Tuesday, February 12, 2019

Visits to a Bohmian village

Over all of my physics life, I have been under the local influence of some Gaul villages that have ideas about physics that are not 100% aligned with the main stream views: When I was a student in Hamburg, I was good friends with people working on algebraic quantum field theory. Of course there were opinions that they were the only people seriously working on QFT as they were proving theorems while others dealt with perturbative series only that are known to diverge and are thus obviously worthless. Funnily enough they were literally sitting above the HERA tunnel where electron proton collisions took place that were very well described by exactly those divergent series. Still, I learned a lot from these people and would say there are few that have thought more deeply about structural properties of quantum physics. These days, I use more and more of these things in my own teaching (in particular in our Mathematical Quantum Mechanics and Mathematical Statistical Physics classes as well as when thinking about foundations, see below) and even some other physicists start using their language.

Later, as a PhD student at the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam, there was an accumulation point of people from the Loop Quantum Gravity community with Thomas Thiemann and Renate Loll having long term positions and many others frequently visiting. As you probably know, a bit later, I decided (together with Giuseppe Policastro) to look into this more deeply resulting in a series of papers there were well received at least amongst our peers and about which I am still a bit proud.

Now, I have been in Munich for over ten years. And here at the LMU math department there is a group calling themselves the Workgroup Mathematical Foundations of Physics. And let's be honest, I call them the Bohmians (and sometimes the Bohemians). And once more, most people believe that the Bohmian interpretation of quantum mechanics is just a fringe approach that is not worth wasting any time on. You will have already guessed it: I did so none the less. So here is a condensed report of what I learned and what I think should be the official opinion on this approach. This is an informal write up of a notes paper that I put on the arXiv today.

Bohmians don't like about the usual (termed Copenhagen lacking a better word) approach to quantum mechanics that you are not allowed to talk about so many things and that the observer plays such a prominent role by determining via a measurement what aspect is real an what is not. They think this is far too subjective. So rather, they want quantum mechanics to be about particles that then are allowed to follow trajectories.

"But we know this is impossible!" I hear you cry. So, let's see how this works. The key observation is that the Schrödinger equation for a Hamilton operator of the form kinetic term (possibly with magnetic field) plus potential term, has  a conserved current

$$j = \bar\psi\nabla\psi - (\nabla\bar\psi)\psi.$$

So as your probability density is $\rho=\bar\psi\psi$, you can think of that being made up of particles moving with a velocity field

$$v = j/\rho = 2\Im(\nabla \psi/\psi).$$

What this buys you is that if you have a bunch of particles that is initially distributed like the probability density and follows the flow of the velocity field it will also later be distributed like $|\psi |^2$.

What is important is that they keep the Schrödinger equation in tact. So everything that you can do with the original Schrödinger equation (i.e. everything) can be done in the Bohmian approach as well.  If you set up your Hamiltonian to describe a double slit experiment, the Bohmian particles will flow nicely to the screen and arrange themselves in interference fringes (as the probability density does). So you will never come to a situation where any experimental outcome will differ  from what the Copenhagen prescription predicts.

The price you have to pay, however, is that you end up with a very non-local theory: The velocity field lives in configuration space, so the velocity of every particle depends on the position of all other particles in the universe. I would say, this is already a show stopper (given what we know about quantum field theory whose raison d'être is locality) but let's ignore this aesthetic concern.

What got me into this business was the attempt to understand how the set-ups like Bell's inequality and GHZ and the like work out that are supposed to show that quantum mechanics cannot be classical (technically that the state space cannot be described as local probability densities). The problem with those is that they are often phrased in terms of spin degrees of freedom which have Hamiltonians that are not directly of the form above. You can use a Stern-Gerlach-type apparatus to translate the spin degree of freedom to a positional but at the price of a Hamiltonian that is not explicitly know let alone for which you can analytically solve the Schrödinger equation. So you don't see much.

But from Reinhard Werner and collaborators I learned how to set up qubit-like algebras from positional observables of free particles (at different times, so get something non-commuting which you need to make use of entanglement as a specific quantum resource). So here is my favourite example:

You start with two particles each following a free time evolution but confined to an interval. You set those up in a particular entangled state (stationary as it is an eigenstate of the Hamiltonian) built from the two lowest levels of the particle in the box. And then you observe for each particle if it is in the left or the right half of the interval.

