Monthly Archives: April 2022

An ultraprecise measurement of the mass of a subatomic particle called the W boson may diverge from the Standard Model, a long-reigning framework that governs the strange world of quantum physics.

After 10 years of collaboration using an atom smasher at Fermilab in Illinois, scientists announced this new measurement, which is so precise that they likened it to finding the weight of an 800-pound (363 kilograms) gorilla to a precision of 1.5 ounces (42.5 grams). Their result puts the W boson, a carrier of the weak nuclear force, at a mass seven standard deviations higher than the Standard Model predicts. That's a very high level of certainty, representing only an incredibly small probability that this result occurred by pure chance.

"While this is an intriguing result, the measurement needs to be confirmed by another experiment before it can be interpreted fully," Joe Lykken, Fermilab's deputy director of research, said in a statement (opens in new tab).

The new result also disagrees with older experimental measurements of the W boson's mass. It remains to be seen if this measurement is an experimental fluke or the first opening of a crack in the Standard Model. If the result does stand up to scrutiny and can be replicated, it could mean that we need to revise or extend the Standard Model with possibly new particles and forces.

Related: Physicists get closer than ever to measuring the elusive neutrino

The weak nuclear force is perhaps the strangest of the four fundamental forces of nature. It's propagated by three force carriers, known as bosons. There is the single Z boson, which has a neutral electric charge, and the W+ and W- bosons, which have positive and negative electric charges, respectively.

Because those three bosons have mass, they travel more slowly than the speed of light and eventually decay into other particles, giving the weak nuclear force a relatively limited range. Despite those limitations, the weak force is responsible for radioactive decay, and it is the only force (besides gravity) to interact directly with neutrinos, the mysterious, ghost-like particles that flood the universe.

Pinning down the masses of the weak force carriers is a crucial test of the Standard Model, the theory of physics that combines quantum mechanics, special relativity and symmetries of nature to explain and predict the behavior of the electromagnetic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear forces. (Yes, gravity is the "elephant in the room" that the model cannot explain.) The Standard Model is the most accurate theory ever developed in physics, and one of its crowning achievements was the successful prediction of the existence of the Higgs boson, a particle whose quantum mechanical field gives rise to mass in many other particles, including the W boson.

According to the Standard Model, at high energies the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces combine into a single, unified force called the electroweak interaction. But at low energies (or the typical energies of everyday life), the Higgs boson butts in, driving a wedge between the two forces. Through that same process, the Higgs also gives mass to the weak force carriers.

If you know the mass of the Higgs boson, then you can calculate the mass of the W boson, and vice versa. For the Standard Model to be a coherent theory of subatomic physics, it must be consistent with itself. If you measure the Higgs boson and use that measurement to predict the W boson's mass, it should agree with an independent, direct measurement of the W boson's mass.

Using the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF), which is inside the giant Tevatron particle accelerator, a collaboration of more than 400 scientists examined years of data from over 4 million independent collisions of protons with antiprotons to study the mass of the W boson. During those super-energetic collisions, the W boson decays into either a muon or an electron (along with a neutrino). The energies of those emitted particles are directly connected to the underlying mass of the W boson.

"The number of improvements and extra checking that went into our result is enormous," said Ashutosh V. Kotwal, a particle physicist at Duke University who led the analysis. "We took into account our improved understanding of our particle detector as well as advances in the theoretical and experimental understanding of the W boson's interactions with other particles. When we finally unveiled the result, we found that it differed from the Standard Model prediction."

The CDF collaboration measured the value of the W boson to be 80,433 9 MeV/c2, which is about 80 times heavier than the proton and about 0.1% heavier than expected. The uncertainty in the measurement comes from both statistical uncertainty (just like the uncertainty you get from taking a poll in an election) and systematic uncertainty (which is produced when your experimental apparatus doesn't always behave in the way you designed it to act). Achieving that level of precision of an astounding 0.01% is itself an enormous task, like knowing your own weight down to less than a quarter of an ounce.

