A Meta-Theory of Physics Could Explain Life, the Universe, Computation, and More – Gizmodo
Posted: August 23, 2020 at 10:57 pm
You may think of physics as a way to explain the behaviors of things like black holes, colliding particles, falling apples, and quantum computers. But a small group physicists today is working on a theory that doesnt just study individual phenomena; its an entirely new way to describe the universe itself. This theory might solve wide-ranging problems such as why biological evolution is possible and how abstract things like ideas and information seem to possess properties that are independent of any physical system. Its called constructor theory, but as fascinating as it is, theres one glaring problem: how to test it.
When I first learned of constructor theory, it seemed too bold to be true, said Abel Jansma, a graduate student in physics and genetics at the University of Edinburgh. The early papers covered life, thermodynamics, and information, which seemed to be too much groundwork for such a young theory. But maybe its natural to work through the theory in this way. As an outsider, its exciting to watch.
As a young physics researcher in the 2010s, Chiara Marletto had been interested in problems regarding biological processes. The laws of physics do not say anything about the possibility of lifeyet even a slight tweak of any of the constants of physics would render life as we know it impossible. So why is evolution by natural selection possible in the first place? No matter how long you stared at the equations of physics, it would never dawn on you that they allow for biological evolutionand yet, apparently, they do.
Marletto was dissatisfied by this paradox. She wanted to explain why the emergence and evolution of life is possible when the laws of physics contain no hints that it should be. She came across a 2013 paper written by Oxford physicist and quantum computing pioneer David Deutsch, in which he laid the foundation for constructor theory, the fundamental principle of which is: All other laws of physics are expressible entirely in terms of statements about which physical transformations are possible and which are impossible, and why.
Marletto said she suspected that constructor theory had a useful set of tools to address this problem of why evolution is possible despite the laws of physics not explicitly encoding the design of biological adaptations. Intrigued by the possibilities, Marletto soon shifted the focus of her PhD research to constructor theory.
While many theories are concerned with what does happen, constructor theory is about what can possibly happen. In the current paradigm of physics, one seeks to predict the trajectory of, say, a wandering comet, given its initial state and general relativitys equations of motion. Constructor theory, meanwhile, is more general and seeks to explain which trajectories of said comet are possible in principle. For instance, no tra jectory in which the comets velocity exceeds the speed of light is possible, but trajectories in which its velocity remains below this limit are possible, provided that they are also consistent with the laws of relativity.
The prevailing theories of physics today can explain things as titanically violent as the collision of two black holes, but they struggle to explain how and why a tree exists. Because constructor theory is concerned with what can possibly happen, it can explain regularitiesany patterns that warrant explanationin domains that are inherently unpredictable, such as evolution.
Constructor theory can also capture properties of information, which do not depend on the physical system in which they exist: The same song lyrics can be sent over radio waves, conjured in ones mind, or written on a piece of paper, for example. The constructor theory of information also proposes new principles that explain which transformations of information are possible and impossible, and why.
The laws of thermodynamics, too, have been expressed exactly in constructor theory; previously, theyd only been stated as approximations that would only apply at certain scales. For example, in attempting to capture the Second Law of Thermodynamicsthat the entropy of isolated systems can never decrease over timesome models show that a physical system will reach eventual equilibrium (maximum entropy) because that is the most probable configuration of the system. But the scale at which these configurations are measured has traditionally been arbitrary. Would such models work for systems at the nanoscale, or for systems that are composed of merely one particle? By recasting the laws of thermodynamics in terms of possible and impossible transformations, rather than in terms of the time evolution of a physical system, constructor theory has expressed these laws in exact, scale-independent statements: It describes the Second Law of Thermodynamics as allowing some transformation from X to Y to be possible, but not its inversework can be entirely converted into heat, but heat can never be entirely converted into work without side effects.
Physics has come a long way since the days of the Scientific Revolution. In 1687, Isaac Newton proposed his universal physical theory in his magnum opus, Principia Mathematica. Newtons theory, called classical mechanics, was founded on his famous three laws of motion. Newtons theory implies that if one knows both the force acting on a system for some time interval as well as the systems initial velocity and position, then one could use classical mechanics equations of motion to predict the systems velocity and position at any subsequent moment in that time interval. In the first few decades of the 20th century, classical mechanics was shown to be wrong from two directions. Quantum mechanics overturned Newton in explaining the physics of the microscopic world. Einsteins general relativity superseded classical mechanics and deepened our understanding of gravity and the nature of mass, space, and time. Although the details differ between the three theoriesclassical mechanics, quantum mechanics, and general relativitythey are all nevertheless expressible in terms of initial conditions and dynamical laws of motion that allow one to predict the state of a systems trajectory across time. This general framework is known as the prevailing conception.
But there are many domains in which our best theories are simply not expressible in terms of the prevailing conception of initial conditions plus laws of motion. For instance, quantum computations laws are not fundamentally about what happens in a quantum system following some initial state but rather about what transformations of information are possible and impossible. The problem of whether or not a so-called universal quantum computera quantum computer that is capable of simulating any physical system to arbitrary accuracycan possibly be built is utterly foreign to the initial conditions plus laws of motion framework. Even in cosmology, the well-known problem of explaining the initial conditions of the universe is difficult in the prevailing conception: We can work backward to understand what happened in the moments after the Big Bang, but we have no explanation for why the universe was in its particular initial state rather than any other. Constructor theory, though, may be able to show that the initial conditions of our universeat the moment of the Big Bangcan be deduced from the theorys principles. If you only think of physics in terms of the prevailing conception, problems in quantum computation, biology, and the creation of the universe can seem impossible to solve.
The basic ingredients of constructor theory are the constructor, the input substrate, and the output substrate. The constructor is any object that is capable of causing a particular physical transformation and retains its ability to do so again. The input substrate is the physical system that is presented to the constructor, and the output substrate is the physical system that results from the constructors transformation of the input.
For a simple example of how constructor theory might describe a system, consider a smoothie blender. This device takes in ingredients such as milk, fruits, and sugar and outputs a drink in completed, homogenized form. The blender is a constructor, as it is capable of repeating this transformation again and again. The input substrate is the set of ingredients, and the output substrate is the smoothie.
A more cosmic example is our Sun. The Sun acts as a nuclear fusion reactor that takes hydrogen as its input substrate and converts it into helium and light as its output substrate. The Sun itself is the constructor, as it retains its ability to cause another such conversion.
In the prevailing conception, one might take the Suns initial state and run it through the appropriate algorithm, which would yield a prediction of the Suns ending once it has run out of fuel. In constructor theory, one instead expresses that the transformation of hydrogen into helium and light is possible. Once its known that the transformation from hydrogen to helium and light is possible, it follows that a constructor that can cause such a transformation is also possible.
Constructor theorys fundamental principle implies that all laws of physicsthose of general relativity, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and even informationcan be expressed as which physical transformations are possible in principle and which are not.
This setup is, perhaps counterintuitively, extremely general. It includes a chemical reaction in the presence of a catalyst: the chemical catalyst is the constructor, while the reactants are the input substrate and the products are the output substrate. The operation of a computer is also a kind of construction: the computer (and its program) is a constructor, and the informational input and output correspond to constructor theorys input substrate and output substrate. A heat engine is yet another kind of constructor, and so are all forms of self-reproducing life. Think of a bacterium with some genetic code. The cell along with its code are a kind of constructor whose output is an offspring cell with a copy of the parent cells genetic code.
Because explaining which transformations are possible and which are impossible never relies on the particular form that a constructor takes, it can be abstracted away, leaving statements about transformations as the main focus of constructor theory. This is already extremely advantageous, since, for instance, one could express which computer programs or simulations are realizable and which are not in principle, without having to worry about the details of the computer itself.
How could one show that the evolution of life, with all of its elegant adaptations and appearance of design, is compatible with the laws of physics, which seem to contain no design whatsoever? No amount of inspection of the equations of general relativity and quantum mechanics would result in a eureka momentthey show no hint of the possibility of life. Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection explains the appearance of design in the biosphere, but it fails to explain why such a process is possible in the first place.
Biological evolution is understood today as a process whereby genes propagate over generations by replicating themselves at the expense of rival, alternative genes called alleles. Furthermore, genes have evolved complex vehicles for themselves that they use to reproduce, such as cells and organisms, including you. The biologist Richard Dawkins is famous for, among other things, popularizing this view of evolution: G enes are the fundamental unit of natural selection, and they strive for immortality by copying themselves as strands of DNA, using temporary, protective vehicles to proliferate from generation to generation. Copying is imperfect, which results in genetic mutations and therefore variation in the ability of genes to spread in this great competition with their rivals. The environment of the genes is the arbiter that determines which genes are best able to spread and which are unfit to do soand therefore, is the source of natural selection.
