Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will Favorite posts | Manifold podcast | Twitter: @hsu_steve
Thursday, June 30, 2022
Kishore Mahbubani: A Nuanced View of Asia & China's Rise — Manifold Podcast #15
Thursday, June 23, 2022
Polygenic Health Index, General Health, and Disease Risk
Polygenic Health Index, General Health, and Disease Risk
We construct a polygenic health index as a weighted sum of polygenic risk scores for 20 major disease conditions, including, e.g., coronary artery disease, type 1 and 2 diabetes, schizophrenia, etc. Individual weights are determined by population-level estimates of impact on life expectancy. We validate this index in odds ratios and selection experiments using unrelated individuals and siblings (pairs and trios) from the UK Biobank. Individuals with higher index scores have decreased disease risk across almost all 20 diseases (no significant risk increases), and longer calculated life expectancy. When estimated Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) are used as the performance metric, the gain from selection among 10 individuals (highest index score vs average) is found to be roughly 4 DALYs. We find no statistical evidence for antagonistic trade-offs in risk reduction across these diseases. Correlations between genetic disease risks are found to be mostly positive and generally mild. These results have important implications for public health and also for fundamental issues such as pleiotropy and genetic architecture of human disease conditions.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.06.15.22276102v1
The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away
Psalm 90:10
Monday, June 20, 2022
Amsterdam, Utrecht, Split, Hvar
Thursday, June 16, 2022
Greg Clark: Genetics and Social Mobility — Manifold Episode #14
Sunday, June 12, 2022
Von Neumann: The Interaction of Mathematics and Computing, Stan Ulam 1976 talk (video)
To solve this problem, the Los Alamos team planned to produce an “explosive lens”, a combination of different explosives with different shock wave speeds. When molded into the proper shape and dimensions, the high-speed and low-speed shock waves would combine with each other to produce a uniform concave pressure wave with no gaps. This inwardly-moving concave wave, when it reached the plutonium sphere at the center of the design, would instantly squeeze the metal to at least twice the density, producing a compressed ball of plutonium that contained about 5 times the necessary critical mass. A nuclear explosion would then result.
Saturday, June 11, 2022
Genomic Prediction on WHYY The Pulse
Startup offers genetic testing that promises to predict healthiest embryo
Aurea toddles around in her pink sparkly sneakers, climbing up the steps that, to her, are nearly waist high. Her tiny t-shirt is the epitome of how adorable she is. It says “you + me + snuggles.” Aurea’s father, Rafal Smigrodzki, watches over his little girl. He is clearly proud of her. “She’s very lively. I think she’s a pretty, pretty happy baby,” Smigrodzki said, “a very often smiley baby.”
Of course, Smigrodzki thinks his baby is special — most parents do. But Aurea is indeed unique. She was born almost two years ago and happens to be the first child born as the result of a new type of genetic screening, which carefully selected her embryo. Smigrodzki and his girlfriend used in vitro fertilization and an advanced selection process from a startup called Genomic Prediction.
The New Jersey startup offers genetic tests and promises to help prospective parents select embryos with the best possible genes. The company says its test can screen embryos for a variety of diseases and health conditions, like heart disease, diabetes, or breast cancer.
Smigrodzki, a neurologist with a PhD in genetics, stumbled across the company in 2017.
“I was always interested and reading about all kinds of new developments,” he said. “And just happened to read an article in the MIT Technology Review about Genomic Prediction.”
...
Thursday, June 02, 2022
John Mearsheimer: Great Powers, U.S. Hegemony, and the Rise of China — Manifold Podcast #13
Sunday, May 29, 2022
Genomic Prediction in Bloomberg
Bloomberg: Simone Collins knew she was pregnant the moment she answered the phone. ... Embryo 3, the fertilized egg that Collins and her husband, Malcolm, had picked, could soon be their daughter—a little girl with, according to their tests, an unusually good chance of avoiding heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and schizophrenia.