"Many collider experiments have produced measurements of the W boson mass over the last 40 years," CDF co-spokesperson Giorgio Chiarelli, a research director at the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics, said in the statement. "These are challenging, complicated measurements, and they have achieved ever more precision. It took us many years to go through all the details and the needed checks."

The result differed from the Standard Model prediction of the W boson's mass, which is 80,357 6 MeV/c2. The uncertainties in that calculation (the "") come from uncertainties in the measurement of the Higgs boson and other particles, which must be inserted into the calculation, and from the calculation itself, which relies on several approximation techniques.

The differences between the results aren't very large in an absolute sense. Because of the high precision, however, they are separated by seven standard deviations, indicating the presence of a major discrepancy.

The new result also disagrees with previous measurements from other collider experiments, which have been largely consistent with the Standard Model prediction. It's not clear yet if this result is caused by some unknown bias within the experiment or if it's the first sign of new physics.

If the CDF result holds up and other experiments can verify it, it could be a sign that there's more to the W boson mass than its interaction with the Higgs. Perhaps a previously unknown particle or field, or maybe even dark matter, is interacting with the W boson in a way the Standard Model currently doesn't predict.

Nonetheless, the result is an important step in testing the accuracy of the Standard Model, said CDF co-spokesperson David Toback, a professor of physics and astronomy at Texas A&M University. "It's now up to the theoretical physics community and other experiments to follow up on this and shed light on this mystery," he said.

The researchers described their results April 7 in the journal Science (opens in new tab).

Originally published on Live Science.

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Oddly heavy particle may have just broken the reigning model of particle physics - Livescience.com

Yales hub for quantum research will soon entangle the campus in the best possible sense in a full week of mind-bending science, artistry, and discussion devoted to the wonders of quantum research.

Quantum Week at Yale, organized by the Yale Quantum Institute (YQI), will feature a hackathon, a lab tour, a movie screening, a record launch party, hands-on computer programming, a superconductive jewelry display, and an assortment of quantum-related library and museum exhibits.

The activities begin April 8 and run through April 14. A full list of events is available here.

Yales quantum scientists are at the very top of this field, said Florian Carle, YQI manager and coordinator for the event. We want to take some of the excitement we see in the labs and at YQI and share it with the rest of the campus.

Quantum science delves into the physical properties that explain the behavior of subatomic particles, atoms, and molecules. Over the past century, quantum research has transformed disciplines as diverse as physics, engineering, mathematics, chemistry, computer science, and materials science.

Over the past 20 years, Yale researchers have propelled quantum research, particularly in quantum information science and quantum computing, with a series of groundbreaking discoveries including the first demonstration of two-qubit algorithms with a superconducting quantum processor.

Yales research has led to unprecedented control over individual quantum objects, whether those objects are naturally occurring microscopic systems such as atoms, or macroscopic, human-made systems with engineered properties. Researchers say these advances may soon enable them to perform otherwise intractable computations, ensure privacy in communications, better understand and design novel states of matter, and develop new types of sensors and measurement devices.

This is the time when computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and engineers are all coming together, said Yongshan Ding, assistant professor of computer science, who will lead a programming workshop on April 14 that shows visitors including those without any experience with quantum computing how to play with quantum interference patterns.

People can just code away, Ding said. My vision is that by exposing people to these activities, we can build a quantum-native programming language. This is a new paradigm of computation, so were going to need new ways to program for it.

YQI has partnered with 18 Yale departments and centers to create 23 events for Quantum Week at Yale. One of the challenges in organizing the week, Carle explained, was developing an engaging mix of activities suited for both experienced researchers and quantum science novices.

To that end, the week is organized around four components: Understanding Quantum, Art & Quantum, Career and Entrepreneurship, and For Researchers.

