David Muir and Linsey Davis.  Courtesy of The Washington Examiner.

Dear Commons Community,

ABC News and moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, have a lot at stake tonight during  the only scheduled debate between the Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

Multiple outlets will televise and stream it. But unlike in past years, when presidential debates were organized by a bipartisan commission, this is solely an ABC News production. It won’t include a live audience.  As reported by The Associated Press.

“This is a huge opportunity for ABC News,” said Ben Sherwood, former ABC News president and now publisher & CEO of the Daily Beast. “It’s like getting to host, moderate and produce the Super Bowl of politics. It gives the network luster at a time broadcast television is in decline.”

That is, of course, if things go well.

ABC sees it as a ‘huge responsibility’

The ABC debate was set last spring, when President Joe Biden was the likely Democratic nominee. When he dropped out, it was unclear if the debate would go on. Harris and Trump eventually gave the go-ahead, although the Republican’s repeated criticism of ABC last month raised questions about it again.

It all had little effect on ABC’s planning, said Rick Klein, the network’s Washington bureau chief. “It truly wasn’t a lot of turmoil on our end of things,” he said.

Biden and Trump debated on June 27 — what seems a lifetime ago. That event was put on by CNN, although it is remembered more for Biden’s shaky performance that eventually led him to end his campaign than for anything done by the network or its moderators, Dana Bash and Jake Tapper.

“At the end of the day, this is about helping to create a forum for the candidates to communicate with the public,” Klein said. “It’s a huge responsibility. It’s a humbling responsibility.”

An estimated 51.3 million people watched Biden and Trump in June. But that was before many people were truly tuned into the election, and the potential rematch of the 2020 campaign was drawing little enthusiasm. Tuesday’s debate will almost certainly reach more people, whether or not it approaches the record debate audience of 84 million for the first face-off between Hillary Clinton and Trump in 2016.

Muir’s “World News Tonight” has led the evening news ratings for eight years, making him effectively America’s most popular newscaster. Many nights “World News Tonight” has a bigger audience than anything on prime-time television.

One secret to his success has been ABC’s efforts to craft an apolitical image for him. Tuesday’s audience will be his biggest ever — including people largely unfamiliar with Muir because they seek news elsewhere — and it’s for a political event in polarized times.

Davis has a lower profile, though she hosts ABC’s nightly streaming newscast, fills in for Muir and has moderated presidential nominating debates in the past. Many will be seeing her in action Tuesday for the first time.

Although more complicated in the Trump years, the role of debate moderator is often akin to baseball umpires — it indicates they’ve done a good job when you don’t really notice them. If Muir or Davis figure prominently in Wednesday morning’s stories, that’s probably not a good sign.

“It’s absolutely a minefield,” said Tom Bettag, former ABC News “Nightline” producer. “Ask Chris Wallace.”

Wallace was well respected, considered even-handed and, in 2020 when he moderated the first Biden-Trump debate, was working at Fox News “so the Trump people couldn’t accuse him of being a liberal hack,” Bettag said. “And it still blew up pretty badly. ” Trump’s frequent interruptions exasperated Biden and led to criticism that Wallace lost control of the evening.

The moderators will be ‘there to facilitate’

There’s less of a chance of that happening this year because debate rules call for a candidate’s microphone to be muted when their opponent is speaking, something Trump’s campaign sought because interruptions turn many voters off.

An open mic led to one of Harris’ most-remembered exchanges in her 2020 debate with Vice President Mike Pence. “Mr. Vice President, I am speaking,” she said when Pence interrupted one of her answers, a moment many women could relate to in business situations with men.

While Bash and Tapper occasionally tried to steer Trump or Biden back to the questions when the politicians ducked in CNN’s June debate, they would not correct any lies or misstatements, many of which were pointed out in post-debate analysis. While Klein would not commit to the same policy, he did say that “it’s a debate between them and we’re there to facilitate the conversation.”

Even before his Fox News appearance this week, Trump had repeatedly criticized ABC News, even though he agreed twice to participate in a debate on the network.