This isn’t a story about Gattaca-style designer babies. No genes were edited in the creation of Collins’s embryo. The promise, from dozens of fertility clinics around the world, is just that the new DNA tests they’re using can assess, in unprecedented detail, whether one embryo is more likely than the next to develop a range of illnesses long thought to be beyond DNA-based predictions. It’s a new twist on the industry-standard testing known as preimplantation genetic testing, which for decades has checked embryos for rare diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, that are caused by a single gene.
One challenge with leading killers like cancer and heart disease is that they’re usually polygenic: linked to many different genes with complex interactions. Patients such as Collins can now take tests that assess thousands of DNA data points to decode these complexities and compute the disease risks. Genomic Prediction, the five-year-old New Jersey company that handled the tests for her fertility clinic, generates polygenic risk scores, predicting in percentage terms each embryo’s chances of contracting each disease in the panel, plus a composite score for overall health. Parents with multiple embryos can then weigh the scores when deciding which one to implant.
...
This new form of genetic embryo testing appears to move humanity one step closer to control of its evolution. The $14 billion IVF industry brings more than 500,000 babies into the world each year, and with infertility rates rising, the market is expected to more than double this decade. Companies including Genomic Prediction bet many going into that process have seen enough loved ones suffer from a polygenic disease to want risk scoring.
[ Note I think the number of IVF babies born worldwide each year is more like 1 million, but there is some uncertainty in estimates. ]
...
In December, Genomic Prediction doubled its venture funding to about $25 million and says it will use the cash to expand and add to its testing panel. Boston IVF, one of the biggest fertility networks in the US, recently started offering Genomic Prediction’s polygenic testing to its patients, says CEO David Stern. “Like anything else, you have early adopters,” he says. “We have had patients who worked in the biotech field or the Harvard milieu who came in and asked for it.” Stern predicts that, like egg freezing, polygenic embryo testing will grow slowly at first, but steadily, and eventually demand will reflect the powerful appeal of lowering a child’s odds for disease.
...
Believers such as Collins and her husband support government subsidies for fertility and parenthood but aren’t interested in any conversation about slowing down. “This is about the people who care about giving their children every opportunity,” she says. “I do not believe that law or social norms are going to stop parents from giving their kids advantages.”
... improved success rates resulting from higher accuracy in aneuploidy screening of embryos will affect millions of families around the world, and over 60% of all IVF families in the US.
The SNP array platform allows very accurate genotyping of each embryo at ~1 million locations in the genome, and the subsequent bioinformatic analysis produces a much more accurate prediction of chromosomal normality than the older methods.
Millions of embryos are screened each year using PGT-A, about 60% of all IVF embryos in the US.
Klaus Wiemer is the laborator director for Poma Fertility near Seattle. He conducted this study independently, without informing Genomic Prediction.
There are ~3000 embryos in the dataset, all biopsied at Poma and samples allocated to three testing labs A,B,C using the two different methods. The family demographics (e.g., maternal age) were similar in all three groups. Lab B is Genomic Prediction and A,C are two of the largest IVF testing labs in the world, using NGS.
The results imply lower false-positive rates, lower false-negative rates, and higher accuracy overall from our methods. These lead to a significantly higher pregnancy success rate.
The new technology has the potential to help millions of families all over the world.
Thursday, May 19, 2022
Theodore A. Postol: Nuclear Weapons, Missile Technology, and U.S. Diplomacy — Manifold #12
Ted Postol: ... So, you've got to listen to Putin's voice dispassionately. And when you listen to him, he makes it clear numerous times, numerous times that he doesn't think American missile defense is a worth anything, but he also is worried about an American president who might believe otherwise, and who might take steps against Russia, that would then lead to an action-reaction cycle that would get us, get us all killed.
In other words, he's not just worried about the system, whether it can work, he's worried about American political leadership and what they think, or if they think, or if they know. And that was, you know, I was very receptive to understanding that because that's exactly what I went through, you know, 30 years earlier when I was at the Pentagon, looking at this dog of a missile defense.