The hands-on programming event, for example, comes under the Understanding Quantum banner. Other include an April 9-10 Quantum Coalition Hack, hosted by the Yale Undergraduate Quantum Computer Club; an April 11 tour of superconducting qubit laboratories; and a quantum-related exhibit of rare books at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library on April 11.

Were always looking for ways that our libraries can engage with the academic work going on at Yale, said Andrew Shimp, who consulted on Quantum Week events at Yale libraries. Shimp is Yales librarian for engineering, applied science, chemistry, and mathematics. One of the unique things a Yale library can offer is the chance to view rare collections that arent necessarily digitized yet.

The quantum exhibit at the Beinecke Library, for example, includes materials from quantum science pioneers such as Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and Max Planck. There is also an astronomy textbook, published in 1511, that includes the word quantum in its title. The title is Textus de Sphera Johannis de Sacrobosco: cum additione (quantum necessarium est) adiecta / Nouo commentario nuper edito ad vtilitate[m] studentiu[m] philosophice Parisien[em]. A brief English translation would be Sphere of Sacrobosco.

Under the Art & Quantum heading, there will be an April 8 screening of the 2013 indie thriller Coherence; a visual arts competition called Visualize Science hosted by Wright Lab on April 13; a launch party for Quantum Sound (a record project begun at YQI in 2018) on April 13; a display of Superconductive Jewelry throughout the week at YQI; a Quantum and the Arts exhibit all week at the Arts Library; an April 13 event hosted by the Yale Schwarzman Center devoted to historical preservation of technology ephemera, called Dumpster Diving: Historical Memory and Quantum Physics at Yale; and a new exhibit at the New Haven Museum, The Quantum Revolution, that opens April 13 and features drawings by former YQI artist in residence Martha Willette Lewis.

Carle is curator for the New Haven Museum exhibit. We wanted to show the evolution of quantum science at Yale, he said. It will take people from some of the first qubits in 1998 to Badger, the dilution refrigerator that ran the first two-qubit algorithms with a superconducting quantum processor in 2009.

Quantum computers require extremely cold temperatures near absolute zero in order to reduce operational errors.

The weeks Career and Entrepreneurship component will include a discussion of quantum startups hosted by The Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale (Tsai CITY) on April 12; a conversation with IBMs Mark Ritter on the global implications of quantum research, hosted by the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs on April 12; a session on how to access market research for major industry analysts, hosted by the Yale University Library, on April 12; and a series of panel discussions on how to join the quantum workforce.

Finally, the For Researchers component of Quantum Week at Yale will feature a quantum sensing workshop at Wright Lab on April 8; and an April 14 lecture by quantum researcher Nathan Wiebe of the University of Washington.

The final day for Quantum Week at Yale, April 14, also happens to be World Quantum Day, Carle said. Our hope is that by then, students all over campus will be aware of quantum work being done here and want to explore it themselves in some way.

Read more:

Quantum Week at Yale geared toward novices and experts alike - Yale News

Robert Mann, a professor in theDepartment of Physics and Astronomy, has been named aUniversity Professorby the University of Waterloo. This designation recognizes exceptional scholarly achievement and international pre-eminence, and is given to a maximum of two faculty members each year. Robert Mann will be honoured for his outstanding achievement at the convocation ceremony this June.

Since this designations inception in 2003, this prestigious title has only been given to six other professors in the Faculty of Science. Robert Mann is the first University Professor chosen from the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Professor Manns research focuses on gravitation, quantum physics, and the overlap of these physics topics.He wrote the first paper that examined how the idea of a minimal length in quantum gravity would affect our understanding of quantum mechanics.He has made a number of contributions to black hole thermodynamics,showing that black holes behave like everyday chemical systems, having phase transitions similar to those of liquids and gases, gels, polymers, and even superfluids.The subject is now called "black hole chemistry.He also was one of the founders of a subfield called relativistic quantum information, which investigates how relativistic effects modify quantum computation, and how quantum computation can exploit relativistic effects.