With this replicator-vehicle logic in mind, one can state the problem more precisely: The laws of physics do not make explicit that the transformations required by evolution and by biological adaptations are possible. Given this, what properties must the laws of physics possess to allow for such a process that demands self-reproduction, the appearance of design, and natural selection?
Note that this question cannot be answered in the prevailing conception, which would force us to try to predict the emergence of life following, say, the initial conditions of the universe. Constructor theory allows us to reframe the problem and consider why and under what conditions life is possible. As Marletto put it in a 2014 paper: the prevailing conception could at most predict the exact number of goats that will (or will probably) appear on Earth given certain initial conditions. In constructor theory, one states instead whether goats are possible and why.
Marlettos paper, Constructor Theory of Life, was published just two years after Deutschs initial paper. In it, she shows that the evolution of life is compatible with laws of physics that themselves contain no design, provided that they allow for the embodiment of digital information (on Earth, this takes the form of DNA). She also shows that an accurate replicator, such as survivable genes, must use vehicles in order to evolve. In this sense, if constructor theory is true, then temporary vehicles are not merely a contingency of life on our planet but rather mandated by the laws of nature. One interesting prediction that bears on the search for extraterrestrial life is that wherever you find life in the universe, it will necessarily rely on replicators and vehicles. Of course, these may not be the DNA, cells, and organisms with which we are familiar, but replicators and vehicles will be present in some arrangement.
You can think of constructor theory as a theory about theories. By contrast, general relativity explains and predicts the motions of objects as they interact with each other and the arena of space-time. Such a theory can be called an object-level theory. Constructor theory, on the other hand, is a meta-level theoryits statements are laws about laws. So while general relativity mandates the behavior of all stars, both those weve observed and those that weve never seen, constructor theory mandates that all object-level theories, both current and future, conform to its meta-level laws, also called principles. With hindsight, we can see that scientists have already taken such principles seriously, even before the dawn of constructor theory. For example, physicists expect that all as-yet unknown physical theories will conform to the principle of conservation of energy.
General relativity can be tested by observing the motions of stars and galaxies; quantum mechanics can be tested in laboratories like the Large Hadron Collider. But since constructor theory principles do not make direct predictions about the motion of physical systems, how could one test them? Vlatko Vedral, Oxford physicist and professor of quantum information science, has been collaborating with Marletto to do exactly that, by imagining laboratory experiments in which quantum mechanical systems could interact with gravity.
One of the greatest outstanding problems in modern physics is that general relativity and quantum mechanics are incompatible with each othergeneral relativity does not explain the tiny motions and interactions of atoms, while quantum mechanics does not explain gravity nor its effects on massive objects. All sorts of proposals have been formulated that might unify the two pillars under a deeper theory that contains both of them, but these are notoriously difficult to test experimentally. However, one could go around directly testing such theories by instead considering the principles to which they should conform.
In 2014, Marletto and Deutsch published a paper outlining the constructor theory of information, in which they expressed quantities such as information, computation, measurement, and distinguishability in terms of possible and impossible transformations. Importantly, they also showed that all of the accepted features of quantum information follow from their proposed constructor theoretic prin ciples. An information medium is a physical system in which information is substantiated, such as a computer or a brain. An observable is any physical quantity that can be measured. They defined a superinformation medium as an information medium with at least two information observables whose union is not an information observable. For example, in quantum theory, one can measure exactly a particles velocity or its position, but never both simultaneously. Quantum information is an example of superinformation. But crucially, the constructor theoretic concept of superinformation is more general and is expected to hold for any theories that supersede quantum theory and general relativity as well.
In a working paper from March 2020, Marletto and Vedral showed that if the constructor theoretic principles of information are correct, then if two quantum systems, such as two masses, become entangled with each other via a third system, such as a gravitational field, then this third system must itself be quantum (one of their earlier publications on the problem can be found here). So, if one could construct an experiment in which a gravitational field can locally generate entanglement between, say, two qubits, then gravity must be non-classicalit would have two observables that cannot simultaneously be measured with the same precision, as is the case in quantum theory. If such an experiment were to show no entanglement between the qubits, then constructor theory would require an overhaul, or it may be outright false.
Should the experiment show entanglement between the two masses, all current attempts to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics that assume that gravity is classical would be ruled out.
There are three versions of how gravity could be made consistent with quantum physics, said Vedral. One of them is to have a fully quantum gravity. Theories that propose fully quantum gravity include loop quantum gravity, the idea that space is composed of loops of gravitational fields, and string theory, the idea that particles are made up of strings, which move through space and some of whose vibrations correspond to quantum mechanical particles that carry gravitational force.
These would be consistent with a positive outcome of our proposed experiment, said Vedral. The ones that would be refuted are the so-called semi-classical theories, such as whats called quantum theory in curved space-time. There is a whole range of these theories. All of them would be ruled outit would be inconsistent to think of space-time as classical if its really capable of producing entanglement between two massive particles.
Marletto and Vedrals proposed experiment, unfortunately, faces some major practical challenges.
I think our experiment is still five or six orders of magnitude away from current technological capabilities, said Vedral. One issue is that we need to eliminate any sources of noise, like induced electromagnetic interaction... The other issue is that its very hard to create a near-perfect vacuum. If you have a background bunch of molecules around objects that you want to entangle, even a single collision between one of the background molecules and one of the objects you wish to entangle, this could be detrimental and cause decoherence. The vacuum has to be so close to perfect as to guarantee that not a single atomic collision happens during the experiment.
Vedral came to constructor theory as an interested outsider, having focused primarily on issues of quantum information. He sometimes thinks about the so-called universal constructor, a theoretical device that is capable of performing all possible tasks that the laws of physics allow.
While we have models of the universal computermeaning ideas of how to make a computer that can simulate any physical systemwe have no such thing for the universal constructor. A breakthrough might be a set of axioms that capture what it means to be a universal constructor. This is a big open problem. What kind of machine would that be? This excites me a lot. Its a wide-open field. If I was a young researcher, I would jump on that now. It feels like the next revolution.
Samuel Kuypers, a physics graduate student at the University of Oxford who works in the field of quantum information, said that constructor theory has unequivocally achieved great successes already, such as grounding concepts of information in exact physical terms and rigorously explaining the difference between heat and work in thermodynamics, but it should be judged as an ongoing project with a set of aims and problems. Thinking of potential future achievements, Kuypers hopes that general relativity can be reformulated in constructor theoretic terms, which I think would be extremely fruitful for trying to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Time will tell whether or not constructor theory is a revolution in the making. In the few years since its inception, only a handful of physicists, primarily at Oxford University, have been working on it. Constructor theory is of a different character than other speculative theories, like string theory. It is an entirely different way of thinking about the nature of reality, and its ambitions are perhaps even bolder than those of the more mainstream speculations. If constructor theory continues to solve problems, then physicists may come to adopt a revolutionary new worldview. They will think of reality not as a machine that behaves predictably according to laws of motion, but as a cosmic ocean full of resources capable of being transformed by an appropriate constructor. It would be a reality defined by possibility rather than destiny.
Logan Chipkin is a freelance writer in Philadelphia. His writing focuses on science, philosophy, economics, and history. Links to previous publications can be found at http://www.loganchipkin.com. Follow him on Twitter @ChipkinLogan.
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A Meta-Theory of Physics Could Explain Life, the Universe, Computation, and More - Gizmodo
This Twist on Schrdinger’s Cat Paradox Has Major Implications for Quantum Theory – Scientific American
Posted: at 10:57 pm
What does it feel like to be both alive and dead?
That question irked and inspired Hungarian-American physicist Eugene Wigner in the 1960s. He was frustrated by the paradoxes arising from the vagaries of quantum mechanicsthe theory governing the microscopic realm that suggests, among many other counterintuitive things, that until a quantum system is observed, it does not necessarily have definite properties. Take his fellow physicist Erwin Schrdingers famous thought experiment in which a cat is trapped in a box with poison that will be released if a radioactive atom decays. Radioactivity is a quantum process, so before the box is opened, the story goes, the atom has both decayed and not decayed, leaving the unfortunate cat in limboa so-called superposition between life and death. But does the cat experience being in superposition?
Wigner sharpened the paradox by imagining a (human) friend of his shut in a lab, measuring a quantum system. He argued it was absurd to say his friend exists in a superposition of having seen and not seen a decay unless and until Wigner opens the lab door. The Wigners friend thought experiment shows that things can become very weird if the observer is also observed, says Nora Tischler, a quantum physicist at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.