From symmetry considerations (details in my paper) you can see that each particle is with the same probability on the left and the right. But they are anti-correlated when measured at the same time. But when measured at different times, the correlation oscillates like the cosine of the time difference.

From the Bohmian perspective, for the static initial state, the velocity field vanishes everywhere, nothing moves. But in order to capture the time dependent correlations, as soon as one particle has been measured, the position of the second particle has to oscillate in the box (how the measurement works in detail is not specified in the Bohmian approach since it involves other degrees of freedom and remember, everything depends on everything but somehow it has to work since you want to produce the correlations that are predicted by the Copenhagen approach).

 The trajectory of the second particle depending on its initial position

This is somehow the Bohmian version of the collapse of the wave function but they would never phrase it that way.

And here is where it becomes problematic: If you could see the Bohmian particle moving you could decide if the other particle has been measured (it would oscillate) or not (it would stand still). No matter where the other particle is located. With this observation you could build a telephone that transmits information instantaneously, something that should not exist. So you have to conclude you must not be able to look at the second particle and see if it oscillates or not.

Bohmians  tell you you cannot because all you are supposed to observer about the particles are their positions (and not their velocity). And if you try to measure the velocity by measuring the position at two instants in time you don't because the first observation disturbs the particle so much that it invalidates the original state.

As it turns out, you are not allowed to observe anything else about the particles than that they are distributed like $|\psi |^2$ because if you could, you could build a similar telephone (at least statistically) as I explain the in the paper (this fact is known in the Bohm literature but I found it nowhere so clearly demonstrated as in this two particle system).

My conclusion is that the Bohm approach adds something (the particle positions) to the wave function but then in the end tells you you are not allowed to observe this or have any knowledge of this beyond what is already encoded in the wave function. It's like making up an invisible friend.

PS: If you haven't seen "Bohemian Rhapsody", yet, you should, even if there are good reasons to criticise the dramatisation of real events.

Thursday, January 17, 2019

Today, there was news about a huge database containing 773 million email address / password pairs became public. On Have I Been Pawned you can check if any of your email addresses is in this database (or any similar one). I bet it is (mine are).

These lists are very probably the source for the spam emails that have been around for a number of months where the spammer claims they broke into your account and tries to prove it by telling you your password. Hopefully, this is only a years old LinkedIn password that you have changed aeons ago.

To make sure, you actually want to search not for your email but for your password. But of course, you don't want to tell anybody your password. To this end, I have written a small perl script that checks for your password without telling anybody by doing a calculation locally on your computer. You can find it on GitHub.

Friday, October 26, 2018

Interfere and it didn't happen

I am a bit late for the party, but also wanted to share my two cents on the paper "Quantum theory cannot consistently describe the use of itself" by Frauchiger and Renner. After sitting down and working out the math for myself, I found that the analysis in this paper and the blogpost by Scot (including many of the the 160+ comments, some by Renner) share a lot with what I am about to say but maybe I can still contribute a slight twist.

Coleman on GHZS

My background is the talk "Quantum Mechanics In Your Face" by Sidney Coleman which I consider as the best argument why quantum mechanics cannot be described by a local and realistic theory (from which I would conclude it is not realistic). In a nutshell, the argument goes like this: Consider the three qubit state state

$$\Psi=\frac 1{\sqrt 2}(\uparrow\uparrow\uparrow-\downarrow\downarrow\downarrow)$$

which is both an eigenstate of eigenvalue -1 for $\sigma_z\otimes\sigma_z\otimes\sigma_z$ and an eigenstate of eigenvalue +1 for $\sigma_x\otimes\sigma_x\otimes\sigma_z$ or any permutation. This means that, given that the individual outcomes of measuring a $\sigma$-matrix on a qubit is $\pm 1$, when measuring all in the z-direction there will be an odd number of -1 results but if two spins are measured in x-direction and one in z-direction there is an even number of -1's.

The latter tells us that the outcome of one z-measurement is the product of the two x-measurements on the other two spins. But multiplying this for all three spins we get that in shorthand $ZZZ=(XXX)^2=+1$ in contradiction to the -1 eigenvalue for all z-measurments.

