Reverse-Engineering Quantum Mechanics, V.

‘The Duckmole Problem’

Quantum theory has been plagued since its formulation by a conception known as ‘wave-particle duality’, a throwback to two distinct and incommensurable concepts from classical physics, forced together into an uneasy shotgun marriage. It was natural for the founders of quantum theory to try to understand and make sense of the new physics in terms of what they were familiar with. But 100 years later, perhaps we can dispense with such unhelpful constructs and seek to develop a nomenclature that moves beyond such dualities and treats quantum entities on their own terms. This may help dispel some of the contortions necessary to accommodate concepts that are not only outmoded but counterproductive. Luckily, some progress has been made on this front.

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Reverse-Engineering Quantum Mechanics, IV.

For Whom the Bell (Theorem) Tolls

Bell’s Theorem excludes a certain class of theories from being viable, and experiments have shown it to be correct, so we’d better pay attention to what the Universe says about its own behaviour. No matter how beautiful you think your theory is, nor how much you love it, it’s always the Universe that gets the final say.

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Reverse-Engineering Quantum Mechanics, III.

An Option for the ‘Ground’ State

In previous posts we have encountered the three main equivalent re-formulations of classical (i.e., Newtonian) mechanics—Lagrangian, Hamiltonian, and Hamilton-Jacobi—as well as their quantum mechanical counterparts, Feynman path integrals, Heisenberg’s operator mechanics, and Schrödinger’s wave mechanics, respectively. (A few more are possible, cf. Styer et al. 2002, but these are the main ones of relevance here). We are now ready to think about what the final step ‘down’ might be to the quantum side of the bottom level of the ladder of abstraction, the quantum equivalent of the ‘ground’ from which classical mechanics arose.

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Reverse-Engineering Quantum Mechanics, II.

Coming Back Down Towards the ‘Ground’

The main contention of the previous post can be summed up succinctly as: the Schrödinger equation is to quantum mechanics what the Hamilton-Jacobi equation is to classical mechanics. This is because it was – in a sense – ‘derived’ (really inferred) from it, via the optical-mechanical analogy between idealised particle paths and idealised geometrical light rays, first pointed out by William Rowan Hamilton in the early 1830s (and see, e.g., Masoliver and Ros 2010 for a detailed mathematical exposition). The main postulate of Schrödinger’s wave mechanics was that the action $S$ from Hamilton-Jacobi mechanics becomes the phase of the complex wavefunction $\psi\sim e^{iS/\hbar}$. This meant that we therefore found ourselves three levels of abstraction away from, and ‘floating’ above (so to speak), the ‘ground’ that classical mechanics was founded upon, namely Newtonian mechanics in 3D space. This post now begins the process of thinking about how to come down again to seek a more solid footing, if indeed there is even one to find…

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‘The Sum Total of All Human Knowledge’, Part VII

Digital Zettelkasteneering

This post considers some of the issues that come up when trying to port a physical Zettelkasten (PZK) using the OoK+UDC schema into digital form (DZK) on a computer, as well as some use-cases for OoK indexing outside the context of a ZK.

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Reverse-Engineering Quantum Mechanics, I.

Generic Feynman Diagrams

‘The Coyote Problem’

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
— Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (1967, p.129).

Six decades later, Feynman’s claim arguably still stands (and remember, he won the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum electrodynamics, including inventing those squiggly diagrams that everyone uses now; so, if he doesn’t understand it…). Despite a century of unprecedented empirical success, the interpretation of quantum mechanics still remains very contested. In general, it seems undertaking any attempt to try to actually make sense of it is “considered barely respectable at all, if not actively disparaged” (Carroll 2019, p.4). Multiple interpretations coexist—Copenhagen, Bohmian, Many Worlds, Objective Collapse, Quantum Bayesian and so forth, at least a dozen or so—each with committed proponents and unresolved difficulties. No consensus view has emerged. Quantum theory has taken on an almost mystical reputation, much of which is, frankly, arrant nonsense (Bricmont 2017).

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Of things NATO, 2: The Second Allied Foresight Conference, and beyond

Image of Emperor Marcus Aurelius statue in Rome

While the process of researching and writing the paper described in the previous post was going on, I was also in contact with another part of the strategic foresight branch at ACT who were beginning to co-organise the second allied foresight conference, thus fulfilling SACT General Lavigne’s wish from the 2024 Helsinki conference for these conferences to become a “tradition”. While that first conference in Helsinki was held in a hotel, which had certain security implications associated with it given the proximity of that city to a fairly staunch NATO adversary, the second one was being planned to be held at NATO Defense College in Rome, which is located inside a military base. Thus, security was going to be both more and less of an issue this time around.

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Of things NATO, 1: The future of the rules-based international order

Animated radar by Futures Platform of the FRBIO

I mentioned a while ago that I was working on a paper on the not-at-all scary little topic of “the future of the rules-based international order”, having been commissioned by NATO to write it. Well, it was finally published online in early November last year, having been submitted just before Easter (ie early April). The full reference with link is given below. Here I want to describe something of the background to the paper as well as the process of getting it to print, which took about 18 months from the initial email canvassing the idea to the final version appearing on the internet. Much of this post was written late last year and only very recently completed.