Now Tischler and her colleagues have carried out a version of the Wigners friend test. By combining the classic thought experiment with another quantum head-scratcher called entanglementa phenomenon that links particles across vast distancesthey have also derived a new theorem, which they claim puts the strongest constraints yet on the fundamental nature of reality. Their study, which appeared in Nature Physics on August 17, has implications for the role that consciousness might play in quantum physicsand even whether quantum theory must be replaced.
The new work is an important step forward in the field of experimental metaphysics, says quantum physicist Aephraim Steinberg of the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the study. Its the beginning of what I expect will be a huge program of research.
Until quantum physics came along in the 1920s, physicists expected their theories to be deterministic, generating predictions for the outcome of experiments with certainty. But quantum theory appears to be inherently probabilistic. The textbook versionsometimes called the Copenhagen interpretationsays that until a systems properties are measured, they can encompass myriad values. This superposition only collapses into a single state when the system is observed, and physicists can never precisely predict what that state will be. Wigner held the then popular view that consciousness somehow triggers a superposition to collapse. Thus, his hypothetical friend would discern a definite outcome when she or he made a measurementand Wigner would never see her or him in superposition.
This view has since fallen out of favor. People in the foundations of quantum mechanics rapidly dismiss Wigners view as spooky and ill-defined because it makes observers special, says David Chalmers, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at New York University. Today most physicists concur that inanimate objects can knock quantum systems out of superposition through a process known as decoherence. Certainly, researchers attempting to manipulate complex quantum superpositions in the lab can find their hard work destroyed by speedy air particles colliding with their systems. So they carry out their tests at ultracold temperatures and try to isolate their apparatuses from vibrations.
Several competing quantum interpretations have sprung up over the decades that employ less mystical mechanisms, such as decoherence, to explain how superpositions break down without invoking consciousness. Other interpretations hold the even more radical position that there is no collapse at all. Each has its own weird and wonderful take on Wigners test. The most exotic is the many worlds view, which says that whenever you make a quantum measurement, reality fractures, creating parallel universes to accommodate every possible outcome. Thus, Wigners friend would split into two copies and, with good enough supertechnology, he could indeed measure that person to be in superposition from outside the lab, says quantum physicist and many-worlds fan Lev Vaidman of Tel Aviv University.
The alternative Bohmian theory (named for physicist David Bohm) says that at the fundamental level, quantum systems do have definite properties; we just do not know enough about those systems to precisely predict their behavior. In that case, the friend has a single experience, but Wigner may still measure that individual to be in a superposition because of his own ignorance. In contrast, a relative newcomer on the block called the QBism interpretation embraces the probabilistic element of quantum theory wholeheartedly (QBism, pronounced cubism, is actually short for quantum Bayesianism, a reference to 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayess work on probability.) QBists argue that a person can only use quantum mechanics to calculate how to calibrate his or her beliefs about what he or she will measure in an experiment. Measurement outcomes must be regarded as personal to the agent who makes the measurement, says Ruediger Schack of Royal Holloway, University of London, who is one of QBisms founders.According to QBisms tenets, quantum theory cannot tell you anything about the underlying state of reality, nor can Wigner use it to speculate on his friends experiences.
Another intriguing interpretation, called retrocausality, allows events in the future to influence the past. In a retrocausal account, Wigners friend absolutely does experience something, says Ken Wharton, a physicist at San Jose State University, who is an advocate for this time-twisting view. But that something the friend experiences at the point of measurement can depend upon Wigners choice of how to observe that person later.
The trouble is that each interpretation is equally goodor badat predicting the outcome of quantum tests, so choosing between them comes down to taste. No one knows what the solution is, Steinberg says. We dont even know if the list of potential solutions we have is exhaustive.
Other models, called collapse theories, do make testable predictions. These models tack on a mechanism that forces a quantum system to collapse when it gets too bigexplaining why cats, people and other macroscopic objects cannot be in superposition. Experiments are underway to hunt for signatures of such collapses, but as yet they have not found anything. Quantum physicists are also placing ever larger objects into superposition: last year a team in Vienna reported doing so with a 2,000-atom molecule. Most quantum interpretations say there is no reason why these efforts to supersize superpositions should not continue upward forever, presuming researchers can devise the right experiments in pristine lab conditions so that decoherence can be avoided. Collapse theories, however, posit that a limit will one day be reached, regardless of how carefully experiments are prepared. If you try and manipulate a classical observera human, sayand treat it as a quantum system, it would immediately collapse, says Angelo Bassi, a quantum physicist and proponent of collapse theories at the University of Trieste in Italy.
Tischler and her colleagues believed that analyzing and performing a Wigners friend experiment could shed light on the limits of quantum theory. They were inspired by a new wave of theoretical and experimental papers that have investigated the role of the observer in quantum theory by bringing entanglement into Wigners classic setup. Say you take two particles of light, or photons, that are polarized so that they can vibrate horizontally or vertically. The photons can also be placed in a superposition of vibrating both horizontally and vertically at the same time, just as Schrdingers paradoxical cat can be both alive and dead before it is observed.
Such pairs of photons can be prepared togetherentangledso that their polarizations are always found to be in the opposite direction when observed. That may not seem strangeunless you remember that these properties are not fixed until they are measured. Even if one photon is given to a physicist called Alice in Australia, while the other is transported to her colleague Bob in a lab in Vienna, entanglement ensures that as soon as Alice observes her photon and, for instance, finds its polarization to be horizontal, the polarization of Bobs photon instantly syncs to vibrating vertically. Because the two photons appear to communicate faster than the speed of lightsomething prohibited by his theories of relativitythis phenomenon deeply troubled Albert Einstein, who dubbed it spooky action at a distance.
These concerns remained theoretical until the 1960s, when physicist John Bell devised a way to test if reality is truly spookyor if there could be a more mundane explanation behind the correlations between entangled partners. Bell imagined a commonsense theory that was localthat is, one in which influences could not travel between particles instantly. It was also deterministic rather than inherently probabilistic, so experimental results could, in principle, be predicted with certainty, if only physicists understood more about the systems hidden properties. And it was realistic, which, to a quantum theorist, means that systems would have these definite properties even if nobody looked at them. Then Bell calculated the maximum level of correlations between a series of entangled particles that such a local, deterministic and realistic theory could support. If that threshold was violated in an experiment, then one of the assumptions behind the theory must be false.
Such Bell tests have since been carried out, with a series of watertight versions performed in 2015, and they have confirmed realitys spookiness. Quantum foundations is a field that was really started experimentally by Bells [theorem]now over 50 years old. And weve spent a lot of time reimplementing those experiments and discussing what they mean, Steinberg says. Its very rare that people are able to come up with a new test that moves beyond Bell.
The Brisbane teams aim was to derive and test a new theorem that would do just that, providing even stricter constraintslocal friendliness boundson the nature of reality. Like Bells theory, the researchers imaginary one is local. They also explicitly ban superdeterminismthat is, they insist that experimenters are free to choose what to measure without being influenced by events in the future or the distant past. (Bell implicitly assumed that experimenters can make free choices, too.) Finally, the team prescribes that when an observer makes a measurement, the outcome is a real, single event in the worldit is not relative to anyone or anything.
Testing local friendliness requires a cunning setup involving two superobservers, Alice and Bob (who play the role of Wigner), watching their friends Charlie and Debbie. Alice and Bob each have their own interferometeran apparatus used to manipulate beams of photons. Before being measured, the photons polarizations are in a superposition of being both horizontal and vertical. Pairs of entangled photons are prepared such that if the polarization of one is measured to be horizontal, the polarization of its partner should immediately flip to be vertical. One photon from each entangled pair is sent into Alices interferometer, and its partner is sent to Bobs. Charlie and Debbie are not actually human friends in this test. Rather, they are beam displacers at the front of each interferometer. When Alices photon hits the displacer, its polarization is effectively measured, and it swerves either left or right, depending on the direction of the polarization it snaps into. This action plays the role of Alices friend Charlie measuring the polarization. (Debbie similarly resides in Bobs interferometer.)
Alice then has to make a choice: She can measure the photons new deviated path immediately, which would be the equivalent of opening the lab door and asking Charlie what he saw. Or she can allow the photon to continue on its journey, passing through a second beam displacer that recombines the left and right pathsthe equivalent of keeping the lab door closed. Alice can then directly measure her photons polarization as it exits the interferometer. Throughout the experiment, Alice and Bob independently choose which measurement choices to make and then compare notes to calculate the correlations seen across a series of entangled pairs.