The most rewarding thing about being a professor is the ongoing adventure of training students to participate in scientific discovery," says Mann."It is an honour to be recognized by the University of Waterloo for doing something that I love to do.

Professor Mann will be honoured alongsideJohn Hirdesfrom theFaculty of Healthat the convocation ceremonies this June. Only 16 other individuals across the University of Waterloo currently hold this title.

Current University Professors in Science includeDr. Lyndon Jonesfrom theSchool of Optometry and Vision Science, and ProfessorsLinda NazarandJanusz Pawliszynfrom theDepartment of Chemistry.

This title has previously been held by retired Dean of ScienceTerry McMahonfrom the Department of Chemistry, Dr. Jacob Sivak from the School of Optometry and Vision Science, and late professor Robert Le Roy from the Department of Chemistry.

See more here:

Physicist Robert Mann named University Professor | Physics and Astronomy - The Iron Warrior

Apr 9th 2022

A CENTURY AGO, on April 6th 1922, the worlds most famous philosopher debated against the most famous physicist and lost. Henri Bergson, a French thinker who caused Broadways first traffic jam when he gave a lecture in New York, had challenged the notion of time advanced by Albert Einstein, the discoverer of relativity. Bergson was putting his thoughts into book form when Einstein came to Paris.

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At a gathering hosted by the Socit franaise de philosophie, which followed a talk by Einstein on relativity, they finally locked horns. Bergson summarised part of his forthcoming book, Duration and Simultaneity. Einsteins rebuttal was withering. There is no such thing as a philosophers time, he asserted. Bergsons version of it was merely psychological time. Their stilted non-conversation was a major anticlimax, says Elie During, a (living) French philosopher. Bergsons reputation waned; Time magazine named Einstein its person of the century.

Lopsided though the contest was, philosophers and scientists still ponder it. At stake is not just the momentous question of what time is. The debate was a key event in the separation of sciences and humanities into what C.P. Snow, a British novelist, later called two cultures. Einstein saw science as the ultimate arbiter of truth, says Jimena Canales, author of The Physicist and the Philosopher, a book about the episode. Bergson insisted that science did not have the last word. Their clash, Ms Canales says, raised the question, What is the relation between the subjective and the objective, and can we have a form of knowledge that includes both?

The philosopher was in the time business long before the physicist. Bergson published his first book, Time and Free Will, in 1889, when Einstein was ten years old. Initially an adherent of the idea that the world works like a machine, in the course of investigating evolution he encountered what he came to regard as sciences mistaken notion of time.

This views time in terms of space: an hour measures one-twenty-fourth of the Earths rotation. While useful, clock time misses what is most important about time, Bergson decided, namely duration. Rather than being disconnected from the past, the way one point on a ruler is separated from another, the present is suffused with it. Music is an example: each instant consists not only of itself but of what came before it. Pure duration is the form that the succession of our states of consciousness adopts when the self lets itself live, when it stops establishing a separation between its present and former states, Bergson wrote.

The passage of timethe present billowed with the pastprovides escape from a clockwork universe. This approach does not deny the importance of matter, but places life partially outside it. It is duration that permits novelty, both in the life forms that emerge from evolution and in the acts that proceed from the exercise of free will. Bergson applied his most famous epithet to lifes struggle with the material world, with which it is also bound up: lan vital. Peoples very identities are the temporal synthesis that is duration, as Mark Sinclair puts it in a recent book on Bergson.

His ideas were hugely influential. The literature of his day teems with Bergsonian characters, living between durational and clockwork worlds. T.S. Eliot (who heard him speak) seems to lament the splaying of time in space in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, writing of the evening spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherised upon a table. For the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, the memories awakened by a madeleines taste are enough to abolish clock time. Bergson married a cousin of Marcel Proust, the novels author, who was best man at his wedding. A spellbinding writer himself, Bergson won the Nobel prize in literature in 1927.