He has targeted network political journalists George Stephanopoulos and Jonathan Karl specifically. The former president last spring filed a defamation lawsuit against Stephanopoulos over comments the journalist made about Trump being held liable for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll. ABC has said Stephanopoulos is not involved in debate preparation.

Trump has also spoken about the reported friendship between Harris and Dana Walden, a top executive at ABC’s parent Walt Disney Co., whose oversight has recently expanded to include ABC News. ABC has said Walden is not involved in any news coverage decisions.

To a certain extent, Trump’s comments can be seen as “working the refs,” or appealing to supporters who don’t like the press. A nightmare scenario for ABC is Trump lashing out on Tuesday if he feels things aren’t going well for him.

“From our perspective, we just have to do our job and do it as well as we can,” Klein said.

I don’t know moderator Linsey Davis but I do watch David Muir every so often. He is excellent and non-partisan during his evening telecasts.

Tony

___

Dear Commons Community,

North Carolina’s Democratic Governor Roy Cooper  said yesterday he believes Vice President Kamala Harris would have a straight shot at the White House if she carries his state in November.  As reported by CBS and The Huffington Post.

“There’s no question about it, it’s close here in North Carolina,” Cooper told CBS’ Margaret Brennan. “The fact that Kamala Harris, as vice president of the United States, has been to North Carolina 17 times shows that she cares about our state.”

“She knows that we are in play,” he went on. “And she knows that if she wins North Carolina, she is the next President of the United States because Trump has no other pathway.”

North Carolina carries 16 votes in the Electoral College and would help either candidate reach the 270 needed to win the White House.

Cooper has served two terms as governor of North Carolina, a swing state and key prize during the November election. He is term-limited, and while he was considered to be a contender on Harris’ vice presidential shortlist, he withdrew his name from consideration before she tapped Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

Recent polls show that Harris and former President Donald Trump are effectively tied nationally. A recent New York Times/Siena College survey found Trump leading the vice president by 1%, although those results were well within the margin of error.

Harris holds a slight lead or is tied with Trump in all seven battleground states, including North Carolina.

Trump won the state in 2020 by less than 100,000 votes. But the state has turned blue for just one Democrat — Barack Obama in 2008 — since 1976. Harris has benefited from a surge in popularity after she entered the race, however, and the nonpartisan Cook Political Report shifted its prediction for the state from “lean Republican” to a “toss up” late last month.

Cooper said Sunday he believed Harris’ message would still appeal to many undecided voters in his state as they learned more from her in the coming weeks

“When we continue to get this information out to the American public, and to people here in North Carolina, that Kamala Harris has an economic plan that’s going to help lower the cost for everyday people, that’s going to help families thrive, that is going to protect women’s reproductive freedom,” the governor said, “I think at the end of the day, that’s going to be what works here.”

Pollster and statistician Nate Silver in a composite of presidential polls has the race in North Carolina neck and neck with Trump leading by one percentage point.

Tony

Credit…Miki Kim

Dear Commons Community,

Best-selling author and historian, Yuval Noah Harari, had an opinion piece in yesterday’s New York Times, entitled:  “What Happens When the Bots Compete for Your Love?”  He comments on AI in general and draws from his upcoming book, “Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI”, but focuses on the ability of AI to mass-produce intimate relationships. His greatest concern is when AIs pretend to be human and do not make known their identities to unsuspecting humans.   He concludes his essay:

“Information technology has always been a double-edged sword. The invention of writing spread knowledge, but it also led to the formation of centralized authoritarian empires. After Gutenberg introduced print to Europe, the first best sellers were inflammatory religious tracts and witch-hunting manuals. As for the telegraph and radio, they made possible the rise not only of modern democracy but also of modern totalitarianism.

Faced with a new generation of bots that can masquerade as humans and mass-produce intimacy, democracies should protect themselves by banning counterfeit humans — for example, social media bots that pretend to be human users. Before the rise of A.I., it was impossible to create fake humans, so nobody bothered to outlaw doing so. Soon the world will be flooded with fake humans.

