Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debunked

Foundations of physics and/or philosophy of physics, and in particular, posts on unresolved or controversial issues

Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debunked

Postby Joy Christian » Sun Jan 27, 2019 6:25 pm

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I have updated my refutation of an earlier critique of my disproof of Bell's theorem in this preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.5876. The updated text is in the notations of this preprint.

I have added a new section in the above preprint, section XIV, summarising my refutations of five critiques of my disproof of Bell's theorem, two by Gill, three by Moldoveanu, and one by Weatherall; see the new section, entitled "Notes Added to Proof --- Responses to Past Criticisms", on pages 12 to 16. It was necessary to add the new section because some referees of my papers are reporting to the journal editors about the above five critiques without informing them about my refutations of them. This post is my attempt to overcome this unethical tactic.

Note also that none of the above "critics" have required qualifications. None has a peer-reviewed publication record in geometric algebra, division algebras, topology, or general relativity. Apart from Weatherall, I also had an encounter with another philosopher called Tim Maudlin, but he too turned out to be rather dogmatic and closedminded to appreciate my local model.

And it is not only individuals that have exhibited dogmatism and bigotry. Academic institutions like FQXi have also exhibited dogmatism and hypocrisy when faced with my local model. Its report on my work found that Gill's and Moldoveanu's claim of "a sign error" is fallacious but failed to declare this publicly because its political interests lie in protecting itself, not science.

There are also some online critiques of my local model, such as this, this, and this. But none of them deserve responding to, because these critics have never bothered to read my papers.

Ignoring the ad hominem attacks on me by these classy critics, let me reproduce some excerpts from my refutations of the critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall, from this paper:

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Joy Christian

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Re: Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debun

Postby Joy Christian » Fri Feb 01, 2019 9:33 pm

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I forgot to mention that there is also another unpublished "critique" by Gill, which he has posted on viXra: http://vixra.org/abs/1504.0102

I have responded to it briefly in the Replies-to-Reviewers of my Royal Society paper: http://einstein-physics.org/wp-content/ ... s-RSOS.pdf

And I have previously posted the following comments at Gill's Researchgate page: https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... 7s_Theorem

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I have heard that Gill has been permanently banned from posting on the arXiv since mid-2015, after he tried to post the above error-filled critique to arXiv. Apparently, the archive moderators did not approve the abusive and unprofessional language Gill used throughout the submitted version of his critique, apart from it being a manifestly incoherent preprint.

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Re: Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debun

Postby Joy Christian » Mon Feb 04, 2019 2:21 am

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The ultimate lesson here is that only uneducated and ignorant people believe in Bell's “theorem.” Just because someone is holding a professorial position at a respectable university does not mean that they are not ignorant of basic mathematics and physics, and educated enough to understand that Bell's "theorem" was a non-starter. Bell claimed that no analytical functions such as those defined in equations (1) and (2) of my one-page paper, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.1879.pdf, can reproduce the correlation E(a, b) = -cos(a, b) between them. Thus Bell’s is a strictly analytical claim. Any talk of computer simulations is beside the point. My local-realistic model in the paper above clearly demonstrates that Bell was grossly wrong about this claim:

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Re: Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debun

Postby Joy Christian » Sat Feb 16, 2019 11:46 am

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Today I received an email from someone with a question that is relevant for this thread. Let me reproduce some parts of our exchange (it is edited to remove the identity of the sender):

XXXXXXX wrote:
Dear Joy,

I read your excellent 2018 Royal Society Paper on Quantum Correlations in S3/S7 and some of your earlier publications. ...

The mathematical and physical properties of S3 are absolutely fascinating indeed. ...

Obviously Aaronson is a critic of your work; however, my impression is that there may be some degree of misunderstanding involved. In your view, what is it that he and others basically get wrong about quantum correlations in S3?