Tischler and her colleagues carried out 90,000 runs of the experiment. As expected, the correlations violated Bells original boundsand crucially, they also violated the new local-friendliness threshold. The team could also modify the setup to tune down the degree of entanglement between the photons by sending one of the pair on a detour before it entered its interferometer, gently perturbing the perfect harmony between the partners. When the researchers ran the experiment with this slightly lower level of entanglement, they found a point where the correlations still violated Bells bound but not local friendliness. This result proved that the two sets of bounds are not equivalent and that the new local-friendliness constraints are stronger, Tischler says. If you violate them, you learn more about reality, she adds. Namely, if your theory says that friends can be treated as quantum systems, then you must either give up locality, accept that measurements do not have a single result that observers must agree on or allow superdeterminism. Each of these options has profoundand, to some physicists, distinctly distastefulimplications.
The paper is an important philosophical study, says Michele Reilly, co-founder of Turing, a quantum-computing company based in New York City, who was not involved in the work. She notes that physicists studying quantum foundations have often struggled to come up with a feasible test to back up their big ideas. I am thrilled to see an experiment behind philosophical studies, Reilly says. Steinberg calls the experiment extremely elegant and praises the team for tackling the mystery of the observers role in measurement head-on.
Although it is no surprise that quantum mechanics forces us to give up a commonsense assumptionphysicists knew that from Bellthe advance here is that we are a narrowing in on which of those assumptions it is, says Wharton, who was also not part of the study. Still, he notes, proponents of most quantum interpretations will not lose any sleep. Fans of retrocausality, such as himself, have already made peace with superdeterminism: in their view, it is not shocking that future measurements affect past results. Meanwhile QBists and many-worlds adherents long ago threw out the requirement that quantum mechanics prescribes a single outcome that every observer must agree on.
And both Bohmian mechanics and spontaneous collapse models already happily ditched locality in response to Bell. Furthermore, collapse models say that a real macroscopic friend cannot be manipulated as a quantum system in the first place.
Vaidman, who was also not involved in the new work, is less enthused by it, however, and criticizes the identification of Wigners friend with a photon. The methods used in the paper are ridiculous; the friend has to be macroscopic, he says. Philosopher of physics Tim Maudlin of New York University, who was not part of the study, agrees. Nobody thinks a photon is an observer, unless you are a panpsychic, he says. Because no physicist questions whether a photon can be put into superposition, Maudlin feels the experiment lacks bite. It rules something outjust something that nobody ever proposed, he says.
Tischler accepts the criticism. We dont want to overclaim what we have done, she says. The key for future experiments will be scaling up the size of the friend, adds team member Howard Wiseman, a physicist at Griffith University. The most dramatic result, he says, would involve using an artificial intelligence, embodied on a quantum computer, as the friend. Some philosophers have mused that such a machine could have humanlike experiences, a position known as the strong AI hypothesis, Wiseman notes, though nobody yet knows whether that idea will turn out to be true. But if the hypothesis holds, this quantum-based artificial general intelligence (AGI) would be microscopic. So from the point of view of spontaneous collapse models, it would not trigger collapse because of its size. If such a test was run, and the local-friendliness bound was not violated, that result would imply that an AGIs consciousness cannot be put into superposition. In turn, that conclusion would suggest that Wigner was right that consciousness causes collapse. I dont think I will live to see an experiment like this, Wiseman says. But that would be revolutionary.
Reilly, however, warns that physicists hoping that future AGI will help them home in on the fundamental description of reality are putting the cart before the horse. Its not inconceivable to me that quantum computers will be the paradigm shift to get to us into AGI, she says. Ultimately, we need a theory of everything in order to build an AGI on a quantum computer, period, full stop.
That requirement may rule out more grandiose plans. But the team also suggests more modest intermediate tests involving machine-learning systems as friends, which appeals to Steinberg. That approach is interesting and provocative, he says. Its becoming conceivable that larger- and larger-scale computational devices could, in fact, be measured in a quantum way.
Renato Renner, a quantum physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), makes an even stronger claim: regardless of whether future experiments can be carried out, he says, the new theorem tells us that quantum mechanics needs to be replaced. In 2018 Renner and his colleague Daniela Frauchiger, then at ETH Zurich, published a thought experiment based on Wigners friend and used it to derive a new paradox. Their setup differs from that of the Brisbane team but also involves four observers whose measurements can become entangled. Renner and Frauchiger calculated that if the observers apply quantum laws to one another, they can end up inferring different results in the same experiment.
The new paper is another confirmation that we have a problem with current quantum theory, says Renner, who was not involved in the work. He argues that none of todays quantum interpretations can worm their way out of the so-called Frauchiger-Renner paradox without proponents admitting they do not care whether quantum theory gives consistent results. QBists offer the most palatable means of escape, because from the outset, they say that quantum theory cannot be used to infer what other observers will measure, Renner says. It still worries me, though: If everything is just personal to me, how can I say anything relevant to you? he adds. Renner is now working on a new theory that provides a set of mathematical rules that would allow one observer to work out what another should see in a quantum experiment.
Still, those who strongly believe their favorite interpretation is right see little value in Tischlers study. If you think quantum mechanics is unhealthy, and it needs replacing, then this is useful because it tells you new constraints, Vaidman says. But I dont agree that this is the casemany worlds explains everything.
For now, physicists will have to continue to agree to disagree about which interpretation is best or if an entirely new theory is needed. Thats where we left off in the early 20th centurywere genuinely confused about this, Reilly says. But these studies are exactly the right thing to do to think through it.
Disclaimer: The author frequently writes for the Foundational Questions Institute, which sponsors research in physics and cosmologyand partially funded the Brisbane teams study.
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Scientists Have Shown There’s No ‘Butterfly Effect’ in the Quantum World – VICE
Posted: at 10:57 pm
Of all the reasons for wanting to time-travelsaving someone from a fatal mistake, exploring ancient civilizations, gathering evidence about unsolved crimesrecovering lost information isnt the most exciting. But even if a quest to recover the file that didnt auto-save doesn't sound like a Hollywood movie plot, weve all had moments when weve longed to go back in time for exactly that reason.
Theories of time and time-travel have highlighted an apparent stumbling block: time travel requires changing the past, even simply by adding in the time traveller. The problem, according to chaos theory, is that the smallest of changes can cause radical consequences in the future. In this conception of time travel, it wouldnt be advisable to recover your unsaved document since this act would have huge knock-on effects on everything else.
New research in quantum physics from Los Alamos National Laboratory has shown that the so-called butterfly effect can be overcome in the quantum realm in order to unscramble lost information by essentially reversing time.
In a paper published in July, researchers Bin Yan and Nikolai Sinitsyn write that a thought experiment in unscrambling information with time-reversing operations would be expected to lead to the same butterfly effect as the one in the famous Ray Bradburys story A Sound of Thunder In that short story, a time traveler steps on an insect in the deep past and returns to find the modern world completely altered, giving rise to the idea we refer to as the butterfly effect.
In contrast," they wrote, "our result shows that by the end of a similar protocol the local information is essentially restored.
"The primary focus of this work is not 'time travel'physicists do not have an answer yet to tell whether it is possible and how to do time travel in the real world, Yan clarified.
[But] since our protocol involves a 'forward' and a 'backward' evolution of the qubits, achieved by changing the orders of quantum gates in the circuit, it has a nice interpretation in terms of Ray Bradbury's story for the butterfly effect. So, it is an accurate and useful way to understand our results."
What is the butterfly effect?
The world does not behave in a neat, ordered way. If it did, identical events would always produce the same patterns of knock-on effects, and the future would be entirely predictable, or deterministic. Chaos theory claims that the opposite: total randomness is not our situation either. We exist somewhere in the middle, in a world that often appears random but in fact obeys rules and patterns.
Patterns within chaos are hidden because they are highly sensitive to tiny changes, which means similar but not identical situations can produce wildly different outcomes. Another way of putting it is that in a chaotic world, effects can be totally out of proportion to their causes, like the metaphor of a flap of butterfly wings causing a tornado on the other side of the world. On the tornado side of the world, the storm would seem random, because the connection between the butterfly-flap and the tornado is too complex to be apparent. While this butterfly effect is the classic poetic metaphor illustrating chaos theory, chaotic dynamics also play out in real-world contexts, including population growth in the Canadian lynx species and the rotation of Plutos moons.
Another feature of chaos is that, even though the rules are deterministic, the future is not predictable in the long-term. Since chaos is so sensitive to small variations, there are near-infinite ways the rules could play out and we would need to know an impossible amount of detail about the present and past to map out exactly how the world will evolve.