The conclusion is (unless you assume some non-local conspiracy between the spins) that one has to take serious the fact that on a given spin I cannot measure both $\sigma_x$ and $\sigma_z$ and thus when actually measuring the latter I must not even assume that $X$ has some (although unknown) value $\pm 1$ as it leads to the contradiction. Stuff that I cannot measure does not have a value (that is also my understanding of what "not realistic" means).

Fruchtiger and Renner

Now to the recent Nature paper. In short, they are dealing with two qubits (by which I only mean two state systems). The first is in a box L' (I will try to use the somewhat unfortunate nomenclature from the paper) and the second in in a box L (L stands for lab). For L, we use the usual z-basis of $\uparrow$ and $\downarrow$ as well as the x-basis $\leftarrow = \frac 1{\sqrt 2}(\downarrow - \uparrow)$  and $\rightarrow = \frac 1{\sqrt 2}(\downarrow + \uparrow)$ . Similarly, for L' we use the basis $h$ and $t$ (heads and tails as it refers to a coin) as well as $o = \frac 1{\sqrt 2}(h - t)$ and $f = \frac 1{\sqrt 2}(h+f)$.  The two qubits are prepared in the state

$$\Phi = \frac{h\otimes\downarrow + \sqrt 2 t\otimes \rightarrow}{\sqrt 3}$$.

Clearly, a measurement of $t$ in box L' implies that box L has to contain the state $\rightarrow$. Call this observation A.

Let's re-express $\rightarrow$ in the x-basis:

$$\Phi =\frac {h\otimes \downarrow + t\otimes \downarrow + t\otimes\uparrow}{\sqrt 3}$$

From which one concludes that an observer inside box L that measures $\uparrow$ concludes that the qubit in box L' is in state $t$. Call this observation B.

Similarly, we can express the same state in the x-basis for L':

$$\Phi = \frac{4 f\otimes \downarrow+ f\otimes \uparrow - o\otimes \uparrow}{\sqrt 3}$$

From this once can conclude that measuring $o$ for the state of L' one can conclude that L is in the state $\uparrow$. Call this observation C.

Using now C, B and A one is tempted to conclude that observing L' to be in state $o$ implies that L is in state $\rightarrow$. When we express the state in the $ht\leftarrow\rightarrow$-basis, however, we get

$$\Phi = \frac{f\otimes\leftarrow+ 3f\otimes \rightarrow + o\otimes\leftarrow - o\otimes \rightarrow}{\sqrt{12}}.$$

so with probability 1/12 we find both $o$  and $\leftarrow$. Again, we hit a contradiction.

One is tempted to use the same way out as above in the three qubit case and say one should not argue about contrafactual measurements that are incompatible with measurements that were actually performed. But Frauchiger and Renner found a set-up which seems to avoid that.

They have observers F and F' ("friends") inside the boxes that do the measurements in the $ht$ and $\uparrow\downarrow$ basis whereas later observers W and W' measure the state of the boxes including the observer F and F' in the $of$ and $\leftarrow\rightarrow$ basis.  So, at each stage of A,B,C the corresponding measurement has actually taken place and is not contrafactual!

Interference and it did not happen

I believe the way out is to realise that at least from a retrospective perspective, this analysis stretches the language and in particular the word "measurement" to the extreme. In order for W' to measure the state of L' in the $of$-basis, he has to interfere the contents including F' coherently such that there is no leftover of information from F''s measurement of $ht$ remaining. Thus, when W''s measurement is performed one should not really say that F''s measurement has in any real sense happened as no possible information is left over. So it is in any practical sense contrafactual.

To see the alternative, consider a variant of the experiment where a tiny bit of information (maybe the position of one air molecule or the excitation of one of F''s neutrons) escapes the interference. Let's call the two possible states of that qubit of information $H$ and $T$ (not necessarily orthogonal) and consider instead the state where that neutron is also entangled with the first qubit:

$$\tilde \Phi = \frac{h\otimes\downarrow\otimes H + \sqrt 2 t\otimes \rightarrow\otimes T}{\sqrt 3}$$.