And so, the Chinese look at this, they know the Americans are lying to them all the time. I could give you a good story about South Korea and the way we lied to the South Koreans and lied to the Chinese.
I was really furious with that. That was under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And my view is...
Steve: THAAD?
Ted Postol: THAAD, right. THAAD in South Korea.
And my view is if you're lying to an ally and you're lying, you know, I have very good friends. I'm very, very proud to say I have some very good friends who are high-level diplomats, and I've asked every one of them, would you lie in a negotiation? And every one of them has said, no. In other words, your credibility depends on your honesty. You might not say something that, you know, could be relevant to a negotiation relevant to your adversary's thinking, but you would never lie because your credibility will, you'll never be believed again. That's their view of this.
And here we were under Hillary Clinton lying to an ally and lying to the Chinese, who I knew through my personal contacts, understood that we were lying to them. I know from personal contacts with the Chinese.
So, how do you expect people to treat you when they know you're a liar? To me, it's just simple human relations. And, and I now understand that because I have friends who are both diplomats and soldiers, and I know, if you have to lie to make a point there's something wrong and you're, you're jeopardizing your credibility with other professionals if, if you do that.
So, we should not be surprised that the Chinese are increasing their forces.
And when Putin marched out this horrifying Poseidon underwater torpedo, could potentially carry a hundred megaton warhead. It's nuclear-powered. It can travel at some very high speed, 50, 60 knots or more, and then it can go quiet, sneak into a Harbor, know coastal Harbor and detonate underwater, and destroy out to 30 or 40 kilometers, a complete area, urban area. And he has this weapon. He made it obvious that he had it. He showed plans for it.
Ted Postol: Well, what he was doing is he was saying to an American president who knows nothing. All right, assuming that the president knows nothing, that your missile defenses will not do anything about this weapon. That's what he did it for. He was an insurance policy toward bad decision-making by American political leadership. That's why he built that weapon. That's why he ordered that weapon built.
So not because, I mean, he may be a monster. That's another issue, but it's not because he was a monster, it's because he made a strategic calculation that that kind of weapon would cause any person, even if they were totally without knowledge and thought of how missile defense could work, to understand that you will not escape retribution if you attack Russia. That's why that weapon was built.
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
Seminar on Black Hole Information and Quantum Hair, Yangzhou University (video)
Wednesday, May 11, 2022
Quantum Hair and Black Hole Information -- Quantum Gravity and All of That seminar series (video)
Title: Quantum Hair and Black Hole Information
Abstract: I discuss recent results concerning the quantum state of the gravitational field of a compact matter source such as a black hole. These results demonstrate the existence of quantum hair, violating the classical No Hair Theorems. I then discuss how this quantum hair affects Hawking radiation, allowing unitary evaporation of black holes. Small corrections to leading order Hawking radiation amplitudes, with weak dependence on the external graviton state, are sufficient to produce a pure final radiation state. The radiation state violates the factorization assumption made in standard formulations of the information paradox. These conclusions are consequences of long wavelength properties of quantum gravity: no special assumptions are made concerning short distance (Planckian) physics.
Thursday, May 05, 2022
Raghuveer Parthasarathy: Four Physical Principles and Biophysics -- Manifold podcast #11
key holez • 2 days ago
It was a fascinating episode, and I immediately went out and ordered the book! One question that came to mind: given how much of the human genome is dedicated to complex regulatory mechanisms and not proteins as such, it seems unintuitive to me that so much of heritability seems to be additive. I would have thought that in a system with lots of complicated,messy on/off switches, small genetic differences would often lead to large phenotype differences -- but if what I've heard about polygenic prediction is right, then, empirically, assuming everything is linear seems to work just fine (outside of rare variants, maybe). Is there a clear explanation for how complex feedback patterns give rise to linearity in the end? Is it just another manifestation of the central limit theorem...?
steve hsu
This is an active area of research. It is somewhat surprising even to me how well linearity / additivity holds in human genetics. Searches for non-linear effects on complex traits have been largely unsuccessful -- i.e., in the sense that most of the variance seems to be controlled by additive effects. By now this has been investigated for large numbers of traits including major diseases, quantitive traits such as blood biomarkers, height, cognitive ability, etc.