Similarly, you cant reverse-engineer some piece of information about the past simply by knowing the current and even future situations; time-travel doesnt help retrieve past information, because even moving backwards in time, the chaotic system is still in play and will produce unpredictable effects.
Information scrambling
Unscrambling information which has previously been scrambled is not straightforward in a chaotic system. Yan and Sinitsyns key discovery is that it is nonetheless possible in quantum computing to get enough information via time-reversal which will then enable information unscrambling.
According to Yan, the fact that the butterfly effect does not occur in quantum realms is not a surprising result, but demonstrating information unscrambling is both novel and important.
In quantum information theory, scrambling occurs when the information encoded in each quantum particle is split up and redistributed across multiple quantum particles in the same quantum system. The scrambling is not random, since information redistribution relies on quantum entanglement, which means that the states of some quantum particles are dependent on each other. Although the scrambled result is seemingly chaotic, the information can be put back together, at least in principle, using the entangled relationships.
Importantly, information scrambling is not the same as information loss. To continue the earlier analogy: information loss occurs when a document is permanently deleted from your computer. For information scrambling, imagine cutting and pasting tiny bits of one computer file into every other file on your machine. Each file now contains a mess of information snippets. You could reconstruct the original files, if you remembered exactly which bits were cut and pasted, and did the entire process in reverse.
Physicists are interested in information scrambling for two main reasons. On the theoretical side, its been proposed as a way to explain what happens to information sucked into a black hole. On the more applied side, it could be an important mechanism for quantum computers to store and hide information, and could produce fast and efficient quantum simulators, which are used already to perform complex experiments including new drug discovery.
Yan and Sinitsyn fall into the second camp, and construct what they call a practically accessible scenario to test unscrambling by time-travel. This scenario is still hypothetical, but explores the mathematics of the actual quantum processor used by Google to demonstrate quantum supremacy in 2019.
Yan says: Another potential application is to use this effect to protect information. A random evolution on a quantum circuit can make the qubit robust to perturbations. One may further exploit the discovered effect to design protocols in quantum cryptography.
The set-up
In Yan and Sinitsyn's quantum thought experiment, Alice and Bob are the protagonists. Alice is using a simplified version of Googles quantum processor to hide just one part of the information stored on the computer (called the central qubit) by scrambling this qubits state across all the other qubits (called the qubit bath). Bob is cast as the intruder, much like a malicious computer hacker. He wants the important information originally stored on the central qubit, now distributed across entangled quantum particles in the bath.
Unfortunately, Bobs hack, while successful in getting the information he wanted, leaves a trail of destruction.
If her processor has already scrambled the information, Alice is sure that Bob cannot get anything useful, the authors write. However, Bobs measurement changes the state of the central qubit and also destroys all quantum correlations between this qubit and the rest of the system.
Bob's method of information theft has altered the computer state so that Alice can also no longer access the hidden information. In this case, the damage occurs because quantum states contain all possible values they could have, with assigned probabilities of each value, but these possibilities (represented by the wave function) collapse down to just one value when a measurement is taken. Quantum computing relies on unmeasured quantum systems to store even more information in multiple possible states, and Bobs intrusion has totally altered the computer system.
Reversing time
Theoretically, the behaviour of a quantum system moving backwards in time can be demonstrated mathematically using whats called a time-reversed evolution operator, which is exactly what Alice uses to de-scramble the information.
Her time-reversal is not actually time travel the way we understand it from science fiction, it is literally a reversal of times direction; the system evolves backwards following whatever dynamics are in play, rather than Alice herself revisiting an earlier time. If the butterfly effect held in the quantum world, then this backwards evolution would actually increase the damage Bob had caused, and Alice would only be able to retrieve the hidden information if she knew exactly what that damage was and could correct her calculations accordingly.
Luckily for Alice, quantum systems behave totally differently to non-quantum (classical or semiclassical) chaotic systems. What Yan and Sinitsyn found is that she can apply her time-reversal operation and end up at an "earlier" state which will not be identical with the initial system she set up, but it will also not have increased the damage which occurred later. Alice can then reconstruct her initial system using a method of quantum unscrambling called quantum state tomography.
What this means is that a quantum system can effectively heal and even recover information that was scrambled in the past, without the chaos of the butterfly effect.
Classical chaotic evolution magnifies any state damage exponentially quickly, which is known as the butterfly effect, explain Yan and Sinitsyn. The quantum evolution, however, is
linear. This explains why, in our case, the uncontrolled damage to the state is not magnified by the subsequent complex evolution. Moreover, the fact that Bobs measurement does not damage the useful information follows from the property of entanglement correlations in the scrambled state.
Hypothetical though this scenario may be, the result already has a practical use: verifying whether a quantum system has achieved quantum supremacy. Quantum processors can simulate time-reversal in a way that classical computers cannot, which could provide the next important test for the quantum race between Google and IBM.
So, while time travel is still not in the cards, the quantum world continues to mess with our classical conception of how the world evolves in time, and pushes the limits of computing information.
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Scientists Have Shown There's No 'Butterfly Effect' in the Quantum World - VICE
Quantum Information Processing Market 2020 | Know the Latest COVID19 Impact Analysis And Strategies of Key Players: 1QB Information Technologies,…
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Doctor Strange might want to trade his Time Stone for time crystals that are doing some otherworldly things – SYFY WIRE
Posted: at 10:57 pm
So maybe Doctor Strange wore the Eye of Agamotto, embedded with the Time Stone which was his own portable time machine (raddest necklace ever), but there is something just as bizarre outside the Marvel Universe that actually exists in this universe.
Time crystals were once just a phantom of a theory. While they cant take you back or zoom you forward in time like the Time Stone, their atoms are arranged in a repeating pattern just like a regular crystalline structure. The difference is that time crystals follow a pattern that repeats in time instead of space. Their repeating motions in time happen on their own with no external influence, and could seriously upgrade quantum computers or the atomic clocks behind your GPS. This new phase of matter was confirmed to be real several years ago, and now two of them that were created in a lab were observed touching for the first time ever.
What it comes to practical work, the rule of thumb is that everything always goes wrong in experiments, and then you just have to try again. So very rarely do you experience a moment when things just suddenly fall in place. It is more like an exhausting endurance test to wipe out a range of problems and mistakes, rather than one distinct moment of brilliance, physicist Samuli Autti, who led a study recently published in Nature Materials, told SYFY WIRE about the breakthrough.
Going back in time for a moment, the existence of time crystals was first theorized by MIT theoretical physicist, mathematician and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek in 2012. Flash forward four years later, and two teams of scientists were able to create them using completely different methods. Proof that creating time crystals were actually possible meant they had to be investigated further if they were ever actually going to be used for anything. Autti and his team froze the superfluid helium-3, a rare isotope of helium to -459.67 Fahrenheit. This is just one ten thousandth of a degree from absolute zero (the lowest possible temperature completely devoid of motion and heat). The deep freeze was necessary to achieve symmetry breaking, a property of regular crystals that only gets weirder when applied to time crystals.
Breaking symmetry only sounds like making symmetry vanish. What really comes out of this phenomenon is a lower symmetry. Liquids in their liquid state look exactly the same from every angle because the molecules in a liquid can move around freely in that liquid, but things change when that liquid freezes into ice and rearranges into a crystalline structure. It is not as symmetrical because the molecules in the crystal end up spaced apart at consistent intervals.
While it may sound ironic that symmetry breaks when a liquid transforms into a regular structure as opposed to an irregular structure, the consistency of that hard structure means it isnt going to be as symmetrical as the liquid because it cant just flow anywhere.
After freezing the helium-3, Autti and his team wrapped two coils of copper wire around the test tube. These were meant to pick up signals that would tell them about the rotation of the magnetic particles in the time crystals. Sure enough, two time crystals, which appeared more like clouds, emerged.
This spontaneous rotating motion is what essentially makes the clouds time crystals. The size of each signal tells you how many particles there are in each cloud. Therefore changes in the populations are seen as changes in the signal size. If the two clouds touch, they will exchange particles back and forth in a particular way, which we saw in the experiment, Autti said.
Time crystals could mean some unreal things for computing in the future. Quantum technology involves features of quantum physics that show quantum effects. For now, superconductors that are being tested for possible use in quantum computers behave similarly to time crystals. This flow of energy between superconductors, which can conduct without electrical resistance at extremely low temperatures, is called the Josephson effect. This is an infinite supercurrent that keeps on going without the need for any additional voltage. Time crystals that touch display this behavior through the exchange of magnons waves that behave like particles between them, and they dont even need an insulating barrier like superconductors do.