Then, the result of step C becomes

$$\tilde\Phi = \frac{f\otimes \downarrow\otimes H+ o\otimes \downarrow\otimes H+f\otimes \downarrow\otimes T-o\otimes\downarrow\otimes T + f\otimes \uparrow\otimes T-o \otimes\uparrow\times T}{\sqrt 6}.$$

We see that now there is a term containing $o\otimes\downarrow\otimes(H-T)$. Thus, as long as the two possible states of the air molecule/neuron are actually different, observation C is no longer valid and the whole contradiction goes away.

This makes it clear that the whole argument relies of the fact that when W' is doing his measurement any remnant of the measurement by his friend F' is eliminated and thus one should view the measurement of F' as if it never happened. Measuring L' in the $of$-basis really erases the measurement of F' in the complementary $ht$-basis.

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Bavarian electoral system

Last Sunday, we had the election for the federal state of Bavaria. Since the electoral system is kind of odd (but not as odd as first past the post), I would like to analyse how some variations (assuming the actual distribution of votes) in the rule would have worked out. So, first, here is how actually, the seats are distributed: Each voter gets two ballots: On the first ballot, each party lists one candidate from the local constituency and you can select one. On the second ballot, you can vote for a party list (it's even more complicated because also there, you can select individual candidates to determine the position on the list but let's ignore that for today).

Then in each constituency, the votes on ballot one are counted. The candidate with the most votes (like in first past the pole) gets elected for parliament directly (and is called a "direct candidate"). Then over all, the votes for each party on both ballots (this is where the system differs from the federal elections) are summed up. All votes for parties with less then 5% of the grand total of all votes are discarded (actually including their direct candidates but this is not of a partial concern). Let's call the rest the "reduced total". According to the fraction of each party in this reduced total the seats are distributed.

Of course the first problem is that you can only distribute seats in integer multiples of 1. This is solved using the Hare-Niemeyer-method: You first distribute the integer parts. This clearly leaves fewer seats open than the number of parties. Those you then give to the parties where the rounding error to the integer below was greatest. Check out the wikipedia page explaining how this can lead to a party losing seats when the total number of seats available is increased.

Because this is what happens in the next step: Remember that we already allocated a number of seats to constituency winners in the first round. Those count towards the number of seats that each party is supposed to get in step two according to the fraction of votes. Now, it can happen, that a party has won more direct candidates than seats allocated in step two. If that happens, more seats are added to the total number of seats and distributed according to the rules of step two until each party has been allocated at least the number of seats as direct candidates. This happens in particular if one party is stronger than all the other ones leading to that party winning almost all direct candidates (as in Bavaria this happened to the CSU which won all direct candidates except five in Munich and one in Würzburg which were won by the Greens).

A final complication is that Bavaria is split into seven electoral districts and the above procedure is for each district separately. So there are seven times rounding and adding seats procedures.

Sunday's election resulted in the following distribution of seats:

After the whole procedure, there are 205 seats distributed as follows

• CSU 85 (41.5% of seats)
• SPD 22 (10.7% of seats)
• FW 27 (13.2% of seats)
• GREENS 38 (18.5% of seats)
• FDP 11 (5.4% of seats)
• AFD 22 (10.7% of seats)

Now, for example one can calculate the distribution without districts throwing just everything in a single super-district. Then there are 208 seats distributed as

• CSU 85 (40.8%)
• SPD 22 (10.6%)
• FW 26 (12.5%)
• GREENS 40 (19.2%)
• FDP 12 (5.8%)
• AFD 23 (11.1%)
You can see that in particular the CSU, the party with the biggest number of votes profits from doing the rounding 7 times rather than just once and the last three parties would benefit from giving up districts.

But then there is actually an issue of negative weight of votes: The greens are particularly strong in Munich where they managed to win 5 direct seats. If instead those seats would have gone to the CSU (as elsewhere), the number of seats for Oberbayern, the district Munich belongs to would have had to be increased to accommodate those addition direct candidates for the CSU increasing the weight of Oberbayern compared to the other districts which would then be beneficial for the greens as they are particularly strong in Oberbayern: So if I give all the direct candidates to the CSU (without modifying the numbers of total votes), I get the follwing distribution:
221 seats
• CSU 91 (41.2%)
• SPD 24 (10.9%)
• FW 28 (12,6%)
• GREENS 42 (19.0%)
• FDP 12 (5.4%)
• AFD 24 (10.9%)
That is, there greens would have gotten a higher fraction of seats if they had won less constituencies. Voting for green candidates in Munich actually hurt the party as a whole!