Best,

XXXXXXX


And here is my reply (again, somewhat edited):

Joy Christian wrote:
Dear XXXXXXX,

Thank you for your kind words about my Royal Society paper. ... The properties of S^3 are indeed profound. What I have presented in my Royal Society paper is ... that once we take into account the properties of S^3 as a physical space, then the strong correlations can be reproduced using local functions like A(a, h) and B(b, h), where h is a randomness shared between Alice and Bob.

Aaronson and others do not seem to have realized that I am using S^3 for my argument. You will not find S^3 mentioned anywhere in their criticism of my work. In my view there are two mistakes involved in their criticisms:

(1) Quite independently of my S^3 model for the quantum correlations, their first mistake is to think that Bell’s theorem is a theorem in a mathematical sense. But it is not. It is a physical argument based on mathematical inequalities that were discovered by George Boole some 100 years before Bell. And, as a physical argument, Bell’s theorem is a deeply flawed argument, as I have explained in section 4.2 of my Royal Society paper.

(2) When it comes to my S^3 model for the strong correlations, what the critics do is misrepresent what I have actually presented, criticize their own misrepresentation, and then declare that they have refuted my model. In other words, their argument against my model is a strawman argument. More specifically, Aaronson argues that my measurement results A(a, h) = +/-1 and B(b, h) = +/-1 are always anti-correlated and therefore Bell inequalities are never violated. Nothing can be further from the truth. In my model A(a, h) and B(b, h) are anti-correlated for all a and b if and only if the conservation of zero-spin angular momentum is violated. This is Physics 101. So Aaronson’s mistake is actually quite elementary. He makes this mistake for two reasons: (I) Because he can’t bring himself to believe that Bell’s theorem is wrong, and (II) because he has not understood that I am talking about the geometry of S^3, and consequently what he calls “something complicated” in my definitions of the functions A(a, h) and B(b, h) is in fact absolutely vital for understanding the physics of the singlet correlations.

Best,

Joy

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Re: Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debun

Postby Joy Christian » Sat Feb 23, 2019 5:04 am

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I have written up a long overdue refutation of Scott Aaronson's online critique of my local-realistic model:

Refutation of Scott Aaronson's Critique of my Disproof of Bell's Theorem

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Re: Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debun

Postby Joy Christian » Sat Mar 02, 2019 12:42 am

Joy Christian wrote:
I have written up a long overdue refutation of Scott Aaronson's online critique of my local-realistic model:

Refutation of Scott Aaronson's Critique of my Disproof of Bell's Theorem

Image

Fortunately, the Truth cannot be starved off so easily, and Aaronson has not succeeded in his goal. :)

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Re: Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debun

Postby Richard D. Gill » Sat Mar 02, 2019 11:48 pm

Joy Christian wrote:***
I have heard that Gill has been permanently banned from posting on the arXiv since mid-2015, after he tried to post the above error-filled critique to arXiv. Apparently, the archive moderators did not approve the abusive and unprofessional language Gill used throughout the submitted version of his critique, apart from it being a manifestly incoherent preprint.

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Having been long ago banned from this forum, I'm no longer able to respond to posts here ... and in general, I don't want to. But I would like to register my objection to the remarks I have just quoted. I have not been permanently banned from posting on the arXiv. In fact, the last three years I was generally "out of circulation" due to pretty serious health issues. Moreover, two years ago I reached mandatory retirement age so I'm now an emeritus professor, which means I have more time for various other hobbies.

Anyone who is interested can see some speeches made at my official retirement ceremony, one and a half years ago, on my blog http://richardgill.weblog.leidenuniv.nl/

I'm still quite proud of my one and only viXra paper http://vixra.org/abs/1504.0102. It seems that at the time, the arXiv moderators routinely rejected all papers on Christian's work, whoever they were by. The excuse they used for me (after I had fixed the language used in the title) was because my paper is of tutorial nature and arXiv (and in particular, quant-ph) does not accept tutorial papers.
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Re: Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debun

Postby Joy Christian » Sun Mar 03, 2019 10:03 am

Richard D. Gill wrote:
Joy Christian wrote:***
I have heard that Gill has been permanently banned from posting on the arXiv since mid-2015, after he tried to post the above error-filled critique to arXiv. Apparently, the archive moderators did not approve the abusive and unprofessional language Gill used throughout the submitted version of his critique, apart from it being a manifestly incoherent preprint.

