Dr John Cornwell
Jesus College
Cambridge
20 November 2003
Dear Dr Cornwell
I was originally going to write to you about your article on Hitler’s Scientists in New Scientist, September 17 2003 (p 25), but must admit from the outset that the link is tenuous! You talk there about the paymasters exercising too much control; I am more concerned with peer pressure and the peer review system, though or course money does come into the story.
You say at the end of your article:
“By communicating and organising themselves, scientists must now wrest back the initiative and protect the freedom and integrity of science itself.”
I wonder if you have encountered the communication failure that is currently turning a large and growing area of physics into a farce? I don’t think this is directly due to the influence of paymasters – or, at least, it was not so originally. It started as just a shared belief, and is now mainly peer pressure, sustaining that belief despite the fact that the real experts now know that it is not backed by experimental evidence.
The subject I’m talking about is “quantum entanglement”. It was first investigated experimentally in the 1960’s, then more formally in the 1970’s and 80’s. The early experimenters could not find any “local realist” (i.e. ordinary scientific) way of explaining their results, so, since the latter agreed numerically with the quantum mechanics predictions, they published papers that anyone could be forgiven for taking as saying their experiments had supported QM. In other words, the real world at the quantum level was “weird”, with particles in one place able instantaneously and miraculously to influence those in others. [This is not exactly what was said, but is certainly the impression given.]
Now later, after much discussion at conferences attended by local realists as well as quantum theorists, it became known among the “experts” that there existed “loopholes” in the experiments. They departed sufficiently from perfection to allow the possibility of local realist explanations after all. This message, however, seems to have been kept rather private!
The most famous of the experiments in the group are those of Alain Aspect, of 1981-2, and he surely is aware of all the loopholes. Not only have the most active local realists told him, but I have myself, starting in 1996 or so, sent copies of all my papers. Yet we find him in 1999 publishing:
Aspect, A: “Bell's inequality test: more ideal than ever”, Nature 398, March 1999, pp 189-190.
In view of the experimental facts, the title is ridiculous, the contents little better.
Great numbers of scientists are now working on “applications” of this quantum entanglement effect that has not been proved to happen. No “ideal Bell inequality” has ever even been tested. Evidently there is a failure of communication, not only between experts and public but also between experts and other groups of scientists. Fortunately, when you come to look in detail at some of the supposed applications, you find that the results do not really require the weird parts of QM. They are perfectly valid in their own right. [A case in point is, I think, Nasr et al’s recent work on “Quantum-Optical Coherence Tomography” (2003 Phys. Rev. Lett. 91 083601).]
The big problem comes in “Quantum Computing”. The whole field has gained financial backing as a result of the claim that, when it actually comes, quantum computing will be enormously faster than ordinary computing. Again, the claim can be taken as partially true, since there is a major ambiguity in the use of the term: to many, “quantum computing” is synonymous with “nano-scale computing”, which is making real progress. The idea of being able to use quantum magic, though, is an illusion sustained by misleading publications.
What has happened? Is it lack of integrity or merely failure of communication? The failure, as I see it, starts with the peer review system: articles publicising the “Bell test loopholes” are not published in the “quality” journals unless they are so obscure that nobody can be expected to understand them! Articles from the “dissident” journals (which do publish comprehensible articles when offered) are not quoted by magazines such as New Scientist. Neither the public nor the majority of the people who would now say their work involves quantum entanglement ever get to see them.
I enclose a copy of a paper describing my own attempts at publication of a paper whose contents are not in dispute:
Thompson, C H, "The Tangled Methods of Quantum Entanglement Experiments", Accountability in Research, vol. 6, no. 4, pp 311-332 (1999).
Please do pass this letter on to any others interested in communicating science. If you give me an email address I can send you an electronic copy.
Yours sincerely
Caroline H Thompson
CC: The Editor, New Scientist