Time crystals are intrinsically very good at protecting their coherence. A basic requirement to enable quantum computing and technology is protecting coherence in the quantum system of interest, Autti said. Next to the Josephson effect, it also turns out that the underlying system of magnetic particles we used (magnon Bose-Einstein condensate) is very similar to a particular solid-state system where a magnon Bose condensate forms at room temperature. That is why one can potentially use these magnetic systems to build quantum devices that work even at room temperature.
What about leveling up your GPS? That starts with atomic clocks, and what time crystals have in common with clocks is repeating motion.
Time crystals are intrinsically good at maintaining the repeating motion that defines them. So in principle they also make for good clocks, because a clock is simply a phenomenon that systematically repeats in time, explained Autti, though he is hesitant to say that time crystals should only be looked at for overhauling atomic clocks when there is so much more to the phenomenon. At least as a thought experiment, this idea provides an illuminating emphasis of what is the essence of a time crystal.
Even Doctor Strange would probably have his mind blown.
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National Speakers Association Inducts Leadership Expert Barry Banther Into The Speaker Hall of Fame – PRNewswire
Posted: at 10:56 pm
TARPON SPRINGS, Fla., Aug. 17, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --The National Speakers Association (NSA) inducted its current National Chair Barry Banther, CMC, CSP into the prestigious Speaker Hall of Fame during a virtual award ceremony in August 2020.
Based in Tarpon Springs, Florida, Banther is among an elite group of only 255 professional speakers throughout the world to ever receive this honor. Well known past recipients of the CPAE designation include: President Ronald Reagan; Norman Vincent Peale; General Colin Powell; Art Linkletter; Jim Rohn; and Zig Ziglar.
Upon accepting the award Banther said, "It has been said that a person is a reflection of the people they spend time with. I am a reflection of the many friends, teachers, colleagues, and clients who have invested so much in me."
Banther continues, "Receiving the CPAE designation from my peers is one of my proudest professional accomplishments. I thank my wife, family and everyone who has enriched and blessed my life. I am forever grateful and humbled by this honor."
"Barry Banther is the master of inspirational storytelling. Pulling from a Wikipedia-level trove of true stories, he has the ability to instantly recall, sequence, and deliver precisely the right anecdote from his own life and learnings to motivate anyone to be a better leader, contributor or person," said Past President of the National Speakers Association, Brian Walter, CSP, CPAE who presented the award. "He was inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame in recognition of what audiences perceive as his speaking gift, but what his speaker peers know is a half century's dedication to his craft."
ABOUT BANTHER
A highly sought after business consultant and inspirational speaker, Banther has created over 50 leadership training programs used by Fortune 500 companies around the world and smaller regional businesses throughout America. He combines four decades of experience as a business leader, corporate executive, and educator.
Banther served in the administration of three Florida Governors as the appointee to oversee private higher education. He was elected to an unprecedented four terms as Chairman of the Florida State Board of Independent Colleges and Universities. This body of work has earned him the highest accreditation from the Institute of Management Consultants as a Certified Management Consultant and from the National Speakers Association as a Certified Speaking Professional. He is one of fewer than 50 professionals world-wide to hold both designations.His latest book,"A Leader's Gift: How to Earn the Right to be Followed," achieved #1 Best Seller status on Amazon.
ABOUT NSA
The National Speakers Association (NSA) is part of a global network of more than 3,000 members whose skills, expertise and experience represent the most recognized and respected community of thought leaders in the industry.
Founded in 1973 byCavett Robert, CSP, CPAE, NSA has comprehensive resources, cutting-edge tools, insightful education and productive events that speakers need to develop their brands and grow their businesses. NSA members include experts in a variety of industries and disciplines, who reach audiences as speakers, trainers, educators, humorists, motivators, consultants, and authors.
InFebruary 1977, the National Speakers Association established the Council of Peers Award for Excellence Speaker Hall of Fame to honor professional speakers who have reached the top echelon of platform distinction. Inductees are evaluated by their peers through a rigorous and demanding process, and must excel in seven categories of speaking excellence and professionalism.
MEDIA CONTACT FOR BANTHER Robert Stack 561-601-9991 [emailprotected]
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National Speakers Association Inducts Leadership Expert Barry Banther Into The Speaker Hall of Fame - PRNewswire
India News | Sachin Pilot Pays Tribute to Former PM Rajiv Gandhi on His Birth Anniversary – LatestLY
Posted: August 22, 2020 at 2:57 am
Jaipur (Rajasthan) [India], Aug 20 (ANI): Congress leader Sachin Pilot on Thursday paid tribute to former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi on his 76th birth anniversary.
"I pay tributes to the father of Indian information technology revolution, manager of the Panchayati raj empowerement and builder of modern India former Prime Minister Shri Rajiv Gandhi on his birth anniversary. His priceless contributions to the building of a strong India will always be written in golden words," Pilot's tweet read.
Also Read | COVID-19 Tally in India Crosses 28 Lakh Mark With a Spike of 69,652 New Cases in Past 24 Hours, Death Toll Rises to 53,866.
Born on August 20, 1944, Rajiv Gandhi became the youngest Prime Minister of India when he assumed office in October 1984. He served as the Prime Minister of India till December 2, 1989.
In May 1991, Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) suicide bomber during an election rally in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu. (ANI)
Also Read | My Mentor Grant Cardone Taught Me How to Scale Businesses to 7 Digit Revenue, Says American Entrepreneur Jeffrey Santulan.
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
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India News | Sachin Pilot Pays Tribute to Former PM Rajiv Gandhi on His Birth Anniversary - LatestLY
Nietzsche’s superman, Islam, and Covid-19 ( Part III) – Daily Times
Posted: at 2:55 am
We have further interesting connections in the relationship of Nietzsche to Islam. Like other German philosophers such as Hegel and Goethe, Nietzsche too sought to understand the meaning of life and the place of the human in existence. The ultimate aim was to discover the path to a fulfilled and even contented life. In the process, like the other philosophers, Nietzsche found himself highly critical of the philosophic and ideological structures that dominated Europe and blamed them for the misery of ordinary people. Nietzsche therefore attacked the Christian church and the state. To him, both were sources of oppression. The church had failed to provide happiness on earth to its followers and therefore its rituals were meaningless. While Christians outwardly acted out the rituals of Christianity and religion, they had lost their conviction in the faith. It was this context that prompted Nietzsche to pronounce the sentence that gave him instant notoriety declaring the death of God. As for the state, Nietzsche was an early critic of Otto Von Bismarck, the architect of the German state, which would go on to become the embodiment of the modern state. Nietzsche warned of the centralizing and tyrannizing tendencies of the state which inevitably would show hostility towards ethnic minorities. Nietzsche the philosopher was an iconoclast: both church and state were corrupt and corrupting. In this sense, Nietzsche was ahead of his time and even predicted what was to come in Europe.
Nietzsche attempted to fill the vacuum by arguing for the ideal of the Superman. For him, wisdom and love are key to understanding the Superman. When a person realizes their human potential and fulfills it, they are able to move away from the herd morality of Christianity and religion to become a Superman. It is noteworthy, and could strike the uninitiated as eccentric, that while dismissing Christianity, Nietzsche appears to be constantly praising Islam. For Nietzsche, Christianity and Islam have a perverse relationship in the sense that while he demeans and shows contempt for the former, he turns towards the latter and elevates it. It is a tension within Nietzsche which is not resolved.
For Nietzsche, Muslims are noble and he describes them as manly, life affirming, and honest (the first adjective is from his 1895 book The Antichrist). Nietzsche even points to the warlike qualities in Islam. In fact, there are over 100 references to Islam in Nietzsches work. Islam is simply everything that Christianity is not. He is so enamored of Muslims that in a letter to a friend he ponders relocating to Muslim lands in North Africa. The scholar Ian Almond wrote, it is difficult to resist the tempting hypothesis: that had Nietzsches breakdown not been imminent, we would have seen a work dedicated to Islam from his own pen (Nietzsches Peace with Islam: My Enemys Enemy is my Friend, German Life and Letters, 56:1, January 2003, p. 51).
Nietzsche blamed Christianity in The Antichrist for the elimination of the advanced civilization of Muslim Spain and the Crusades: Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization, and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan civilization. The wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was fundamentally nearer to us and appealed more to our senses and tastes than that of Rome and Greece, was trampled down. If there is any doubt as to his position regarding the two religions, Nietzsche himself dispelled it in The Antichrist: There should be no choice in the matter when faced with Islam and Christianity. War to the knife with Rome! Peace and friendship with Islam!