I have not been permanently banned from posting on the arXiv.

That is good to know.

I look forward to seeing Gill’s new work on the arXiv, or a renewal of an existing preprint, since none has appeared after July 2015: https://arxiv.org/search/?query=Gill%2C ... rce=header

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Re: Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debun

Postby Joy Christian » Wed Mar 06, 2019 10:37 am

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Some people do not seem to have access to Academia.edu. A PDF of the paper can be downloaded also from the Einstein Centre: http://einstein-physics.org/wp-content/ ... ronson.pdf

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Re: Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debun

Postby Richard D. Gill » Wed Mar 06, 2019 11:04 pm

Joy Christian wrote:
Richard D. Gill wrote:
Joy Christian wrote:***
I have heard that Gill has been permanently banned from posting on the arXiv since mid-2015, after he tried to post the above error-filled critique to arXiv. Apparently, the archive moderators did not approve the abusive and unprofessional language Gill used throughout the submitted version of his critique, apart from it being a manifestly incoherent preprint.

I have not been permanently banned from posting on the arXiv.

That is good to know.

I look forward to seeing Gill’s new work on the arXiv, or a renewal of an existing preprint, since none has appeared after July 2015: https://arxiv.org/search/?query=Gill%2C ... rce=header

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Thanks for your remarks. I had a totally disastrous 3 years (health and personal). Some new stuff is coming up very soon (forensic science / Bayes nets), but I have nothing quantum in the pipeline and no plans to renew existing preprints.

It occurs to me right now that Joy and I could bundle our exchanges on the RSOS forum into a joint paper.
Richard D. Gill
 

Re: Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debun

Postby Joy Christian » Sat Mar 09, 2019 8:19 am

Richard D. Gill wrote:
It occurs to me right now that Joy and I could bundle our exchanges on the RSOS forum into a joint paper.

None of the comments on that RSOS thread, apart from a few by me, Fred, and Robert, are worthy of publication.

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Re: Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debun

Postby Joy Christian » Tue Mar 19, 2019 6:37 pm

Joy Christian wrote:
Joy Christian wrote:
I have written up a long overdue refutation of Scott Aaronson's online critique of my local-realistic model:

Refutation of Scott Aaronson's Critique of my Disproof of Bell's Theorem

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Fortunately, the Truth cannot be starved off so easily, and Aaronson has not succeeded in his goal. :)

There have been 828 views in three weeks of my post below in the LinkedIn news feed. That is nearly three times the views of any of my previous posts in that news feed. Aaronson effect?

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Re: Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debun

Postby Joy Christian » Fri Mar 22, 2019 4:34 am

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Scott Aaronson seems to have responded to my refutation of his claims. The following comment was posted by him on his blog on March 13: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4145

Scott Aaronson wrote:
Once I slipped up, and made a single ad hominem comment about Cathy McGeoch (lead author of the “D-Wave machine gets a 3000x speedup” paper). I quickly apologized and I still regret it. Besides that, the one time in 13 years that I think I even came close to Bray and Pachter’s tone, was with the aggressive Bell’s-theorem-denialist Joy Christian. The reader can judge for herself whether Joy Christian and Manolis Kellis inhabit the same moral or intellectual universe. Even there, though, I regret getting drawn into the mud; it would’ve been more effective on my part to keep things professional.

Well, "regret" is cheap and does not undo the damage he has done to me (which is huge, if anyone cares to know). But it is good to know that he has made some progress: He now calls me "aggressive Bell's-theorem-denialist." That is progress because previously he used to call me a "Bell's-inequlity-denialist", which is not only false but also reveals his lack of understanding of the difference between Bell's inequality and Bell's theorem. How can anyone deny a mathematical inequality? On the other hand, Bell's theorem is not a theorem in the mathematical sense and its validity within physics can indeed be denied and have been from its very inception. So, again, it is good to know that Aaronson is finally making progress in learning some basic facts.