The effect is not so big that it actually changes majorities (CSU and FW are likely to form a coalition) but still, the constitutional court does not like (predictable) negative weight of votes. Let's see if somebody challenges this election and what that would lead to.

The perl script I used to do this analysis is here.

Postscript:
The above analysis in the last point is not entirely fair as not to win a constituency means getting fewer votes which then are missing from the grand total. Taking this into account makes the effect smaller. In fact, subtracting the votes from the greens that they were leading by in the constituencies they won leads to an almost zero effect:

Seats: 220
• CSU  91 41.4%
• SPD  24 10.9%
• FW  28 12.7%
• GREENS  41 18.6%
• FDP  12 5.4%
• AFD  24 10.9%
Letting the greens win München Mitte (a newly created constituency that was supposed to act like a bad bank for the CSU taking up all central Munich more left leaning voters, do I hear somebody say "Gerrymandering"?) yields

Seats: 217
• CSU  90 41.5%
• SPD  23 10.6%
• FW  28 12.9%
• GREENS  41 18.9%
• FDP  12 5.5%
• AFD  23 10.6%
Or letting them win all but Moosach and Würzbug-Stadt where the lead was the smallest:

Seats: 210

• CSU  87 41.4%
• SPD  22 10.5%
• FW  27 12.9%
• GREENS  40 19.0%
• FDP  11 5.2%
• AFD  23 11.0%

Thursday, March 29, 2018

Machine Learning for Physics?!?

Today was the last day of a nice workshop here at the Arnold Sommerfeld Center organised by Thomas Grimm and Sven Krippendorf on the use of Big Data and Machine Learning in string theory. While the former (at this workshop mainly in the form of developments following Kreuzer/Skarke and taking it further for F-theory constructions, orbifolds and the like) appears to be quite advanced as of today, the latter is still in its very early days. At best.

I got the impression that for many physicists that have not yet spent too much time with this, deep learning and in particular deep neural networks are expected to be some kind of silver bullet that can answer all kinds of questions that humans have not been able to answer despite some effort. I think this hope is at best premature and looking at the (admittedly impressive) examples where it works (playing Go, classifying images, speech recognition, event filtering at LHC) these seem to be more like those problems where humans have at least a rough idea how to solve them (if it is not something that humans do everyday like understanding text) and also roughly how one would code it but that are too messy or vague to be treated by a traditional program.

So, during some of the less entertaining talks I sat down and thought about problems where I would expect neural networks to perform badly. And then, if this approach fails even in simpler cases that are fully under control one should maybe curb the expectations for the more complex cases that one would love to have the answer for. In the case of the workshop that would be guessing some topological (discrete) data (that depends very discontinuously on the model parameters). Here a simple problem would be a 2-torus wrapped by two 1-branes. And the computer is supposed to compute the number of matter generations arising from open strings at the intersections, i.e. given two branes (in terms of their slope w.r.t. the cycles of the torus) how often do they intersect? Of course these numbers depend sensitively on the slope (as a real number) as for rational slopes $p/q$ and $m/n$ the intersection number is the absolute value of $pn-qm$. My guess would be that this is almost impossible to get right for a neural network, let alone the much more complicated variants of this simple problem.

Related but with the possibility for nicer pictures is the following: Can a neural network learn the shape of the Mandelbrot set? Let me remind those of you who cannot remember the 80ies anymore, for a complex number c you recursively apply the function
$f_c(z)= z^2 +c$
starting from 0 and ask if this stays bounded (a quick check shows that once you are outside $|z| < 2$ you cannot avoid running to infinity). You color the point c in the complex plane according to the number of times you have to apply f_c to 0 to leave this circle. I decided to do this for complex numbers x+iy in the rectangle -0.74
I have written a small mathematica program to compute this image. Built into mathematica is also a neural network: You can feed training data to the function Predict[], for me these were 1,000,000 points in this rectangle and the number of steps it takes to leave the 2-ball. Then mathematica thinks for about 24 hours and spits out a predictor function. Then you can plot this as well:

There is some similarity but clearly it has no idea about the fractal nature of the Mandelbrot set. If you really believe in magic powers of neural networks, you might even hope that once it learned the function for this rectangle one could extrapolate to outside this rectangle. Well, at least in this case, this hope is not justified: The neural network thinks the correct continuation looks like this:
Ehm. No.