There are also parallels in the manner in which the idea of the Superman is revealed in Thus Spake Zarathustra and the history of early Islam. As in the case of the Prophet, Nietzsches protagonist in Thus Spake Zarathustra ascends a mountain, acquires knowledge at the age of 40-the age at which the Prophet received his Quranic revelation-and comes down from the mountain with wisdom and love to share and faces hostility and cynicism. In fact, this pattern reflects not only the broad outline of the early days of Islam but that of many Biblical prophets.
It is worth noting that two of Nietzsches Supermen, Goethe as well as Napoleon, expressed their admiration for Islam. Napoleon in Cairo dressed in Arab robes, spent time with sheikhs from Al Azhar, said he had become a Muslim, and even took a Muslim name. Nietzsche, like Wagner, also praised the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, calling him a genius and celebrating the fact that he fought the papacy while seeking peace and friendship with Islam.
Man could aspire to the heights set by the Perfect Man, the model of the Prophet, and Iqbal exhorted his readers to do so
This raises the question as to why Islam impresses Nietzsche so much. I have explored the answer at some length in my book Journey into Europe in which I argued that traditionally some European scholars and philosophers cast Islam and its tribes in the classic romantic mold of Rousseaus noble savage. To them the Muslim tribesman, the Berber in the deserts, or the Pashtun in the mountains, had escaped the deprivations of modernity and preserved their natural and original nobility. This was particularly true of German scholars, who, as I explain in Journey into Europe, thought of themselves as belonging to a kind of tribal society going back to Germanys status as the frontier of the Roman Empire and celebrated the work of Tacitus who wrote of the German tribes of that time. Thus, German scholars were more likely to respect other societies which they deemed worthy and had characteristics that reflected German self-perception. They increasingly set the German people, ethnicity, language, and religious interpretation against the central authority of the Catholic Church based in Rome in forging a distinct German identity and often displayed a concurrent fascination and appreciation for Islam and Islamic culture. Figures like Drer, Goethe, Wagner, and Nietzsche reflected this larger world-view, which I called the historical German soft spot for Islam.
Nietzsche was thus a genuine admirer of a civilization that he knew very little of. In the nineteenth century Islam was going through a difficult period of its history and it had not yet emerged from colonization. It was dominated by often ignorant and decadent rulers and there was chaos and corruption in its societies. Yet Nietzsche and many others romanticized it seeing instead the uncorrupted noble savage. Through such Orientalist eyes the Islamic world though seen as barbarous and anti-modern was yet a praiseworthy society. We see this tendency continuing in Europe as modernity developed into the next century. By the time of Aldous Huxleys Brave New World written some 30 years after Nietzsche died, the most normal character is John who is widely called a savage and lives outside the bounds of the totalitarian World State.
Nietzsche and Iqbal
Perhaps the most celebrated direct relationship of the concept of the Insan-iKamil or the Perfect Man and the Prophet to Nietzsche was highlighted by Allama Muhammad Iqbal, the revered Poet of the East. Iqbal had arrived from British India for his studies at Cambridge University where he was enrolled at Trinity College, after Nietzsche died in 1900. A brilliant student of philosophy, Iqbal very quickly absorbed the leading philosophers of the time including Nietzsche.
Iqbals own work reflected Nietzsche, albeit with a more religious dimension linked to Islam, to the extent that he was accused of plagiarism, a charge that has stayed with him long after his death. Iqbal believed that through the understanding of religion, Man could develop his potential to become the Perfect Man, in short Superman-a Superman whose mind ranged across the cosmos: Sitaron key aageyjehanaurbhihein!/Abhiishq key imtihanaurbhihein There are many worlds beyond the stars!/ And many more tests of love.
Iqbal notes that God himself in the Quran made man in the image of the divine as a vicegerent on earth, a phrase used in the Quran. Man could aspire to the heights set by the Perfect Man, the model of the Prophet, and Iqbal exhorted his readers to do so. We see the religious dimension in Iqbals understanding of self-betterment in the last lines of what is Iqbals arguably most famous populist poems, The Complaint and The Answer to the Complaint. The latter poem has God clearly informing man in the last verses that as long as he is faithful to the Prophet of Islam then everything belongs to him. Ki Muhammad say wafatu nay to hum terayhain/ Ye jahan cheese hay kialuh o kalamterayhain-If you are faithful to Muhammad, than I am yours./ Why do you ask for this universe? I will give you the secret to knowledge. Iqbal thus acknowledged the legitimacy of the Superman while also his connection to God. Whatever Nietzsche thinks of the matter, for Iqbal man cannot break that link from and to God.
The writer is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC, and author of Journey into Europe: Islam, Immigration, and Identity
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Nietzsche's superman, Islam, and Covid-19 ( Part III) - Daily Times
Nietzsche’s superman, Islam, and Covid-19 ( Part I) – Daily Times
Posted: at 2:55 am
When Friedrich Nietzsche ran to stop the brutal owner of a horse from thrashing it mercilessly in Turin, Italy, and threw his arms around the animal crying, I understand your pain, it gave us an extraordinary insight into his character and mind; more than his usually convoluted philosophic utterances. Nietzsche, who blithely declared to the world, God is dead could not bear the cruelty to the animal. While the image of Nietzsche is that of a world-class philosopher grappling with esoteric philosophic insights into the human condition and forever engulfed in controversy, this account reveals to us his sensitive nature that would have made the great Jain sage Mahavira proud. This episode also triggered his mental breakdown from which he never recovered.
Ten years later in 1900, after living in a vegetative state, he was dead. Ever since his breakdown he had been in the care of his sister. They had grown apart and had very different ideas about life and politics. She not only made her own edits to his work at will but after his death projected and distorted her brothers thought in alignment with her own pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic prejudices. She had migrated to Paraguay to attempt to create a colony of like-minded right-wing Germans and falsified her brothers ideas and ideology to curry favor with the Nazis. She even entirely fabricated numerous letters that she published in his name. This was morally reprehensible but she was doing thriving business in Nazi Germany. So impressed was Hitler by her loyalty that he attended her funeral. Nietzsche scholars have condemned her criminally scandalous forgeries (David Wroe, Criminal manipulation of Nietzsche by sister to make him look anti-Semitic, The Telegraph, January 19, 2010).
Nietzsches bermensch
Nietzsches mind was like a vast, dark, and dangerous cave. In it dwelt flying creatures with sharp teeth. There were also those wondrous ones with luminous eyes conveying compassion and kindness. To enter the cave was an adventure and one never knew what would come flying at you. Take the matter of slavery. Nietzsche made several comments on slavery which are unacceptable to us. There is simply no excuse for the dreadful and disgusting institution of slavery. Nietzsches supporters cannot exonerate him by citing illustrious figures like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and arguing that even the founding fathers of the greatest Western democracy owned slaves so the institution of slavery at that time was somehow excusable. They cannot also brush away this information because it comes in fragments from obscure notes of dubious sources and was perhaps influenced by his sister who was busy distorting his work over which he had little control. Nor can the supporters take his references to the Greeks whom he admired and argue that because they had slavery it was somehow acceptable. To me it is likely that Nietzsches fragments on slavery reflect his broader philosophy on the subject and he stands condemned. There is much to be explored and researched for the scholar in Nietzsches writing. But those entering the cave must do so with a strong torch and a stronger heart.
The process whereby man progressed to Superman, according to Nietzsche, began with ones will to do so. Between animal and Superman was man and man had to aspire to become Superman. To move beyond man, he had to aspire to the next stage of creative evolution
Nietzsche is without doubt considered one of the greatest of Western philosophers and certainly one of the most controversial. From his bushy Groucho Marx mustache and eyebrows to his statement declaring God dead, Nietzsche seems to invite controversy and comment. One of Nietzsches concepts is that of the bermensch, a superior man, a beyond man or super man who, through his being, justifies the very existence of the human race. It is one of his most famous, and in the wrong hands, as we will see below, notorious concepts. It comes from Nietzsches celebrated magnum opus, Thus Spake Zarathustra. In the novel, Zarathustra, the protagonist, retreats to the mountains at the age of thirty to seek knowledge and wisdom. Ten years later he has achieved his aim. His heart is overflowing with wisdom and love, like a bee with an abundance of honey, in Nietzsches words. He now wishes to share what he has gathered with humanity. On the way down from the mountain he meets an old man who predicts the people would not accept his message except with hatred and ridicule. People were miserable and although they lived in an advanced material society and indulged in base pleasures, they were still miserable. In spite of their condition they rejected the wise mans offer to share his wisdom. In the end they chased him away with their hatred and ridicule. Nietzsche, like the protagonist of the book, sets out to share his wisdom and love. And like the protagonist, Nietzsche also meets with ridicule and hatred.