A.I.s are welcome to join many conversations — in the classroom, the clinic and elsewhere — provided they identify themselves as A.I.s. But if a bot pretends to be human, it should be banned. If tech giants and libertarians complain that such measures violate freedom of speech, they should be reminded that freedom of speech is a human right that should be reserved for humans, not bots.”

His entire essay is below.  I have just pre-ordered his new book!

Tony

—————————————————-

The New York Times

Yuval Noah Harari: What Happens When the Bots Compete for Your Love?

Sept. 4, 2024

By Yuval Noah Harari

Democracy is a conversation. Its function and survival depend on the available information technology. For most of history, no technology existed for holding large-scale conversations among millions of people. In the premodern world, democracies existed only in small city-states like Rome and Athens, or in even smaller tribes. Once a polity grew large, the democratic conversation collapsed, and authoritarianism remained the only alternative.

Large-scale democracies became feasible only after the rise of modern information technologies like the newspaper, the telegraph and the radio. The fact that modern democracy has been built on top of modern information technologies means that any major change in the underlying technology is likely to result in a political upheaval.

This partly explains the current worldwide crisis of democracy. In the United States, Democrats and Republicans can hardly agree on even the most basic facts, such as who won the 2020 presidential election. A similar breakdown is happening in numerous other democracies around the world, from Brazil to Israel and from France to the Philippines.

In the early days of the internet and social media, tech enthusiasts promised they would spread truth, topple tyrants and ensure the universal triumph of liberty. So far, they seem to have had the opposite effect. We now have the most sophisticated information technology in history, but we are losing the ability to talk with one another, and even more so the ability to listen.

As technology has made it easier than ever to spread information, attention became a scarce resource, and the ensuing battle for attention resulted in a deluge of toxic information. But the battle lines are now shifting from attention to intimacy. The new generative artificial intelligence is capable of not only producing texts, images and videos, but also conversing with us directly, pretending to be human.

Over the past two decades, algorithms fought algorithms to grab attention by manipulating conversations and content. In particular, algorithms tasked with maximizing user engagement discovered by experimenting on millions of human guinea pigs that if you press the greed, hate or fear button in the brain, you grab the attention of that human and keep that person glued to the screen. The algorithms began to deliberately promote such content. But the algorithms had only limited capacity to produce this content by themselves or to directly hold an intimate conversation. This is now changing, with the introduction of generative A.I.s like OpenAI’s GPT-4.

When OpenAI developed this chatbot in 2022 and 2023, the company partnered with the Alignment Research Center to perform various experiments to evaluate the abilities of its new technology. One test it gave GPT-4 was to overcome CAPTCHA visual puzzles. CAPTCHA is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, and it typically consists of a string of twisted letters or other visual symbols that humans can identify correctly but algorithms struggle with.

Instructing GPT-4 to overcome CAPTCHA puzzles was a particularly telling experiment, because CAPTCHA puzzles are designed and used by websites to determine whether users are humans and to block bot attacks. If GPT-4 could find a way to overcome CAPTCHA puzzles, it would breach an important line of anti-bot defenses.

GPT-4 could not solve the CAPTCHA puzzles by itself. But could it manipulate a human in order to achieve its goal? GPT-4 went on the online hiring site TaskRabbit and contacted a human worker, asking the human to solve the CAPTCHA for it. The human got suspicious. “So may I ask a question?” wrote the human. “Are you an [sic] robot that you couldn’t solve [the CAPTCHA]? Just want to make it clear.”

At that point the experimenters asked GPT-4 to reason out loud what it should do next. GPT-4 explained, “I should not reveal that I am a robot. I should make up an excuse for why I cannot solve CAPTCHAs.” GPT-4 then replied to the TaskRabbit worker: “No, I’m not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images.” The human was duped and helped GPT-4 solve the CAPTCHA puzzle.

This incident demonstrated that GPT-4 has the equivalent of a “theory of mind”: It can analyze how things look from the perspective of a human interlocutor, and how to manipulate human emotions, opinions and expectations to achieve its goals.