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Re: Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debun

Postby Joy Christian » Fri Apr 26, 2019 9:00 pm

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Another excerpt from this paper: https://www.academia.edu/38423874/Refut ... ls_Theorem

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One does not have to be Einstein to understand Bell's mistake. His so-called theorem can only be proved by considering three or four incompatible physical experiments involving mutually exclusive detector directions. Thus "it is not the objective measurable predictions of quantum mechanics which rules out local hidden variables. It is the arbitrary assumption of a particular (and impossible) relation between the results of incompatible measurements either of which might be made on a given occasion but only one of which can, in fact, be made." For further details, see https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.02876.

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Re: Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debun

Postby minkwe » Mon Apr 29, 2019 1:55 pm

This is indeed the most ironic aspect of this Bell drama. Bell himself provided the most succinct explanation of his error. Is the problem that most Bell proponents can't read, or won't read, or simply do not understand what seems so obvious? It is a sad state of affairs.
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Re: Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debun

Postby Joy Christian » Mon Apr 29, 2019 2:44 pm

minkwe wrote:This is indeed the most ironic aspect of this Bell drama. Bell himself provided the most succinct explanation of his error. Is the problem that most Bell proponents can't read, or won't read, or simply do not understand what seems so obvious? It is a sad state of affairs.

Their blind spot has to do with the assumption of the so-called "statistical independence'' of the three or four separate pairs of measurement settings involved in Bell's argument. But, to put it rather politely, statistical independence is hardly the same thing as actual independence. Statistics and probabilities are used by the followers of Bell to simply obfuscate Bell's mistake.

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Re: Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debun

Postby Joy Christian » Thu May 02, 2019 5:36 pm

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I have revised my "Bell's oversight" paper to include the following "Note added to proof": https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.02876

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Re: Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debun

Postby gill1109 » Tue May 21, 2019 4:22 am

Joy Christian wrote:
minkwe wrote:This is indeed the most ironic aspect of this Bell drama. Bell himself provided the most succinct explanation of his error. Is the problem that most Bell proponents can't read, or won't read, or simply do not understand what seems so obvious? It is a sad state of affairs.

Their blind spot has to do with the assumption of the so-called "statistical independence'' of the three or four separate pairs of measurement settings involved in Bell's argument. But, to put it rather politely, statistical independence is hardly the same thing as actual independence. Statistics and probabilities are used by the followers of Bell to simply obfuscate Bell's mistake.

Certainly, the distinction between statistical independence, mathematical independence, and physical independence has confused readers and critics of Bell for all these long years, and still does. There are very interesting “metaphysical” analyses of when one kind of independence might imply another in recent works on Causality. I think of Judea Pearl’s “modern classic” (2nd edition) and of the new book on machine learning and causality by Jonas Peters et al, you can find a legal and free pdf on internet if you follow the links carefully. Both books even use the Bell-CHSH business as an example. They are both based on the modern theory of “graphical models” aka “Bayes nets”, a wonderful integration of computing, graphics, probability theory, and statistics. Lots and lots of money being made with them, too. I’ll try to add some links and exact references later.

There are now also quantum graphical models, just the same thing: “graphs” which specify statistical dependencies; but with several different kinds of nodes and different kinds of edges.
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Re: Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debun

Postby FrediFizzx » Tue May 21, 2019 6:50 pm

gill1109 wrote:Certainly, the distinction between statistical independence, mathematical independence, and physical independence has confused readers and critics of Bell for all these long years, and still does.

You might be and probably still are confused but many of us are not.
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Re: Fake Critiques by Gill, Moldoveanu, and Weatherall Debun

Postby gill1109 » Tue May 21, 2019 11:46 pm

FrediFizzx wrote:
gill1109 wrote:Certainly, the distinction between statistical independence, mathematical independence, and physical independence has confused readers and critics of Bell for all these long years, and still does.

You might be and probably still are confused but many of us are not.

:D :D :D :D
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