Consciousness, measurement, and quantum mechanics – Part 7

(See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6. Also I am going to suspend the limit of three comments per post for this series of posts because it is a topic that benefits from back and forth discussions.)

In order to fully appreciate the role of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle on the question of objective reality and measurement, a highly truncated history of quantum mechanics might help.

The theory traces its beginnings to 1900 when Max Planck decided to assume that the material that made up the walls of the cavity inside a body that was at a uniform temperature (called a blackbody) could be treated as oscillators that could only absorb and radiate energy in discrete amounts (‘quanta’) and not continuously as had been previously assumed. The size of these quanta depended upon the frequency of oscillation as well as a new constant he introduced that has come to be known as Planck’s constant h. The value of this constant was very small, which is why it had long seemed that the energy could be absorbed and radiated in any amount. This was a purely ad hoc move on his part that had no theoretical justification whatsoever except that it gave the correct result for the radiation spectrum of the energy emitted by the blackbody. Planck himself viewed it as a purely mathematical trick that had no basis in reality but was just a placeholder until a real theory came along. But as time went on and the idea of quanta caught on, he began to think that it could represent something real.

In 1905 Einstein proposed that light energy also came in quanta and this was used to explain the photoelectric effect, which was what he was awarded the Nobel prize for in 1921. Then Niels Bohr in 1913 used the idea of quantization to come up with a model of simple atoms that explained some of their radiation spectra. Both of their works used Planck’s constant.

Erwin Schrodinger’s eponymous equation was proposed by him in 1926 and set in motion the field of quantum mechanics because it laid the foundations of a real theory that enabled one to systematically set about making calculations of observables. Almost simultaneously, Werner Heisenberg came up with alternative formulation based on matrices. (Later on P. A. M. Dirac showed that the two formulations were equivalent.) But Schrodinger’s theory was in the form of a differential equation that enabled one to calculate the wave function of a particle that was moving under the influence of a potential. Differential equations and wave behavior were both very familiar to physicists and thus Schrodinger’s approach was more easily accessible and used more widely.
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The fall of a royal grifter

The man formerly known as Prince Andrew but in future will be just plain old Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, is undoubtedly a grifter, willing to trade on his title and the connections generated by his family connections to fund his greed and lust for a lavish lifestyle. But the public revelations of his association with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his sexual relations with Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a young women whom Epstein offered to him and other men, has been too much for the current king who has set about cutting him loose from the family, at least publicly.

The entitled behavior of people like Windsor is usually something that is learned at an early age. It is said that he was the favorite child of the late queen who indulged him and protected him and partially funded his lifestyle, though his greed for even more led him into all manner of shady deals with shady people. Throughout his life, there have been questions about how he and his now ex-wife Sarah Ferguson funded their luxurious lifestyle, which includes the upkeep of the 30-room Royal Lodge described as “a Georgian mansion sitting in 40 hectares of secluded grounds in Windsor Great Park” for which he paid no rent, or in 2014 to buy for £18 million a chalet in Switzerland. On top of this was the lavish lifestyle that he enjoyed.
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Judges order that SNAP payments must continue

Two federal judges have ruled that SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) payments that assist low-income people to pay for food must continue despite the government shutdown. The program assists 42 million people, about one in eight of the population.

John McConnell, a US district judge in Providence, issued a temporary restraining order in the Rhode Island case at the behest of those plaintiffs. They had argued that the US Department of Agriculture’s suspension of Snap benefits due to kick in on Saturday was unlawful.
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In the Massachusetts case, the US district judge Indira Talwani in Boston gave the administration until Monday to say whether it would partly pay for the benefits for November with contingency money or fund them fully with additional funds.

The Trump administration maintains that the SNAP money will run out by November 1 unless Congress reconvenes and passes new appropriations.
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Jury nullification on the rise

I have written many times before about the practice known as jury nullification, where juries exercise their right to acquit people of violating a law even if they are plainly guilty. Juries do not have to give any reason for their action but the reason juries do this is usually because they feel that the law is unjust or was applied arbitrarily and punitively or that the accused had justifiable reasons for their actions. It was because of juries refusing to convict despite the evidence and the law that we now have basic freedoms like freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, and free exercise of religion. I would strongly recommend reading this post from 2007 where I discuss how important this right of juries is and its history.

There have been other cases recently (see here, here, here, and here) that suggest that grand juries are becoming reluctant to indict people who have been targeted by Trump’s ICE thugs and department of justice. This is significant because usually grand juries proceedings are heavily slanted in favor of the prosecutor and juries tend to go along with whatever they want. There is an old joke that because of the low standard of proof required in grand juries, any prosecutor should be able to get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.

The fact that so many are refusing to do so is a good sign.
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The brave new world of online relationships get newer and braver

Many people nowadays find friends and potential romantic partners through online dating sites and similar means. If they strike up some kind of rapport through initial text exchanges, they may pursue a deeper relationship, even leading to in-person meetings. This has led to cases of ‘catfishing’ ‘where people get into online relationships, not with a real person, but with someone who is not who they say they are and are just toying with them, either as a prank or as a prelude to scamming them.

But now some people are encountering something different that is not quite catfishing, as this case illustrates.