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The New Abnormal podcast episode

After the Future Force Talk podcast episode, I did an interview on The New Abnormal podcast hosted by Sean Pillot de Chenecey. It was recorded a couple of weeks before a presentation I was to give at a NATO conference in Rome last October. I will describe the lead-up to that presentation, and the paper it was based upon, in a subsequent post.

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Future Force Talk podcast episode

I recently did a podcast interview on the Future Force Talk podcast, which is hosted by the Hungarian Defence Ministry’s Defence Innovation Research Institute (in Hungarian: Védelmi Innovációs Kutató Intézet, which has the wonderful acronym VIKI). The podcast host is Dr Gergely Németh, the Director of VIKI, who was formerly the Branch Head of the Strategic Foresight Branch at NATO’s Allied Command Transformation.

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Two recent activities – a podcast and a presentation

I see that it has been quite a while since I posted here. This is mainly because for the past year or so, and most especially the last six months, I have been immersed up to my eyelobes [sic] in the International Relations literature working on a thematic paper on the future of the rules-based international order. I’ll delay any further discussion about this until the paper is published and then reflect on what that was like. But you can probably guess from the previous blog entry who this was for…
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NATO’s First Allied Foresight Conference

Last week, I was invited to attend and present at the First Allied Foresight Conference, organised by NATO’s Allied Command Transformation in conjunction with the Finnish Ministry of Defence. This follows a very successful Foresight Symposium held in Washington DC around this time last year.

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NATO’s Strategic Foresight Analysis 2023

Last year I contributed to the development of the Strategic Foresight Analysis 2023 (SFA23), undertaken by the Strategic Foresight Branch of NATO’s Allied Command Transformation. This was a more-than-year-long effort combining the expertise of some 800 workshop participants, together with the experience of around 20 or so members of a core reference team who got to see, comment upon, and make suggestions for inclusion into, earlier draft versions of the Report (see page 98 of the SFA23 to see their names). It was amazing to see the document take shape over that time.
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Scanning hits over at LinkedIn

In the spirit of the Scanning Retrospective, I now publish some of my scanning hits over at LinkedIn, on a dedicated page called, of course (what else?), TheVoroscope. I typically post only 2-3 per week, and then only if they are something that catches my eye, so if you look through the hits from the Scanning Retrospective and you find them interesting or quirky enough, or they seem to resonate for you, you might want to consider “following” TheVoroscope page over at LinkedIn.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/thevoroscope/

 

National Security Podcast episode – Mapping the Future

A few weeks ago I was in Canberra to teach into the Advanced Futures course run by the Futures Hub at the National Security College (NSC), which is part of a joint initiative between the Australian Commonwealth Government and The Australian National University (ANU).

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AusCERT Podcast interview – What Does The Future Hold?

While at the AusCERT Conference back in May, I recorded a podcast interview with my old friend, tech aficionado and general tech fan-boy all-rounder Anthony Caruana. We’ve known each other for nearly 30 years, and our paths have criss-crossed many times over the course of our careers, so it was kind of fun to catch up once again for a chat.

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Conference Keynote: The future as an ever-evolving attack surface

I was invited to speak last week at the annual cybersecurity conference hosted by AusCERT, at The Star Hotel on the Gold Coast. The conference theme was “Back to the Future”, and the topic I chose was ‘The Future as an Ever-Evolving Attack Surface’, which I thought might be interesting enough to hold the many-ways-divided attention of the assembled crowd of very busy cyberfolks. And the feedback does seem to have borne this out, I’m pleased to say.

The MC for the event was Adam Spencer, and it was a good deal of fun to relate to him over breakfast the following story I used to tell my students in the Masters program (see under the de Bono Principle on the scanning heuristics page).

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Podcast for Inquiry interview

I recently recorded a podcast episode with Leslie Rosenblood of the Centre for Inquiry Canada, which produces the (aptly-named) Podcast for Inquiry.

Leslie has a wonderful ability to take conversations in new directions on the spur-of-the-moment. You can hear this in his other interviews, and in the way this one branched out several times. And also in how it tried to finish but couldn’t quite do so, the first time, no doubt due to my worrying that I had forgotten something I’d meant to speak about (the Sept 11 story).

Anyway, it was fun to do, and I hope that readers of this blog might find it useful. Sometimes it is much easier to hear someone speak about their subject than to simply read it. I hope you enjoy it.

https://centreforinquiry.ca/futures-studies-with-joseph-voros/

‘The Sum Total of All Human Knowledge’, Part VI

Implementing the schema

In this post, we look more closely at how to implement the combined and refined OoK+UDC schema using physical note-cards. These will include both the standard note-bearing cards (zettels), as well as ancillary ‘structure’ cards which are used to organise and ‘situate’ the note-bearing cards within the overall knowledge structure defined by the OoK+UDC schema.
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‘The Sum Total of All Human Knowledge’, Part V

Extending the schema

In this post we continue the process of refining the knowledge indexing schema based upon the Outline of Knowledge (OoK) and the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), by now adding new categories to the framework through both combination and extension. This will bring the schema into a workable quasi-final form ready to be implemented.
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