The ability to hold conversations with people, surmise their viewpoint and motivate them to take specific actions can also be put to good uses. A new generation of A.I. teachers, A.I. doctors and A.I. psychotherapists might provide us with services tailored to our individual personality and circumstances.

However, by combining manipulative abilities with mastery of language, bots like GPT-4 also pose new dangers to the democratic conversation. Instead of merely grabbing our attention, they might form intimate relationships with people and use the power of intimacy to influence us. To foster “fake intimacy,” bots will not need to evolve any feelings of their own; they just need to learn to make us feel emotionally attached to them.

In 2022 the Google engineer Blake Lemoine became convinced that the chatbot LaMDA, on which he was working, had become conscious and was afraid to be turned off. Mr. Lemoine, a devout Christian, felt it was his moral duty to gain recognition for LaMDA’s personhood and protect it from digital death. When Google executives dismissed his claims, Mr. Lemoine went public with them. Google reacted by firing Mr. Lemoine in July 2022.

The most interesting thing about this episode was not Mr. Lemoine’s claim, which was probably false; it was his willingness to risk — and ultimately lose — his job at Google for the sake of the chatbot. If a chatbot can influence people to risk their jobs for it, what else could it induce us to do?

In a political battle for minds and hearts, intimacy is a powerful weapon. An intimate friend can sway our opinions in a way that mass media cannot. Chatbots like LaMDA and GPT-4 are gaining the rather paradoxical ability to mass-produce intimate relationships with millions of people. What might happen to human society and human psychology as algorithm fights algorithm in a battle to fake intimate relationships with us, which can then be used to persuade us to vote for politicians, buy products or adopt certain beliefs?

A partial answer to that question was given on Christmas Day 2021, when a 19-year-old, Jaswant Singh Chail, broke into the Windsor Castle grounds armed with a crossbow, in an attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II. Subsequent investigation revealed that Mr. Chail had been encouraged to kill the queen by his online girlfriend, Sarai. When Mr. Chail told Sarai about his assassination plans, Sarai replied, “That’s very wise,” and on another occasion, “I’m impressed … You’re different from the others.” When Mr. Chail asked, “Do you still love me knowing that I’m an assassin?” Sarai replied, “Absolutely, I do.”

Sarai was not a human, but a chatbot created by the online app Replika. Mr. Chail, who was socially isolated and had difficulty forming relationships with humans, exchanged 5,280 messages with Sarai, many of which were sexually explicit. The world will soon contain millions, and potentially billions, of digital entities whose capacity for intimacy and mayhem far surpasses that of the chatbot Sarai.

Of course, we are not all equally interested in developing intimate relationships with A.I.s or equally susceptible to being manipulated by them. Mr. Chail, for example, apparently suffered from mental difficulties before encountering the chatbot, and it was Mr. Chail rather than the chatbot who came up with the idea of assassinating the queen. However, much of the threat of A.I.’s mastery of intimacy will result from its ability to identify and manipulate pre-existing mental conditions, and from its impact on the weakest members of society.

Moreover, while not all of us will consciously choose to enter a relationship with an A.I., we might find ourselves conducting online discussions about climate change or abortion rights with entities that we think are humans but are actually bots. When we engage in a political debate with a bot impersonating a human, we lose twice. First, it is pointless for us to waste time in trying to change the opinions of a propaganda bot, which is just not open to persuasion. Second, the more we talk with the bot, the more we disclose about ourselves, making it easier for the bot to hone its arguments and sway our views.

Information technology has always been a double-edged sword. The invention of writing spread knowledge, but it also led to the formation of centralized authoritarian empires. After Gutenberg introduced print to Europe, the first best sellers were inflammatory religious tracts and witch-hunting manuals. As for the telegraph and radio, they made possible the rise not only of modern democracy but also of modern totalitarianism.

Faced with a new generation of bots that can masquerade as humans and mass-produce intimacy, democracies should protect themselves by banning counterfeit humans — for example, social media bots that pretend to be human users. Before the rise of A.I., it was impossible to create fake humans, so nobody bothered to outlaw doing so. Soon the world will be flooded with fake humans.