All this of course with the caveat that I am no expert on neural networks and I did not attempt anything to tune the result. I only took the neural network function built into mathematica. Maybe, with a bit of coding and TensorFlow one can do much better. But on the other hand, this is a simple two dimensional problem. At least for traditional approaches this should be much simpler than the other much higher dimensional problems the physicists are really interested in.

Thursday, December 14, 2017

What are the odds?

It's the time of year, you give out special problems in your classes. So this is mine for the blog. It is motivated by this picture of the home secretaries of the German federal states after their annual meeting as well as some recent discussions on Facebook:
I would like to call it Summers' problem:

Let's have two real random variables $M$ and $F$ that are drawn according to two probability distributions $\rho_{M/F}(x)$ (for starters you may both assume to be Gaussians but possibly with different mean and variance). Take $N$ draws from each and order the $2N$ results. What is the probability that the $k$ largest ones are all from $M$ rather than $F$? Express your results in terms of the $\rho_{M/F}(x)$. We are also interested in asymptotic results for $N$ large and $k$ fixed as well as $N$ and $k$ large but $k/N$ fixed.

Last bonus question: How many of the people that say that they hire only based on merit and end up with an all male board realise that by this they say that women are not as good by quite a margin?

Thursday, November 09, 2017

Why is there a supercontinent cycle?

One of the most influential books of my early childhood was my "Kinderatlas"
There were many things to learn about the world (maps were actually only the last third of the book) and for example I blame my fascination for scuba diving on this book. Also last year, when we visited the Mont-Doré in Auvergne and I had to explain how volcanos are formed to my kids to make them forget how many stairs were still ahead of them to the summit, I did that while mentally picturing the pages in that book about plate tectonics.

But there is one thing I about tectonics that has been bothering me for a long time and I still haven't found a good explanation for (or at least an acknowledgement that there is something to explain): Since the days of Alfred Wegener we know that the jigsaw puzzle pieces of the continents fit in a way that geologists believe that some hundred million years ago they were all connected as a supercontinent Pangea.

By Original upload by en:User:Tbower - USGS animation A08, Public Domain, Link

In fact, that was only the last in a series of supercontinents, that keep forming and breaking up in the "supercontinent cycle".

By SimplisticReps - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

So here is the question: I am happy with the idea of several (say $N$) plates roughly containing a continent each that a floating around on the magma driven by all kinds of convection processes in the liquid part of the earth. They are moving around in a pattern that looks to me to be pretty chaotic (in the non-technical sense) and of course for random motion you would expect that from time to time two of those collide and then maybe stick for a while.

Then it would be possible that also a third plate collides with the two but that would be a coincidence (like two random lines typically intersect but if you have three lines they would typically intersect in pairs but typically not in a triple intersection). But to form a supercontinent, you need all $N$ plates to miraculously collide at the same time. This order-$N$ process seems to be highly unlikely when random let alone the fact that it seems to repeat. So this motion cannot be random (yes, Sabine, this is a naturalness argument). This needs an explanation.

So, why, every few hundred million years, do all the land masses of the earth assemble on side of the earth?

One explanation could for example be that during those tines, the center of mass of the earth is not in the symmetry center so the water of the oceans flow to one side of the earth and reveals the seabed on the opposite side of the earth. Then you would have essentially one big island. But this seems not to be the case as the continents (those parts that are above sea-level) appear to be stable on much longer time scales. It is not that the seabed comes up on one side and the land on the other goes under water but the land masses actually move around to meet on one side.

I have already asked this question whenever I ran into people with a geosciences education but it is still open (and I have to admit that in a non-zero number of cases I failed to even make the question clear that an $N$-body collision needs an explanation). But I am sure, you my readers know the answer or even better can come up with one.