One possible explanation is that because humans are so similar to each other, and have passed through tight evolutionary bottlenecks, *individual differences* between humans are mainly due to small additive effects, located both in regulatory and coding regions.
To genetically edit a human into a frog presumably requires many changes in loci with big nonlinear effects. However, it may be the case that almost all such genetic variants are *fixed* in the human population: what makes two individuals different from each other is mainly small additive effects.
Zooming out slightly, the implications for human genetic engineering are very positive. Vast pools of additive variance means that multiplex gene editing will not be impossibly hard...This topic is discussed further in the review article: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.05870
Tuesday, May 03, 2022
How We Learned, Then Forgot, About Human Intelligence... And Witnessing the Live Breakdown of Academia (podcast interview with Cactus Chu)
Timestamps:
3:24 Interview Starts
15:49 Cactus' Experience with High Math People
19:49 High School Sports
21:26 Comparison to Intelligence
26:29 Is Lack of Understanding due to Denial or Ignorance?
29:29 The Past and Present of Selection in Academia
37:02 How Universities Look from the Inside
44:19 Informal Networks Replacing Credentials
48:37 Capture of Research Positions
50:24 Progressivism as Demagoguery Against the Self-Made
55:31 Innumeracy is Common
1:06:53 Understanding Innumerate People
1:13:53 Skill Alignment at Cactus' High School
1:18:12 Free Speech in Academia
1:21:00 You Shouldn't Fire Exceptional People
1:23:03 The Anti-Excellence Progressives
1:28:42 Rawls, Nozick, and Technology
1:34:00 Freedom = Variance = Inequality
1:37:58 Dating Apps
1:41:27 Jumping Into Social Problems From a Technical Background
1:41:50 Steve's High School Pranks
1:46:43 996 and Cactus' High School
1:50:26 The Vietnam War and Social Change
1:53:07 Are Podcasts the Future?
1:59:37 The Power of New Things
2:02:56 The Birth of Twitter
2:07:27 Selection Creates Quality
2:10:21 Incentives of University Departments
2:16:29 Woke Bureaucrats
2:27:59 Building a New University
2:30:42 What needs more order?
2:31:56 What needs more chaos?
@hsu_steve on innumerate journalists, professors, and politicians:
— Cactus Chu (@cactus_chu) May 3, 2022
"If you are not high [Math], you cannot reason from statistical data" pic.twitter.com/N3glUITCXH
Sunday, May 01, 2022
Complex Trait Prediction: Methods and Protocols (Springer 2022)
Complex Trait Prediction: Methods and Protocols (Springer Nature)
Editors:
Nourollah Ahmadi and Jérôme Bartholomé
CIRAD, UMR AGAP Institut, Montpellier, France
About this book
This volume explores the conceptual framework and the practical issues related to genomic prediction of complex traits in human medicine and in animal and plant breeding. The book is organized into five parts. Part One reminds molecular genetics approaches intending to predict phenotypic variations. Part Two presents the principles of genomic prediction of complex traits, and reviews factors that affect its reliability. Part Three describes genomic prediction methods, including machine-learning approaches, accounting for different degree of biological complexity, and reviews the associated computer-packages. Part Four reports on emerging trends such as phenomic prediction and incorporation into genomic prediction models of “omics” data and crop growth models. Part Five is dedicated to lessons learned from case studies in the fields of human health and animal and plant breeding, and to methods for analysis of the economic effectiveness of genomic prediction.