Even before his showdown with Einstein, though, Bergson was mocked for purveying metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. His exaltation of intuition, the faculty through which duration is apprehended, over intellect provided a fat target for Bertrand Russell, a British logician. According to Russell, writing in 1912, Bergson thought that the universe was a vast funicular railway, in which life is the train that goes up, and matter the train that goes down. Like advertising men Bergson relied upon picturesque and varied statement. In his History of Western Philosophy (1945), Russell added that the irrationalism of Bergsons philosophy harmonised easily with the movement which culminated in Vichya brutal comment about a Jew who refused special treatment from the Nazi-backed regime.

Einstein and Bergson were a study in contrasts. The German-born physicist was a pacifist and, until just before his death, a meat-eater; Bergson found philosophical grounds for Frances role in the first world warand was a vegetarian. Their clash in Paris was principally over Einsteins special theory of relativity, which had supplanted the unvarying time of Isaac Newtons physics.

Relativity states that time flows at different ratesfaster or slowerfor observers moving with respect to each other, as most do. Space compresses too, with the result that simultaneity is not absolute. This means that, in general, distinct observers witness events separated in space in different orders. Time and space blur together in a way implying that the past and future may be as real as the present, just as the Moon is as real as the Earth, a view sometimes called eternalism. The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion, Einstein famously wrote.

This was a frontal challenge to Bergsons central idea. If time, he wrote, is thus spread out in spaceit takes account neither of what is essential to succession nor of duration in so far as it flows. Bergson did not deny Einsteins discoveries; philosophy must be constantly verified by contact with the positive sciences, he averred. But he maintained that relativitys profusion of times are not all equally real. It could not overthrow the common-sense belief in a single time, the same for all beings and all things. In fact, properly understood, relativity confirms that.

In defending this position, Bergson denied the consequence of the special theory illustrated by the twin paradox: if Peter remains on Earth while Paul rides a rocket into space and then returns, Peter will have aged more than Paul. Special relativity says that the faster something moves relative to you, the slower its clock will tick, from your point of view. Bergson insisted that the reunited twins will have aged by the same amount. This proved to be his Achilles heel, writes Ms Canales.

Most physicists continue to disdain Bergson, not mainly because of his twin gaffe but because of his attempted prison-break from the material world. Carlo Rovelli, an Italian theoretical physicist, makes one dismissive reference to the philosopher in his recent book The Order of Time. Bergson correctly pointed out that experiential time has more features than the time the physicists were talking about, Mr Rovelli says. But he incorrectly deduced from that there must be something that escapes physics in the real world. Now, when science is under attack from anti-vaxxers and others, Bergsons spiritualism seems to some not just wrong-headed but dangerous. Ms Canales says a physicist warned her that my career would be finished if she published a book that took Bergson seriously.

Yet he still matters, in two ways. He continues to influence thinkers who deem a materialistic account of the world to be inadequate, such as Rupert Sheldrake, author of The Science Delusion. And some who do not agree that science is deluded still find inspiration in Bergsons ideas, and seek to reconcile them with Einsteins.

Louis de Broglie, a pioneer of quantum physics, recognised Bergson as a seer. Had he studied quantum theory he would doubtless have observed with joy that in the image of the evolution of the physical world which it offers us, at each instant nature is described as if hesitating between a multiplicity of possibilities, de Broglie wrote. Jenann Ismael, a philosopher of science, argues that any being, man or machine, that gathers and uses information would perceive time as passing and the future as open. That time is no less real than Einsteins static four-dimensional spacetime, she says. There is a sense of conflict being replaced by a bridge.

The debate in Paris found both thinkers at their most dogmatic. Afterwards Bergson seems to have had second thoughts about some aspects of Duration and Simultaneitythough he never abandoned his basic position. In subsequent decades Einstein seemed to budge more. He acknowledged that metaphysics plays a role in science, and became more troubled by the failure of physics to give a complete description of time.

