Schrödinger's Blue Whale

And some non-computing quantum supremacy

Apr 08, 2025

Too much “supremacy” in the politicosphere to deal with (check out Finkelstein here with Bri), so instead of the depressing ball of nihilist-inducing anxiety, how about something more fun today?

If you wish to learn quantum theory, (what? yeah it is fun) without needing to sit an exam, nor divert yourself with a smartphone in the lecture rooms, I would recommend Alex Maloney’s courses out of McGill University, or this dude Frederic Schuller (if Einstein had a genial autistic OCD son). These two are complimentary. Maloney’s is rougher, but has more physical insight and focus, Schuller’s is more formal, but with wry humour and wonderful spirit.

Some Quantum Supremacy?

Little bit of a spicy heading there. (More spice later if you read on…) All I mean is the best quantum theory lectures around.

I knew about Frederic Schuller from his excellent geometry of physics series. His quantum theory series is equally as good, and a rival, or complement, to Alex Maloney’s nice courses out of McGill. Both excellent teachers.

But if you go for Schuller’s courses, the sparkling rigour might fool you, so I advise reading what I have to say as preparatory. I will keep it brief, since it really only concerns his introductory remarks. Once you understand my counter, then the rest of his course is digestible and you will not have to worry about the “weirdness” of quantum mechanics. It is not weird. What is weird is the way people try to interpret QM as actual reality. It is not actual reality. It is a mere statistical description of measurement outcomes.

Very little in QM tells you what the world is made of, for that you need the Standard Model + Gravity (which is, of course, what T4G is trying to say).

Do take what I write with a grain of salt. All I set out to do is undermine the orthodoxy and corrupt the youth, but at least with a decent alternative (Topological 4-Geon theory). I do not leave students hanging.

Fact-checking Frederic

So I just had these few comments.

Good lecture series overall, but bad start @2:00 . One should never make strong ontological claims (such as “the trajectory does not even exist”) about a provisional theory like QM. You are making one parochial interpretation, and you have no clue that it is “true”.
QM can always be taken to be a merely effective stochastic description of events in an otherwise classical configuration space. (See Jacob Barandes' papers.) The ontology that can make QM not classical even with a classical configuration space, is indivisible non-Markov stochastic processes, which ultimately (in 4D) can be accounted for with entanglement structure. This yields interference and superposition, but retains local realism. The reason the Bell Inequalities can be derived (and violated) is not necessarily due to non-locality, but could be due to non-Reichenbach probabilities, i.e., non-Reichenbach common cause variables that cannot be integrated or summed over. They are not “hidden variables” per se but they cannot be summed over (equivalently, that is because they are essentially the variables for the [let’s say Planck scale] indivisible structure). Pretty much any spacetime model for entanglement has such non-Reichenbach structure, for example ER=EPR structure. (Einstein triumphs again!)

Then when Frederic started talking about a whole whale going through both slits I had to make another remark:

@3:12 I would doubt very much is the the “amount of mass” involved, which is a type of Penrose-Diósi decoherence argument (all but ruled out). I think it is more a question of combinatorics. Entanglement being ultimately what is responsible for superposition and interference, and entanglement being monogamous. So the coherence needed for two-slit type interference is bipartite (except for topologically more exotic GHZ states). The more pairs needed to be entangled the worse for the interference effect, since each entanglement bridge has a fairly fixed probability of collapsing.

Schuller correctly noted two-slit interference of 800 atom sized molecules has been observed. Which is amazing. But well short of a Blue Whale.

It is amazing because like the Bose-Einstein condensates, these experiments on the blue-green-brown Earth have achieved conditions that are not found anywhere else in the naturally occurring cosmos. Has to make you wonder about human beings. Not just fancy Apes, not just biological computations, I would say. We have connections to The Divine. (Lord knows how or what that connection is, I try not to ask, it leads to madness.)

There is simply no sense in which a Blue Whale is ever in coherent superposition, the combinatorics “explode” (the probability vanishes).

*Using up all my fiat comedy tokens for the year. After this it is going to be all credit taking from the Bank of Bill Burr.*

When Amplitudes Vanish

The deceptive thing about QM is that it is a statistical theory. But too many people want to take it to be ontological. Bad mistake. Exactly the same mistake is being made writ large with LLM’s. (They are not conscious folks, sorry to say. Find someone with a soul to love.) So when the orthodox argument Tin Man hits back and claims,

Mr Orthodicx: “Well, the amplitude for the Blue Whale going through both slits is small, but never non-zero…”

one can only laugh…

… but then try to restore some sanity. For a start, a statistical amplitude does not reflect reality. It reflects possible measurement outcomes.

It is always possible that superpositions simply do not exist. (I refer you again to Jacob Barandes.) A theory that tells you Moby Dick (not to pick on just the blue whales) could be in two places at once, or at least has some amplitude for more than one location of His centre of mass, is only a statistical theory. It tells you nothing about whether Moby Dick actually is in a ghostly superposition.

Since entanglement is monogamous, we can only say pairwise the electrons and quarks of Moby Dick have some chance of not being uniquely localized.

That’s pretty much it. I am struggling to force myself to dream up a topology for the Standard Model su(3)⊕su(2)⊕u(1) algebra. Dreams are hard to force, I am finding, especially with real life madness and artificial but real imposed macroeconomic austerity happening around us, for no good reason except power elites are inbred ꛘ𖠢𖥕ꛚ𖥣𖧳𖠢𖦪𖧥ꛚ ᗑᗝᖇᗝᐱᔑ with no discernible souls (not saying they are soulless… they’re shriveled).

At least we know there is a topology (Langland’s stuff, there is always a topology for an algebra if the dimensionality is matched). But dynamics is a 𝖇𝑒🅈🅰𝙩ⓒ🅗. We cannot just dream-up any old 4D wormhole braiding nonsense, it is bound to be generically unstable under gravitational curvature, and so cannot generically be a model for stable elementary particles.

But darnitall, I’d settle for now for just any topology. You got one? I’ll buy your wormoil.

Last touch, had to mention: Melville’s Moby Dick is a truly great novel. Take note of the chapter on the tyranny of the colour ⓦⓗⓘⓣⓔ. It is a brilliant piece of literature.