Written in the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology series format, the book provides theoretical bases and practical guidelines for an informed decision making of practitioners and identifies pertinent routes for further methodological researches. Cutting-edge and thorough, Complex Trait Predictions: Methods and Protocols is a valuable resource for scientists and researchers who are interested in learning more about this important and developing field.Our article (pp 421–446):
From Genotype to Phenotype: Polygenic Prediction of Complex Human Traits
T. Raben, L. Lello, E.Widen, and S. Hsu
Decoding the genome confers the capability to predict characteristics of the organism (phenotype) from DNA (genotype). We describe the present status and future prospects of genomic prediction of complex traits in humans. Some highly heritable complex phenotypes such as height and other quantitative traits can already be predicted with reasonable accuracy from DNA alone. For many diseases, including important common conditions such as coronary artery disease, breast cancer, type I and II diabetes, individuals with outlier polygenic scores (e.g., top few percent) have been shown to have 5 or even 10 times higher risk than average. Several psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia and autism also fall into this category. We discuss related topics such as the genetic architecture of complex traits, sibling validation of polygenic scores, and applications to adult health, in vitro fertilization (embryo selection), and genetic engineering.
Monday, April 25, 2022
Has Hawking's Black Hole Information Paradox Been Resolved? (Video of MSU Theory Seminar 4/22/2022)
Thursday, April 21, 2022
Carl Zha: Xinjiang, Ukraine, and U.S.-China relations — Manifold podcast #10
Thursday, April 14, 2022
Black Hole Information and Quantum Hair in 10 minutes! (video)
Thursday, April 07, 2022
Scott Aaronson: Quantum Computing, Unsolvable Problems, & Artificial Intelligence — Manifold podcast #9
Thursday, March 24, 2022
Sebastian Mallaby: Venture capital as an engine of courage — Manifold Podcast #8
Friday, March 18, 2022
Quantum Hair from Gravity (published version in Physical Review Letters)
Quantum Hair from Gravity
Xavier Calmet, Roberto Casadio, Stephen D. H. Hsu, and Folkert Kuipers
Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 111301 – Published 17 March 2022
We explore the relationship between the quantum state of a compact matter source and of its asymptotic graviton field. For a matter source in an energy eigenstate, the graviton state is determined at leading order by the energy eigenvalue. Insofar as there are no accidental energy degeneracies there is a one to one map between graviton states on the boundary of spacetime and the matter source states. Effective field theory allows us to compute a purely quantum gravitational effect which causes the subleading asymptotic behavior of the graviton state to depend on the internal structure of the source. This establishes the existence of ubiquitous quantum hair due to gravitational effects.The paper establishes that the quantum state of the graviton field (equivalently, the spacetime metric) of a compact matter source depends on the quantum state of the source. This can be established without a short distance theory of quantum gravity -- i.e., near the Planck length. Our results are long wavelength effects and are insensitive to the details of short distance physics, such as whether gravitons are excitations of strings, or something else, at the most fundamental level.
Quantum hair and black hole information
Physics Letters B Volume 827, 10 April 2022, 136995
Xavier Calmet and Stephen D.H. Hsu
It has been shown that the quantum state of the graviton field outside a black hole horizon carries information about the internal state of the hole. We explain how this allows unitary evaporation: the final radiation state is a complex superposition which depends linearly on the initial black hole state. Under time reversal, the radiation state evolves back to the original black hole quantum state. Formulations of the information paradox on a fixed semiclassical geometry describe only a small subset of the evaporation Hilbert space, and do not exclude overall unitarity.
Note to experts: the companion paper explains why Mathur's Theorem (i.e., entanglement entropy must always increase by ~ln 2 with each emitted qubit) is evaded once one considers BH evolution in the full radiation Hilbert space. The radiation Hilbert space is much larger than the small subspace which remains after conditioning on any specific spacetime background or BH recoil trajectory. Even exponentially small entanglement between different radiation states (mediated by quantum hair) can unitarize the evaporation process.