The problem of Now worried him seriously, wrote the philosopher Rudolf Carnap. It means something essentially different from the past and the future, yet this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics. Perhaps the ageing physicist came close to admitting that a philosophers time exists after all.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Time v the machine"

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When Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson rowed about time - The Economist

Most people who talk about free will seem to assume that everyone knows what the words free will mean. But what do they mean? The only time we use these words in everyday conversation is when we say things like, You cant complain. You signed the contract of your own free will and Many people will never be vaccinated of their own free will. That is, doing something of your own free will means that no one forced you to do it or threatened you with unpleasant consequences if you didnt do it.

That is, doing something of your own free will means that no one forced you to do it or threatened you with unpleasant consequences if you didnt do it.

But the phrase free will has another meaning, a meaning it doesnt have in everyday conversation. And most people seem to understand free will when its used with this meaning. Most people would say that they understood the following words, which were written by Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron dHolbach, an 18th-century French philosopher)

A mans life is a line that nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, and he is never able to swerve from it, even for an instant. . . . he is constantly being modified by causes, whether visible or hidden, over which he has no control . . . Nevertheless, in despite of the chains by which he is bound, it is pretended he is an agent with free will.

Its evident that Holbach is not saying that its only under pressure that people ever sign contracts or allow themselves to be vaccinated. That is, hes not denying that we do things of our own free will. And yet most people would understand this passage. That sense seems to have something to do with the way our decisions are caused, so lets examine a decision.

In the writings of the mid-20th-century existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre there is a famous example of a young man in Nazi-occupied France who is torn between remaining at home and caring for his aged mother and leaving home to join the Resistance.

Suppose we are there, observing him as he desperately tries to decide which course of action he will pursue. If Holbach is right, then we should conclude that the following statement is true: Either he will stay and care for his mother and he is unable to join the Resistance or he will leave and join the Resistance and he is unable to stay and care for his mother.

This suggests the following definition of not having free will: A person lacks free if and only if:

. . . whenever that person is trying to decide between two courses of action, A and B, either that person is going to do A and is unable to do B or is going to do B and is unable to do A.

And this implies a definition of free will: A person has free will if and only if:

. . . sometimes, when that person is trying to decide between two courses of action, A and B, either the person is going to do A and is able to do B or is going to do B and is able to do A.

The belief of Holbach and his fellow pre-twentieth-century materialists that free will in this sense was ruled out by physics rested on two assumptions.

They assumed, first, that that physics had demonstrated the truth of determinismthe doctrine that the past and the laws of nature determine the future (and determine it even in the smallest detail).

The belief of Holbach and his fellow pre-twentieth-century materialists that free will in this sense was ruled out by physics rested on two assumptions.

Early in the nineteenth century, the great mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace gave this statement of determinism:

We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose itan intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysisit would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.

Their other assumption was incompatibilism, the thesis that free will and determinism are incompatiblethat is, that determinism rules out free will. Those in any age who accept incompatibilism probably do so because of some version of the so-called Consequence Argument:

If determinism is true, what we do is always a consequence of the way things were long before we were born and the laws of physics; but the way things were before we were born is never up to us and its never up to us what the laws of physics are; therefore, if determinism is true, what we do is never up to us.

The physics known to Holbach and Laplace was indeed deterministic (a few very minor and highly technical points aside). The situation is different in todays physics.

Photo by Greg Jeanneau on Unsplash

In present-day physics, all phenomena in nature other than gravity are treated by a theory called the standard model. The standard model is a quantum field theory, which means that its over-all structure is provided by quantum mechanics. And there is general agreement that quantum mechanics is incompatible with Laplaces statement of determinism. There is, moreover, universal agreement that the success of the standard model at the very least means that physics does not endorse determinism. And if physics does not endorse determinism, we have no reason to accept determinism.

Should we then conclude that there is no reason to think that we lack free will, owing to the fact that there is no reason to accept determinism?

That would be a hasty conclusion. We have considered an argument that is supposed to show that human beings lack free will:

Physics tells us that determinism is true; Determinism is incompatible with free will; therefore, free will does not exist.