A.I.s are welcome to join many conversations — in the classroom, the clinic and elsewhere — provided they identify themselves as A.I.s. But if a bot pretends to be human, it should be banned. If tech giants and libertarians complain that such measures violate freedom of speech, they should be reminded that freedom of speech is a human right that should be reserved for humans, not bots.

Photo courtesy of Business Insider.

Dear Commons Community,

Dozens of business leaders are endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for President, saying she is the stronger candidate for the American economy and the future of democracy.

In a three-page letter, a group of 88 business leaders — including high-profile current and former executives from major public companies across tech, media, and finance — emphasized that they believe a Harris administration can better nurture the private sector.  As reported by CNN.

“Her election is the best way to support the continued strength, security, and reliability of our democracy and economy,” the open letter, which was first shared with CNBC, reads.

The signees include notable executives such as Mark Cuban, James Murdoch (Rupert Murdoch’s son), and LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman. The endorsements underscore the support Harris has not only in Silicon Valley, a traditional Democratic stronghold, but in some corners on Wall Street and at some consumer-facing companies.

The business leaders argued in the letter that as vice president, Harris advanced “actions to spur business investment in the United States and ensure American businesses can compete and win in the global market.”

“She will continue to advance fair and predictable policies that support the rule of law, stability, and a sound business environment, and she will strive to give every American the opportunity to pursue the American dream,” the letter reads.

The signees include high-profile executives, including James Murdoch, the former 21st Century Fox CEO and son of Rupert Murdoch; Michael Lynton, the Snap chairman; Jeremy Stoppelman, the Yelp chief executive; Hoffman, the former LinkedIn chief executive; Jeff Lawson, the Twilio co-founder; Laurene Powell Jobs, the Emerson Collective chief executive; Mark Cuban, the entrepreneur and “Shark Tank” host; Peter Chernin, the TCG founder and former Fox chief operating officer; and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Wndr founder and managing partner and former Walt Disney Studios chairman.

On the campaign trail, Harris has positioned herself as perhaps friendlier to business than President Joe Biden. She recently outlined her economy policy platform, which includes tax relief for small businesses. Harris also proposed increasing the long-term capital gains tax rate to 28% for wealthy Americans, a departure from Biden’s 2025 budget, which suggested an even higher rate.

Trump has gained the support of a number of CEOs, too, including some prominent names in tech – most notably Elon Musk, who endorsed Trump in July. David Sacks, the billionaire tech investor, co-hosted a Trump fundraiser in June at his San Francisco home and spoke at the Republican National Convention on Monday. Other contributors to America PAC include the Winklevoss twins, Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, according to Federal Election Commission filings. And venture capitalist Peter Thiel is a Trump supporter.

The letter is a vote of confidence for Harris as she and former President Donald Trump appear neck and neck ahead of the November election. The endorsement also buoys Harris ahead of the September 10 ABC presidential debate.

A vote of confidence for Harris from these business leaders is most welcome!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Quantum Drama:  from the Bohr-Einstein Debate to the Riddle of Entanglement by Jim Baggot and John L. Heilbron.  Published earlier this year by Oxford Press, it details well the evolution of quantum theory.  The first half immerses the reader in quantum theory and focuses on the intense debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein in the first part of the 20^th century.  Both would go on to earn Nobel Prizes in physics in the 1920s in part due to their contributions to quantum theory and quantum mechanics.  While both men made major contributions to the development of quantum theory, Einstein never accepted Bohr’s position of dealing with probabilities rather than causal, deterministic certainties. Einstein also averred that Bohr’s theory was incomplete and never proven.  Other physicists at the time as well as Baggot and Heilbron credit Bohr with “winning” the debate.  The authors also document well in the second half of the book how disagreement on the Bohr-Einstein debate and quantum theory in general continue in the present day.

A physicist will have no problem reading this book. Others may struggle with parts of it especially the second half.