Standing outside the pub, 36-year-old business owner Rachel took a final tug on her vape and steeled herself to meet the man she’d spent the last three weeks opening up to. They’d matched on the dating app Hinge and built a rapport that quickly became something deeper. “From the beginning he was asking very open-ended questions, and that felt refreshing,” says Rachel. One early message from her match read: “I’ve been reading a bit about attachment styles lately, it’s helped me to understand myself better – and the type of partner I should be looking for. Have you ever looked at yours? Do you know your attachment style?” “It was like he was genuinely trying to get to know me on a deeper level. The questions felt a lot more thoughtful than the usual, ‘How’s your day going?’” she says.

Soon, Rachel and her match were speaking daily, their conversations running the gamut from the ridiculous (favourite memes, ketchup v mayonnaise) to the sublime (expectations in love, childhood traumas). Often they’d have late-night exchanges that left her staring at her phone long after she should have been asleep. “They were like things that you read in self-help books – really personal conversations about who we are and what we want for our lives,” she says.

This sounded very promising. But as soon as the actual date started, something seemed off.
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Good and bad news in international politics

First the bad news.

In mid-term elections in Argentina, the party of president Javier Milei, a Trump fanboy, won a decisive victory. Trump had blatantly interfered in that election by promising that country a $40 billion bailout package if Milei’s party won and abandoning it if they lost. Typical thuggish threats from him. Unfortunately there are suggestions that this may well have swayed the outcome so Trump will try and repeat it elsewhere.

Milei’s libertarian party, La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances), captured nearly 41% of the vote – considerably higher than expected after a miserable spell of corruption scandals and growing economic crisis – compared with his Peronist rivals’ 32%. Argentina’s bonds, stocks and currency, the peso, surged on Monday as Milei celebrated what he called a vindication of his two-year-old “shock therapy” crusade.
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The US president had vowed to jettison his South American ally if, as widely predicted, the radical libertarian fared badly in Sunday’s make-or-break legislative vote. “If he doesn’t win, we’re gone,” Trump declared when Argentina’s shaggy-haired president visited him in Washington earlier this month to plead for economic help.

Milei’s political woes have been building in recent months, with growing public frustration over Argentina’s sluggish economy translating into market jitters and a pasting in Buenos Aires’ provincial election in September. Trump stepped in after that humiliating result, offering a $20bn (£15bn) currency swap deal and a further $20bn in support for an economy he claimed was “dying” – although the US president indicated such “generosity” would evaporate if Milei failed to win big on Sunday.

It is really quite astonishing how Trump can find such sums of money to dispose of seemingly at will.
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The possible real reason that Trump is angry about latest Chinese trade move

Trump is heading off today to attend the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting in Seoul, South Korea. A lot of attention is being paid to the meeting of Trump with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the sidelines of that meeting because it will be held in the aftermath of the latest flareup in the tariff war war between the to countries.

I blogged two weeks ago about how China, that usually does not initiate these things, did so in this case by placing restrictions on the export of rare-earth minerals that are vital in high technology. China has a dominant position in this area, since roughly 70 percent of rare earth mining, 90 percent of separation and processing, and 93 percent of magnet manufacturing, takes place in that country.

An enraged Trump immediately announced that he would impose 100% tariffs on all imports from China to the US and that he would also not meet with Xi during the summit. His treasury secretary Scott Bessent immediately tried to downplay fears of a new trade war escalation, saying that the two countries were engaged in trade talks. Trump then later said that the 100% tariffs would only be applied in November and that he would in fact likely meet with Xi after all to negotiate. Most people assumed that this was another case of TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) in action, with Trump threatening extreme actions and then backing down.
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The oddities of the English language

I like puns and other plays on words. This is why I like doing cryptic crosswords, which depend more upon linguistic puzzles than the recall of facts, far more that the standard type. For that reason, they are harder to construct. Cryptic ones are more popular in the UK and other non-US English speaking countries, where newspapers often offer them on a daily basis. In the US The New Yorker magazine at one point offered a good cryptic crossword puzzle every Sunday but stopped doing so a few months ago, I presume because not enough people were doing it.

Because of my liking for word play, I often find humor in interpreting things differently from what the writer or speaker intended. And for someone like me, English idioms can be endlessly fascinating.
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Trump preparing military assault on Venezuela

It is becoming increasingly clear that Trump is preparing the ground for a direct military assault on Venezuela. This has been steadily building. There have long been sanctions against that country. Then we had allegations that drug gangs from that country are creating a national security threat to the US, which was used to justify attacks on at least eight small boats in the Caribbean that have killed at least 37 people, on the unsubstantiated claim that they were bringing drugs to the US. Even if true, such attacks would be a flagrant violation of international law. That this was a laughable proposition was made even more unbelievable by the fact that most of the drug flow to the US occurs via the Pacific Ocean, which Venezuela does not share a coast with. But hey, this is the US that doesn’t give a damn about upholding international law unless it is a perceived enemy country that violates it.

It may be that those attacks were an attempt to provoke the Venezuelan government to retaliate in some way so that a full-scale invasion could be justified. This is the standard practice of the US and also Israel. They attack people in their own homes and territories and when those people resist and fight back even in self-defense, they are charged with being terrorists and even harsher attacks follow.

Now we have Trump publicly saying that he has ordered the CIA to conduct covert strikes within the country which suggests that he does not know the meaning of the word covert or that the CIA’s mode of operation is to never acknowledge when and where it is operating. Trump has also ordered its largest aircraft carrier to head towards Venezuela, the clearest sign yet of plans for a potential invasion.
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