This is also explained in detail in the talk video and slides linked below.
Press coverage:
Earlier discussion, with more background on the Hawking paradox. See especially the important work by Suvrat Raju and collaborators:
Quantum Hair and Black Hole Information (December 2021)
Monday, March 14, 2022
"The Pressure to Conform is Enormous": Steve Hsu on Affirmative Action, Assimilation and IQ Outliers (CSPI Podcast with Richard Hanania)
Full transcript at Richard's substack.Begin: American society, growing up as child of immigrants18m: Russia-Ukraine conflict (eve of invasion), geopolitical implications (China, India, Germany, EU)38m: Affirmative Action, Harvard case at SCOTUS54m: Woke leftists at the university, destruction of meritocracy, STEM vs Social Justice advocacy, Sokal Hoax1h25m: Academic economics, 2008 credit crisis, Do economists test theories?1h33m: Maverick thinking, Agreeableness, Aspergers, Pressure to conform1h39m: Far-tail intelligence, Jeff Bezos and physics, progress in science and technology
Friday, March 11, 2022
Genomic Prediction’s Stephen Hsu: Making superhumans will be possible (Sunday Times podcast)
Genomic Prediction’s Stephen Hsu: Making superhumans will be possible
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Stephen Hsu, co-founder of Genomic Prediction, to talk about the plummeting price of genomic sequencing (5:00), predicting height and cancer (9:10), mining biobanks (14:25), scoring embryos (19:00), why investors are staying anonymous (28:00), the need for a society-wide discussion (32:30), when he was accused of being a eugenicist (37:25), how powerful genetic prediction can be (43:15), genetic engineering (49:45), and why Denmark is the future (59:30).
Thursday, March 10, 2022
Vlatko Vedral: Oxford Theoretical Physicist on Quantum Superposition of Living Creatures — Manifold Podcast #7
Wednesday, March 09, 2022
Geopolitics and Empire podcast: The End of the Unipolar Moment & the Cementing in Blood of the Eurasian Alliance
Physicist, startup founder, and polymath Steve Hsu discusses the end of the unipolar moment, the return of geopolitics, and the U.S.-China New Cold War. He believes China is not as fragile as some say. We talk Taiwan, how Beijing has caught up in military tech, and how the nature of naval warfare in the next war will be very different. On the technology and AI front, he feels the U.S. and China are at parity, but that the long-term trend is in China's favor. He feels the social credit system is advancing just as fast in the West as in China and that the digital yuan is rapidly gaining in stature. He gives his view on the Ukraine crisis and how it has been a huge strategic error by the U.S. because it has cemented the Eurasian alliance. He's concerned about a systemic financial meltdown, discusses being a victim of woke cancel culture, and knowing Richard Feynman.
Friday, March 04, 2022
On Ukraine: the return of Multipolarity and Hard Power
Two years ago, Burns wrote a memoir entitled, The Back Channel. It directly contradicts the argument being proffered by the administration he now serves. In his book, Burns says over and over that Russians of all ideological stripes—not just Putin—loathed and feared NATO expansion. He quotes a memo he wrote while serving as counselor for political affairs at the US embassy in Moscow in 1995. ‘Hostility to early NATO expansion,” it declares, “is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.” On the question of extending NATO membership to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about the breadth of Russian opposition are even more emphatic. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” he wrote in a 2008 memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
While the Biden administration claims that Putin bears all the blame for the current Ukraine crisis, Burns makes clear that the US helped lay its foundations. By taking advantage of Russian weakness, he argues, Washington fueled the nationalist resentment that Putin exploits today. Burns calls the Clinton administration’s decision to expand NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.” And he describes the appetite for revenge it fostered among many in Moscow during Boris Yeltsin’s final years as Russia’s president. “As Russians stewed in their grievance and sense of disadvantage,” Burns writes, “a gathering storm of ‘stab in the back’ theories slowly swirled, leaving a mark on Russia’s relations with the West that would linger for decades.”