The process whereby man progressed to Superman, according to Nietzsche, began with ones will to do so. Between animal and Superman was man and man had to aspire to become Superman. To move beyond man, he had to aspire to the next stage of creative evolution. He was called the last man because that was the last stage before he could become Superman. It was different from Darwinian mutations and biological combinations with no aspirational aspects.
In terms of those people who had qualities of the Superman, Nietzsche gave his own personal list. They included Goethe, Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Montaigne and Voltaire. It is a list that most Europeans could identify with. Indeed, for Nietzsche, Goethe is probably the closest a human being can be to the idea of the Superman.
The ideal qualities of the Superman, Nietzsche wrote, were Caesar with Christs soul. For those surprised to find Napoleon on the list, it is worth pointing out that others saw these figures as Superman too. For example, for Hegel, the eminent German philosopher, Napoleon was the very embodiment of the modern state and the Absolute or the world-soul on horseback. The Duke of Wellington famously said that Napoleons presence on the battlefield was the equivalent of 40,000 soldiers and a similar remark was made of Saladin, who we could call a Muslim Superman, at the time of the Crusades.
The writer is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC, and author of Journey into Europe: Islam, Immigration, and Identity
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Examining the qualities of Nietzsches Supermen figures we may deduce some broad characteristics: they have a sense of destiny; something is driving them to spread their message and understanding to the world. They are generally protective of the weak and the vulnerable and concerned about the minorities. They are inclined to see the big picture and are not so concerned about minor things that may occupy other people. They are bold and independent in their thinking which often causes opposition and controversy. Their actions have an impact on distant places and into the future of which perhaps even they are not aware. Because they are extraordinary in their lives and aspirations, they are often lonely even though surrounded by followers and admirers.
They find followers rather than companions. They often spend time by themselves, retreating to isolated caves and mountains. They are brilliant in their strategic choices and moves. They are not always successful and since they are creating new ideas and challenging old ones, they often suffer a backlash that may even cost them their lives in the process. Even after they die, they cross time and space and remain alive in the imagination of their followers. As Nietzsches list of his own figures who approached and approximated the Superman is subjective and personal, each one of us is entitled to drawing up our own list. It is an exercise to be recommended as it will tell us as much about ourselves as our society..
Nietzsche followed Goethe in his admiration for the Prophet of Islam. Nietzsche compared the Prophet to Plato, one of the foundational figures of Western civilization. For Nietzsche, Plato thought he could do for all the Greeks what Muhammad did later for his Arabs
When Nietzsches Zarathustra went up the mountain seeking a species of Superman, he did not quite appreciate that they were in plain sight all along. Indeed, the concept of the Superman is not new. We have examples from the past going back several thousand years of figures who could justifiably be called Superman, from Moses, who parted the sea, turned his staff into a snake that ate up the Pharaohs snake, and climbed a mountain to talk to God, to Jesus Christ, who walked on water and gave life to a corpse. There are other figures such as the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II who brought the different religions and communities in his empire closer together through scholarship and in mutual respect. In Hindu mythology we have examples of ancient heroes performing superhuman feats. Most societies have their own towering figures that they view as supermen-or superwomen. So, while among Christians, Jesus is the ultimate Superman, among Hindus it is Lord Ram, among Buddhists Lord Buddha, and so on. Platos philosopher-king was a prototype Superman and Alexander the Great was seen as an early Greek version of the Superman. Earlier in Nietzsches century, Thomas Carlyle had written his celebrated On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History which was similar in scope to Nietzsches Superman idea and included several figures such as the Prophet of Islam, Rousseau and Napoleon that could over-lap with those on Nietzsches own list.
Insan-i Kamil: The Prophet as the Muslim Superman
For Muslims, the figure of the Superman is represented by the Prophet of Islam. The Quran stated that God created man to be Gods vicegerent on earth; a super superman if you will. The high status and expectations of man are inherent in Islams theological vision and philosophic understanding of the nature of man. That philosophic vision is suffused with the notions of compassion and mercy. This potential in man finds its ultimate expression in the Prophet of Islam, the model and example for Muslims to aspire to. Gods greatest attributes are derived from his two most popular names-Rahman and Rahim-Compassionate and Merciful and as he is the Messenger of God the Prophet is described in the Quran as a mercy unto mankind. The Prophet is known in the Islamic tradition as Insan-i Kamil or the Perfect Man, the equivalent of the Superman, and he is also called Khayr ul Bashr, or the best of mankind.
There are indeed interesting parallels between Nietzsches Superman and the Perfect Man in the Islamic tradition as personified by the Prophet. Is there a more direct relationship between the two concepts? Did the way that Muslims conceive of the Prophet of Islam, in turn, influence the construct of Ubermensch or the Superman? If so what are the intellectual links to possible sources that we can trace? The clues are many although some are admittedly weak. Yet it is worth exploring some of the connections which may heighten our understanding of both concepts and their similarities.
Nietzsche may have been consciously or unconsciously influenced by the Islamic notion of the Perfect Man through sources such as Goethe, his number one exemplary role model for the Superman. While Goethe wrote his devotional poem in honor of the Prophet called Mahomets Song at the age of 23, at age 70 he publicly declared he was considering devoutly celebrating that holy night in which the Quran in its entirety was revealed to the prophet from on high. Goethes comments on Islam have led to speculation about the extent of his commitment to the faith, for example, in the following verse: If Islam means, to God devoted/ All live and die in Islams ways. In fact, Goethe himself sometimes wondered if he was actually living the life of a Muslim, writing, when announcing the publication of his poetic work West-Eastern Divan, that the author does not reject the suspicion that he may himself be a Muslim.
No Muslim can be unmoved by Goethes poem, Mahomets Song, dedicated to the Prophet of Islam, whom he calls chief and head of created beings. Goethe had intended to write a longer piece in which Hazrat Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet and himself a Superman figure as a great scholar and warrior, was to have sung the poem in honor of his master, but the project was never completed. Mahomets Song is a powerful expression of the desire to discover unity in the universe while searching for the divine. Goethe uses the metaphor of an irresistible stream that flows down from the mountains to the ocean, taking other streams along with it. Here are some verses from the poem:
And the streamlets from the mountain,
Shout with joy, exclaiming: Brother,
Brother, take thy brethren with thee,
With thee to thine aged father,
To the everlasting ocean,
Who, with arms outstretching far,
Waiteth for us
And the meadow
In his breath finds life.'
Nietzsche followed Goethe in his admiration for the Prophet of Islam. Nietzsche compared the Prophet to Plato, one of the foundational figures of Western civilization. For Nietzsche, Plato thought he could do for all the Greeks what Muhammad did later for his Arabs. Muslims, who have been fascinated by Greek philosophers like Plato, have invariably seen the Prophet of Islam as the philosopher-king that Plato dreamed of and the Muslim community, as in the example of the early settlement in Medina, as the realization of Platos ideal City. Nietzsche also followed Goethe in his admiration for the great Persian poet Hafiz. Nietzsche wrote a poem extolling the heroic virtues of Hafiz including the fact that Hafiz was a water drinker-along with Christianity the drinking of alcohol was one of Nietzsches bugaboos about Europe. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Zarathustra is referred to as a born water drinker. The poem Nietzsche wrote in honor of Hafiz is entitled To Hafiz: Questions of a Water Drinker. It is worth reminding the reader that Islam forbids the drinking of alcohol and Muslims are thus quintessential water drinkers.
In spite of the potential for research, the interest in Islam of Goethe and Nietzsche has been relatively unexplored and even neglected. There are many dissertations waiting for the diligent researcher in this field. Most Germans, who acknowledge Goethe as the Shakespeare of the German language and the classic Renaissance man, do not know about Goethes enthusiasm for Islam, which lasted his entire life. Bekir Albo?a, the secretary general of Germanys largest Islamic organization, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), when interviewed for my project Journey into Europe in Cologne, described Goethe as a brother to me, and a great thinker with a great affinity for Islam. Goethe wrote a wonderful poem about our Prophet, he said, referring to Mahomets Song. Albo?a complained that in Germany the Islamic dimension of Goethes work is ignored, if not intentionally suppressed. As for the subject of Nietzsche and Islam that too remains largely uncharted territory. (For a detailed discussion of attitudes to Muslims in contemporary Europe see my book Journey into Europe: Islam, Immigration and Identity, 2018). Nietzsche, Islam, and Christianity
The writer is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC, and author of Journey into Europe: Islam, Immigration, and Identity
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