But even if the premise of this argumentthat physics testifies to the truth of determinismis false, all that its falsity shows is that one argument against free will has a false premise. Maybe there are other arguments against free willones that dont depend on determinism.

There are.

Some are based on experimental evidence about human beings, such as the controversial experiments conducted by the neuroscientist Benjamin Libet in the 1980s. Others depend the idea of near-determinism: All right, the proponents of these arguments say, maybe determinism is strictly speaking false. But there are things like computers whose behavior is so close to being deterministic that one could say that they were deterministic for all practical purposes. Quantum mechanics doesnt imply that we human beings arent as nearly deterministic as computers. And if determinism is incompatible with free will, doesnt it seem likely that near determinism is, too?

But the most troubling argument of this kind is an argument that is supposed to show that indeterminism is incompatible with free will. The idea behind this argument is that an act that is undetermined is an act that is due to chance.

For example, suppose that Sally has to choose between telling the truth and lying, and that she tells the truth, and that her decision was completely undetermined. Suppose that, simultaneously with her decision, fifty atom-for-atom absolutely perfect duplicates of Sally in duplicate immediate environments are making the same decision. (Since they are duplicates of Sally, their decisions are undetermined, too.) If you arranged these fifty women in a line, youd see something like this (L stand stands for woman who lies and T for woman who tells the truth):

LTTLTLTTTTTTTLTTLTLTLLLTLLLTTLTLTLTLTTLLTTLTLTTLLL

A random distribution!

Since the decision of each woman in the line was undetermined, theres no explanation of why her decision went one way and not the other. And what could be further from your having free will than your decisions being random events? If your decisions are indeterministic (the argument suggests) they might as well be the outcome of a little man in your brain tossing a coin!

So we have arguments for Determinism implies theres no free will (the Consequence Argument) and Indeterminism implies theres no free will. If both arguments are right, free will is impossible. What would it mean if there were no free will?

It would mean that we live in a world in which nothing that happens is ever anyones fault. It would mean that we live in a world full of terrible things and that no one is ever to blame for any of them. It would mean that the Atlantic slave trade and the Final Solution and the assassination of Martin Luther King were not anyones faultthat no one is to blame for those terrible events.

But lets focus our thoughts on a smaller, more easily visualizable, case than those great, world-historical tragedies.

You and your family plan to be out of town for a few weeks, and your friend Frank promises to feed Fluffy the family cat while youre away. You return and find that he never fed Fluffy and she has died of starvation. You say to him, Poor Fluffy is dead, and my children are crying themselves to sleep and little Sally is the one who found her dead and shes going to need therapy and its all your fault! Frank says that none of those things is his fault, because he was unable to feed Fluffy, owing to the fact that the day we left he was diagnosed with Yellow Fever and confined to his house by the state quarantine authority. All right, you say, but you could have arranged to have someone else feed her. No, he replies, his phone was the only means of contact with the outside world, and the phone company cut off his service because of a mistake in their billing office. (And so on, and so on. You continue the story.)

The point is, if Frank can convince you that there was nothing he could have done to prevent Fluffys death, then you should agree that that event and its consequences werent his fault. And this is a general principle. If you say that something is Alices fault or that Alice is to blame for it, that implies that Alice shouldnt have allowed it to happen. And that impliessince it did happenthat Alice should have done something different from what she did do. And that implies that Alice was able to do something different from what she did do. And to be able to do something different from what one does do is to have free will.

The bottom line is: if there is no free will, if no one is ever able to do anything but what he or she does do, nothing is anyones fault.

To me, the statement

Neither the Atlantic slave trade nor the Final Solution nor the assassination of Martin Luther King was anyones fault

is so obviously false that I can only conclude that we do have free willand that there is therefore something wrong with either the Consequence Argument or the fifty perfect duplicates argument. My own view is that the Consequence Argument is valid and sound and that theres some flaw in the duplicates argument. But I confess I do not know what that flaw is.

Editor's Note: The notion that free will is tough to prove is not something most theologically minded people (like myself) would prefer to hear. Nonetheless, we have posted Dr. van Inwagens essay in the spirit of free inquiry and to celebrate the investigation of truth.

Judaic tradition insists that humanity was gifted free will, that it is the hub around which all morality turns and that it is the capacity that most makes humanity Godly.

Free will is obviously an extremely complex and controversial subject, and rightly so, given the stakes outlined by Dr. van Inwagen. One can easily respect his struggle with the subject and his honesty in professing his personal belief in free will concurrently with his current inability to prove it philosophically. He rightly notes that the physics that seemed so settled and obvious in the 18th Century was radically overturned in the 20th in a way that directly impacted the free will debate. It seems likely that more scientific revolutions will take place in the future and that these too may spark new explorations of free will.

One additional observation is that though there may be people who claim to disbelieve free will, very few actually conduct their lives as if it wasn't real (not that they could help it). My subjective feeling is that in their heart of hearts, most people don't really think themselves incapable of making choices or that this deep-seated human faculty is simply an illusion.

Image credit by Burst on Unsplash

Original post:

Can Science Prove There's No Free Will? Can Anything? - aish.com - Aish

Overview

We are a newly established group at UCLA led by Prof. Clarice D. Aiello. Our mission is to establish the extent to which quantum mechanics accounts for biologically relevant phenomena, and can be manipulated to technological and therapeutic advantage.

Experiments suggest that nontrivial quantum mechanical effects involving spin might underlie biologically relevant phenomena as varied as magnetic field detection for animal navigation, metabolic regulation in cells and optimal electron transport in chiral biomolecules. We investigate such phenomena using high-tech tools borrowed from the fields of quantum sensing/computing, device physics, and atomic and molecular (AMO) physics. Current and near-future research directions include:

Optimal quantum control of spins in biological systems via optically-detected magnetic resonance performed under a single-molecule microscope, and subsequent correlation with microscopic cellular processes;

Detection and control of spin coherence and polarization in electrons traversing nanoscale chiral potentials (from complex engineered materials to DNA and proteins) using a scanning tunneling microscope with spin-resonance capabilities.

At this time, we seek postdoctoral candidates with training in AMO, spin or solid-state physics (including but not restricted to: ultracold atoms, trapped ions, superconducting qubits, NV centers). Nanofabrication skills and experience in developing experimental control software are a plus.

Postdoctoral scholars are expected to conduct research in small teams, and mentor trainees. In particular, accepted candidates will have an invaluable opportunity to help shape our young lab. Formal teaching opportunities and pursuing the nationally recognized CIRTL certification at UCLA are possibilities. Clarice is invested in working with accepted candidates to develop a plan towards their own career goals.

Diversity and inclusion

We encourage applications from members of underrepresented groups with respect to gender, race and ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, disability status, age, socioeconomic background, care-taking status, and other axes of diversity.

Compensation

Pay is non-negotiable and at a NIH+7 level, well above-average for a postdoctoral appointment in the United States (scholarships will be topped up to this amount). Postdoctoral contracts are 1-year long, with the possibility of extension upon mutual agreement.

All team members are encouraged and expected to apply for fellowships.

Timeline

While flexible, preferred start dates are between September 2021 and March 2022. The positions will remain open until filled.

Application

Applicants should send an email to Clarice (cla@ucla.edu): 1. briefly detailing their research experience, interests and career plans; 2. with an up-to-date CV as attachment.

Additional info

We encourage you to follow us on Twitter (@ClariceDAiello, @QuBiT_UCLA) and LinkedIn (ClariceDAiello, Quantum Biology Tech (QuBiT) Lab @UCLA)!

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Postdoctoral researcher at the Quantum Biology Tech (QuBiT) Lab at UCLA; AMO/spin/solid-state physic job with UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA | 288634 -...