As the Bush administration moved toward opening NATO’s doors to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about a Russian backlash grew even starker. He told Rice it was “hard to overstate the strategic consequences” of offering NATO membership to Ukraine and predicted that “it will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.” Although Burns couldn’t have predicted the specific kind of meddling Putin would employ—either in 2014 when he seized Crimea and fomented a rebellion in Ukraine’s east or today—he warned that the US was helping set in motion the kind of crisis that America faces today. Promise Ukraine membership in NATO, he wrote, and “There could be no doubt that Putin would fight back hard.”
Were a reporter to read Burns’ quotes to White House press secretary Jen Psaki today, she’d likely accuse them of “parroting Russian talking points.” But Burns is hardly alone. From inside the US government, many officials warned that US policy toward Russia might bring disaster. William Perry, Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary from 1994 to 1997, almost resigned because of his opposition to NATO expansion. He has since declared that because of its policies in the 1990s, “the United States deserves much of the blame” for the deterioration in relations with Moscow. Steven Pifer, who from 1998 to 2000 served as US ambassador to Ukraine, has called Bush’s 2008 decision to declare that Ukraine would eventually join NATO “a real mistake.” Fiona Hill, who gained fame during the Trump impeachment saga, says that as national intelligence officers for Russia and Eurasia she and her colleagues “warned” Bush that “Putin would view steps to bring Ukraine and Georgia closer to NATO as a provocative move that would likely provoke pre-emptive Russian military action.”Oh, there's some historical background to all this? Some context? Wait I'm told every day this crisis just happened because Putin went crazy and wants to rebuild the USSR / Russian Empire.
Thursday, March 03, 2022
Manifold Podcast #6: Richard Sander on Affirmative Action, Mismatch Theory, and Academic Freedom
Wednesday, March 02, 2022
Quantum Hair and Black Hole Information (Physics Letters B published version)
Quantum hair and black hole information
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2022.136995
Abstract
It has been shown that the quantum state of the graviton field outside a black hole horizon carries information about the internal state of the hole. We explain how this allows unitary evaporation: the final radiation state is a complex superposition which depends linearly on the initial black hole state. Under time reversal, the radiation state evolves back to the original black hole quantum state. Formulations of the information paradox on a fixed semiclassical geometry describe only a small subset of the evaporation Hilbert space, and do not exclude overall unitarity.The earlier paper, which established the existence of quantum hair, has been accepted by PRL and should also appear soon.
4. Conclusion
Hawking's information paradox has been the focus of intense interest for almost 50 years. In his 1992 lecture on the subject, John Preskill wrote [5]
I conclude that the information loss paradox may well presage a revolution in fundamental physics.
The resolution described here is conservative: the quantum state of the exterior gravity field is determined by the interior black hole state, allowing the latter to influence Hawking radiation produced at the horizon. Two distinct quantum states of the black hole may produce the same semiclassical external geometry, but the graviton states differ at the quantum level. The relationship between interior and exterior quantum states is not governed by classical no-hair theorems. Indeed, it has gradually been appreciated that gravity itself prevents the localization of quantum information [4], [9], [10], [11], [21], [22], [23], even behind a horizon. We stress that all formulations of the paradox require a degree of factorization between the black hole internal state and the radiation (see, e.g., (6)), which is clearly not true of our equation (4).
Certain aspects of our expressions (2)-(4) are very clear: the black hole information is spread over many branches of the final radiation state, and macroscopic superpositions of different spacetime geometries play a role in the evaporation. Some of the difficulty in resolving the paradox may originate from a reluctance to accept these aspects of quantum dynamics.
Thursday, February 24, 2022
ManifoldOne Podcast Episode #5: Shai Carmi (Hebrew University): Polygenic risk scores & embryo screening
Thursday, February 17, 2022
ManifoldOne Podcast Episode#4: Jon Y (Asianometry) on Semiconductor Tech and U.S.-China Competition
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