WHAT EXPERTS SAY
The following is a letter dated July 21, 2007 from Dr. Paul J. Werbos [of the National Science Foundation] to Mr. James Blodgett [of the Risk Evaluation Forum], forwarded to the Lifeboat Foundation:
Thank you very much for your message, James!
How can anyone (like myself) feel genuine pleasure in seeing a message from someone arguing for a serious possibility of an end to the earth? Well, first, I wish people would remember the old dictum "Don't shoot the messenger," and really take it to heart.
Next -- the disaster I am truly most afraid of is that humans may simply not wake up in time to handle all the many things they need to handle, across many issues, simply in order to survive at all as a species.
While I fully agree with James, and am glad to see his message... there are still some aspects of human thinking on this issue which continue to trouble me.
At 01:09 AM7/21/2007, james_r_blodgett wrote:
If the issue were that string theory might be right... well, in truth, that is one of the possibilities that I would worry least about. Occam's Razor is SUCH a fundamental principle!
To assume so many extra dimensions, without a shred of empirical evidence for them... It reminds me a lot of those folks who come up with "systems" in roulette or in the lottery, who come up with arguments that a certain twelve-digit string of numbers is just so beautiful that it must have unique powers... nothing but a 10^-12 probability in the end.
BUT: if people were less theological about it, superstring theory does have at least one important value for human thinking -- it provides at least one alternative to The Standard Model. Like a good science fiction novel, it can help wake us up to the fact that things might not be exactly like what they seem... and also to the fact that there are still some embarrassing holes and mathematical inconsistencies in the naive story of physics. We do badly need to be woken up on that score. While superstring theory (and brane theory) as such may have little probability of truth, it can have value as a REPRESENTATIVE of a very large and diverse class of theories which collectively have a high probability of truth; this works, so long as we don't take the details too religiously.
Though in fact... the Hawking prediction is not exactly Standard Model either...
THE REAL issue, from the viewpoint of rational policy, is that we REALLY DON'T KNOW to within many orders of magnitude what it takes to make a minimal black hole.
Many people would say: "We don't know, so let's be 'rational' and assume the best, and have faith. After all there were silly nay-sayers who were even worried about the first hydrogen bomb... We aren't dead yet, so why worry?"
This reminds me of the teenage drunk drivers who say: "I haven't been killed YET, so why should I worry? Drinking and driving can't possibly be really dangerous for ME... I have pressed on the accelerator before, while drunk, so why not raise it again and go 120 mph while drunk?" This is also relevant to human psychology on energy policy. I went to look for a nice picture illustrating such teenage drivers, for my slides for a talk on energy policy... but unfortunately, the only picture I found was 'way too partisan to use for Congress. Still, it left a deep engraving in MY mind... a picture of George Bush as a teenager, holding a bottle in his hand... morphing into Alfred E. Newman "What me worry?", and this time crashing a bigger pickup truck... "Well, Dad, I tried to be good this time, but there was a slight problem..." But it's not just Bush who has things to learn here. Can we develop the mental discipline to start learning BEFORE the pickup truck crashes?
The story of the small black holes DOES in fact involve Bush's science advisor, who did mount a campaign for positive thinking on the issue, which was very powerful and very effective. Political campaigns for the wrong kind of "positive thinking" (backed up with state power) are part of the problem. It may be that American versions of "positive thinking" are analogous in a way to jihadist views of unity and loyalty to God... an example of how a few minor problems in the technical formulation could kill everyone.
For what it's worth, I have posted a condensed version of my views on the black hole issue at www.werbos.com/space.htm.
"(2) Black holes were supposed to dissipate via Hawking radiation. Now two good papers question whether Hawking radiation exists [Unruh, Helfer]";
It also ... raises some hope... to see the name Unruh here. (I probably need to look up the paper and comment.)
Could there be an emerging circle of genuine human competence here somewhere? That would be really great.
I know Unruh's name from his chapter in Time's Arrow Today, by Savitt(Cambridge University Press, 1995). That was a really seminal collection, addressing some of the very most important issues in the foundations of physics. I especially liked the chapter by the philosopher Huw Price in that book -- because he described very clearly and beautifully (I thought) the mental blocks which have kept people from people able to understand what is really going on with quantum mechanics, in my view. (At www.werbos.com/reality.htm, I have posted some of my correspondence with Price.) Some people tell me that they find Price's chapter hard to understand -- but I think there is an analogy to people indoctrinated in Biblical fundamentalism finding it hard to understand what Darwin was saying; it is really quite easy, if one lets go and gets rid of the mental block. (It is sad that 'tHooft has decided to play Holy Inquisition this time. Nothing like the allure of trying to keep wearing those fancy red robes..)
The Savitt book as a whole, like Price, asks whether we can really understand the implications of the fact that the underlying dynamics of the universe are SYMMETRIC with respect to time, so far as we can tell. (More precisely: exact CPT symmetry in all know empirical physics --one kind of time symmetry -- and T symmetry which is usually exactly but on certain occasions rare on earth violated in the twelfth decimal place or so.)
Price fully assimilates the implications. Unruh provides a mathematical formalism, far more concrete than Price's work, but doesn't quite manage to express in mathematics what he was aiming for.
The fact is... I was the first person to publish (in Nuovo Cimento in early 1970's) the backwards-time "interpretation" (theory) of quantum mechanics, along the same lines which Price proposed in Savitt. But to translate that into a full mathematical formalism, capable of testable and interesting predictions, is EXTREMELY difficult. It took me many years to figure out the basics of how to do it, enough to make contact with definitive experiments. Science being what it is, I certainly couldn't make a living off the intermediate stages of that effort; thus I have mainly made money from other activities, and focused my "recreational budget for quantum theory" into the core effort to figure out the basic physics and mathematics.
I finally do think I see how the pieces fit together here... as in my two most recent papers posted in the physics section of arxiv.org.
One of the reasons why it is hard to disentangle what is going on here is that there are at least four major mainstream formulations of what quantum field theory (in the standard model) IS. (None of them has been proven to "exist" in a rigorous mathematical sense, which has led to a lot of hand-waving in discussions about whether they are equivalent or not.)
The two most important, for the black hole discussion, are the "Feynmann path" version and the canonical Schrodinger picture.
My impression is that Hawking’s arguments for black hole radiation (which saves us from the earth being gobbled up) is based on the major (1/2)hw kinds of stochastic effects in the Feynmann picture. BUT: ON THIS POINT I DO NOT REALLY KNOW! Please feel free to correct me... but please keep in mind that I have done a WHOLE lot more due diligence on the other points here, and in the recent papers on arxiv!!!
If this impression is correct... there is a link here to the zero point energy (ZPE) arguments that folks like Puthoff have been propagating (including a recent paper published in International Journal for Theoretical Physics, IJTP). The notion of (1/2)hw zero point energy in the universe, and the ZPE interpretation of the Casimir effect, have been advocated not only by Hawkings, but in the authoritative text on QFT by Zinn-Justin, and even in sympathetic if cautious footnotes in Weinberg's text on QFT.
Much as I respect illuminated Texans like Puthoff, and would now seriously consider the possibility that they MIGHT be right, it does scare me to think that current policy is willing to stake the very survival of all life on earth on the truth of their ZPE stuff! And people think that the Iraq war was a gamble....
The Feynmann path picture is not the only credible mainstream formulation of quantum field theory. In fact, the original Nobel Prizes for the discovery of quantum field theory were given for the original formulation, the CANONICAL formulation. To make contact with empirical reality, quickly, the fastest way is to read the respected text QFT by Mandl and Shaw. (Weinberg also presents the canonical formulation, but is less compact. Real mathematicians respect compact -- it expresses the axioms relatively clearly.) In fact, 99% of our precise empirical knowledge of physics still involves quantum electrodynamics (QED), the mathematics of electricity, magnetism, and particles with charge and magnetism. The mathematics used in modern electrical and photonic engineering, where people still truly care about empirical reality.
But guess what folks -- standard QED (canonical or Feynmann) doesn't work. It doesn't fit empirical data. Before you send out the thought police (who are legion these days), take a quick look at Semiconductor Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics (CQED) by Yamamoto, Tassone and Cao. And while you are at it, look up what the condensed matter people said about the initial versions of quantum computing proposed by David Deutsch. It is against the HighChurch of physics these days to engage in revisionism, and say that we are actually learning something new -- but these folks are too busy making money to waste time on Confession. And they have theory, CQED (expressed with density matrices) works.
Why is that relevant to black holes? Because CQED works as a modification to the CANONICAL version of QED. A variation of the CANONICAL form of QED works.
And... the difference between the canonical version and the Feynmann version is extremely important to the black hole issue.
If you look at Mandl and Shaw, you will see immediately that they do write down an initial Hamiltonian which does have the famous (1/2)hw terms. BUT THEN THEY THROW THEM OUT. All empirical predictions of QED comes from use of something called the normal form Hamiltonian, WHICH HAS NO (1/2)hw terms in them!
By the way... to really understand what is going on here, people should not only read Mandl and Shaw, but should read the short and beautiful
classic (1977?) paper on the sine-Gordon model by Coleman... and the related paper by Mandelstam. You can see the normal form Hamiltonian at work... and its essential role in making things work. And many other important ideas.
And so... if the NORMAL FORM Hamiltonian is what explains empirical reality... and Occam's Razor (as well as mathematical rigor) tells us not to believe in the (1/2)hw terms... should we stake our lives on predictions of unproven theories about quantum gravity which require that these terms exist?
Lately, I see some justification for considering a MODIFIED, more mathematically meaningful version of the zero point energy idea... but it is 'way too early to ASSUME that it would validate the Hawkings predictions. We simply do not know the true story yet.
I just hope humans are strong-minded enough to FIND OUT before we do the experiment of pointing a gun at our heads and just seeing what happens... I wish I could see more grounds for optimism... as I see the holy parade singing joyous hymns of unshakeable faith walking straight towards the English channel at Dover...
REFERENCES:
J.-P. Blaizot, J. Iliopoulos, J. Madsen, G.G. Ross, P. Sonderegger, and H.-J. Specht, "Study Of Potentially Dangerous Events During Heavy-Ion Collisions At The LHC: Report Of The LHC Safety Study Group" CERN, 2003
W. Busza, R.L. Jaffe, J. Sandweiss, and F. Wilczek; "Review of Speculative `Disaster Scenarios'” Brookhaven, 2000
Steven Giddings and Scott Thomas, "High energy colliders as black
hole factories: the end of short-distance physics," Physical Review D 65(5) (2002) 056010.
Adam D. Helfer, "Do black holes radiate?" Reports on Progress in Physics. Vol. 66 No. 6 (2003) pp. 943-1008.
G. X. Peng, X. J. Wen, and Y. D. Chen, “New solutions for the color-
flavor locked strangelets” Physics Letters B 633 (2006) 314-318.
William G. Unruh and Ralf Schützhold, "On the Universality of the
Hawking Effect," Physics Review D 71(2005) 024028.