it had a "hidden variable"! The problem was that a Tuxedo Domain would crank up a new instance of a C++ Tuxedo Service when the load increased and sometimes that would trip the "hidden variable" bug! Below is a description of the C++ code that caused the "hidden variable" bug.

int i;
More code;
More code;
More code;
More code;
if ( i == 1 )
{
    Do this code;
    Do this code;
    Do this code;
    Do this code;
    Do this code;
    Do this code;
}

The problem was that the original programmer did not initialize the variable i to zero with the code:

int i = 0;

So the bug happened when a new instance of the C++ Tuxedo Service was cranked up by the Tuxedo Domain and the section of memory allocated for the new instance of the C++ Tuxedo Service just happened to contain a binary "1" for the memory location of the "hidden variable" i. If the variable i was not set to a different value by some other code in the C++ Tuxedo Service before it reached the "if" statement above, then the "hidden variable" i contained a binary "1" in it and the "Do this code;" block of code would execute by mistake. This did not happen very often, so this was a very intermittent bug that was very hard to debug. The interesting thing to note is that the declaration of the "hidden variable" i was many thousands of lines of code distant from the "Do this code;" block of code that caused the damage. If our Universe is similarly the Superdeterministic result of a highly entangled and correlated set of particles and their descendants arising from the Big Bang, then such would also be the case.

For More on Sabine Hossenfelder's Work
You can read some accessible papers by Sabine Hossenfelder in the Cornell University arXiv at:

Rethinking Superdeterminism
https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06462
Abstract
Quantum mechanics has irked physicists ever since its conception more than 100 years ago. While some of the misgivings, such as it being unintuitive, are merely aesthetic, quantum mechanics has one serious shortcoming: it lacks a physical description of the measurement process. This “measurement problem” indicates that quantum mechanics is at least an incomplete theory – good as far as it goes, but missing a piece – or, more radically, is in need of complete overhaul.
Here we describe an approach which may provide this sought-for completion or replacement: Superdeterminism. A superdeterministic theory is one which violates the assumption of Statistical Independence (that distributions of hidden variables are independent of measurement settings). Intuition suggests that Statistical Independence is an essential ingredient of any theory of science (never mind physics), and for this reason Superdeterminism is typically discarded swiftly in any discussion of quantum foundations.
The purpose of this paper is to explain why the existing objections to Superdeterminism are based on experience with classical physics and linear systems, but that this experience misleads us. Superdeterminism is a promising approach not only to solve the measurement problem, but also to understand the apparent nonlocality of quantum physics. Most importantly, we will discuss how it may be possible to test this hypothesis in an (almost) model independent way.

Superdeterminism: A Guide for the Perplexed
https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.01324
Abstract
Superdeterminism is presently the only known consistent description of nature that is local, deterministic, and can give rise to the observed correlations of quantum mechanics. I here want to explain what makes this approach promising and offer the reader some advice for how to avoid common pitfalls. In particular, I explain why superdeterminism is not a threat to science, is not necessarily finetuned, what the relevance of future input is, and what the open problems are.

For the more mathematically gifted, you can use the Search feature in the upper right corner of the arXiv webpages to search for more mathematically challenging papers by Sabine Hossenfelder. Her blog is at:

BackReaction
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-forgotten-solution-superdeterminism.html

and her YouTube channel is at:

Sabine Hossenfelder
https://www.youtube.com/@SabineHossenfelder

Conclusion
Thus, if we really do live in a Superdeterministic Universe, it means some more work needs to be done to produce a replacement theory for standard quantum mechanics that incorporates realism, determinism, relativity and is local in nature. Like the General Theory of Relativity, such a more-fundamental theory would likely be described by nonlinear differential equations that induce chaotic behaviors in tiny particles. The seemingly random behaviors of particles in standard quantum mechanics would then just be the result of particles existing in the chaotic regimes of such nonlinear differential equations.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston