Quantum Fluff and the Rodham-Clintoris Uncertainty Principle

Nowhere is the "he-said-but-she-said" style of journalism more pretentious and annoying than in The New York Pravda.

Example #1: the Science Times' piece on "Quantum Trickery: Testing Einstein's Strangest Theory", where we are told that:

This fall scientists announced that they had put a half dozen beryllium atoms into a "cat state."

No, they were not sprawled along a sunny windowsill. To a physicist, a "cat state" is the condition of being two diametrically opposed conditions at once, like black and white, up and down, or dead and alive.

These atoms were each spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Moreover, like miniature Rockettes they were all doing whatever it was they were doing together, in perfect synchrony. Should one of them realize, like the cartoon character who runs off a cliff and doesn't fall until he looks down, that it is in a metaphysically untenable situation and decide to spin only one way, the rest would instantly fall in line, whether they were across a test tube or across the galaxy...

Interesting. Now I realize there's a lot of math involved with quantum physics that greater than 99.999% of the Pravda's readers might not understand. But that's a pretty outrageous statement. For one thing, I didn't realize you could measure quantum spin state in a test tube, much less across the galaxy, and I work with test tubes every day.

The author follows this with a lot of name dropping from the Highest and therefore well-funded Coolest Cats in the world of quantum physics.

We are told they disagree about the ramifications of said experiment on things like Locality and the Structure of Reality, but damn me if I can figure from the writing exactly what their positional differences are or why in a general way these individuals think this way. Much less, the details of the experiment that lead the author- or the scientists- to believe an event of quantum teleportation has occurred. Nor is a single citation to the scientific literature given in the text, where we can look at the facts as they were presented, and possibly formulate our own ideas.

Science is presented as beliefs and not a set of rational conclusions.

You may have encountered my thoughts on that before.

Science- and rational humans- believe in nothing. We start with an observation; we formulate an idea to explain it and test it as we can; and we modify our ideas based on the results we obtain. There's no doctrine and no dogma.

There's just reality and a whole world to explore around us.

You can present explanations of it that the general public can understand.

Perhaps this is what they're referring to:

Science 13 May 2005:
Vol. 308. no. 5724, pp. 997 - 1000
DOI: 10.1126/science.1110335
Implementation of the Semiclassical Quantum Fourier Transform in a Scalable System
J. Chiaverini, J. Britton, D. Leibfried, E. Knill, M. D. Barrett, R. B. Blakestad, W. M. Itano, J. D. Jost, C. Langer, R. Ozeri, T. Schaetz, D. J. Wineland

or this...

Science 4 June 2004:
Vol. 304. no. 5676, pp. 1476 - 1478
DOI: 10.1126/science.1097576
Toward Heisenberg-Limited Spectroscopy with Multiparticle Entangled States
D. Leibfried, M. D. Barrett,T. Schaetz, J. Britton, J. Chiaverini, W. M. Itano, J. D. Jost, C. Langer, D. J. Wineland

The precision in spectroscopy of any quantum system is fundamentally limited by the Heisenberg uncertainty relation for energy and time. For N systems, this limit requires that they be in a quantum-mechanically entangled state. We describe a scalable method of spectroscopy that can potentially take full advantage of entanglement to reach the Heisenberg limit and has the practical advantage that the spectroscopic information is transferred to states with optimal protection against readout noise. We demonstrate our method experimentally with three beryllium ions. The spectroscopic sensitivity attained is 1.45(2) times as high as that of a perfect experiment with three non-entangled particles.

Using beryllium cationic particles accelerated and trapped in a magnetic field.

Basically we have to trust the math of this crew of scientists. And their assumptions. And their technique. There are no test tubes and there is no calibration of spatial parameters given. And across the galaxy? Not quite.

But damn me, Pravda's Science Times is a good read, ain't it?

Which brings us to another detailed analysis where The New York Pravda really shows what it's made of.

Frustration Over Iraq Vote Unlikely to Trouble Clinton, headed with a picture of Big Sister smiling down upon us.

We're informed:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's support for the war in Iraq has outraged many liberal activists in the Democratic Party, who are warning of retribution, including a primary challenge to her re-election campaign next year.

But the activists are in the same sort of political bind that liberals found themselves in a decade ago when Bill Clinton defied liberal orthodoxies: struggling to bring meaningful pressure to bear on a politician who is cherished by many traditional Democrats.

Excuse me- traditional Democrats hated Bill Clinton in '92. I know, I was there. But I know, who am I gonna believe, the Paper of Record, or my lyin' eyes?

...The frustration on the left toward Mrs. Clinton, the junior senator from New York, has been building for months, particularly as opinion has turned against the war and some Democrats in Congress have begun to pressure President Bush to begin a withdrawal of American troops.

Recently, the anger erupted into public view, with antiwar activists publicly protesting against the senator and, perhaps more significantly, an antiwar candidate emerging to challenge her in the Democratic primary next year.

That challenger, Jonathan Tasini, a longtime labor advocate, has the support of Cindy Sheehan, the antiwar protester who lost her son in the war and who camped for weeks outside Mr. Bush's Texas ranch, demanding to meet with him. Mrs. Sheehan has been critical of Mrs. Clinton. ..

Now, liberal critics of Mrs. Clinton appear to be running headlong into the same political reality: the immense support she has with the party faithful, despite having taken positions that infuriated the left. That loyalty among the rank and file may help explain why the senator's advisers do not appear to be very troubled by the protests erupting on the left, loud and persistent though they may be.

Polls tell much of the story. A recent poll by the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute found that 88 percent of Democrats who were interviewed said they approved of Mrs. Clinton's job performance. That number would be remarkable under any circumstance. (By contrast, 71 percent of Democrats approved of the job that Charles E. Schumer, New York's senior senator, is doing.) But Mrs. Clinton's approval rating comes at the same time that 83 percent of Democrats in the sample told Quinnipiac pollsters that they regarded the war in Iraq as a mistake...

Statistics without detailed parametric methodology aren't statistics. They're "he-said-but-she-said" gossip. But Fair and Balanced, I'm sure.

We're told:

...Political analysts say Mrs. Clinton's standing within the party gives her greater room to maneuver politically.

"She has the left in her back pocket," said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac institute. "She doesn't have to worry about catering to them. She has to worry about attracting centrist Democrats, the mainstream of the party."...

The "mainstream". An itty-bitty minority, but the richest doubtless. The best connected. But centrist, so why trouble with the numbers? They'll only make your head hurt and they certainly aren't good for the Business.