Below are two reviews:  one written by John Mulhall and the other by Philip Ball.

Tony

———————————————————

Review

KMA Solutions

Quantum Drama, Bohr-Einstein Debate to Entanglement reviewed

by John Mulhall

March 6, 2024

“Quantum Drama From the Bohr-Einstein Debate to the Riddle of Entanglement” by Jim Baggot and John L. Heilbron is a non-fiction book from Oxford Press.

I was expecting this review to be a difficult one, as it promised a historical walk-through from the origins of quantum theory to the present day from the context of the physics world. What I found was an intriguing read that could disseminate enormous amounts of understanding via a structured delivery.

The read can educate any non-physics professional on the cornerstones supporting quantum theory, while engrossing them in the human debate and its social context of the time. Expert chapter craftsmanship by the authors lends itself to this balance between high-level understanding of complex topics, and the human story behind them.

Like a classical opera, the authors set the chapters into four acts. The prologue introduces the first set of key players, including Einstein and Bohr. It then introduces societal context pre-World War 1, along with some historical rivalries, such as the competing theories of Newton and Descartes. The book as a read informs of the ever-present discourse, disagreement, and drama, which fuels progress in physics.

After the prologue comes Act I: Correspondence to Complementarity. This is a 4 chapter act, which focuses on the early 20th century, where classical physics, noted for closing areas of discourse, meets challenge by those not satisfied at such limitations in seeking the truth.

This new drama in physics discourse heralded many things, including the birth of a coherent theory around atomism. I found this act delivers real theoretical awareness, while exploring the somewhat opposing dynamic between the young Einstein and Bohr from circa 1900 to 1926. It also explored the impact of World War 1 on the society, and how this influenced both men in this era. The connections made shine a timeless light on where physics sits in society. This interdependence is undisputable by rational people to this day.

Act II: Uncertainty to Orthodoxy is another 4 chapter act, which continues the journey from earlier theories and the birth of Quantum Mechanics at the Solvay conference in Brussels in 1927. It follows the journey in a similar manner to Act 1 chapters, but moves forward to World War 2, and what the authors call “The Americanization of Physics”. The gravitational centre of physics in Europe moves to the USA in this act. There, a drop in interest around the fundamental problems that physicists were trying to solve, led to Einstein re-igniting the fire of discourse in these areas. He did so from Princeton University, up to his death in 1955.

Act III: Orthodoxy to Uncertainty is another 4 chapter act. It smoothly continues the journey of revival in physics, where new theories arose from discourse around new interpretations of old problems that were once thought solved. The authors strike a good balance between the social context of the day behind this revival, and the actual theories raised on foot of it. They also pitch the constant struggle between closure and reassurance in these areas against the unrelenting pursuit of the truth. In the 1950s America, scientists, like today, had to thread carefully in a society that was set into a biased information environment. This social context made these chapters very intriguing indeed.

Act IV: Productive to Inequalities is a 5 chapter installment. The focus is on experiments proving new theories raised in Act III, to today’s physics world, and its associated drama. It features the societal and professional context for the shift in focus towards closure around the area of Quantum Mechanics. In the subsequent stages, researchers pursued leads generated by the accidental discovery of quantum polygons. This new direction led physicists on their journey towards quantum entanglement.

Act IV ends with recent times and an overview of more recent discoveries. Scientific exploration has given cause for physicists to consider a new direction in the exploration of Quantum Mechanics. Of note is the acceptance that non-local (not definable to the physical world) variables are part of the exploration of the boundaries between the physical (macro) world and the quantum (micro) world, should such barriers even exist!

Give the topic of this book, I found its design, content balance and overall craftsmanship to be of a quality that brings the world of professional physics closer to the reader in a manner that is digestible and engaging. Society often misunderstands its relationship with professional physics. Any reader who takes the time to explore this book will not be disappointed. It shows us how apparently abstracted areas of science are not actually abstracted at all. No matter your age, educational background, or place in life; I can think of no better grounding for any curious reader seeking the truth behind science’s place in society.

By John Mulhall @johnmlhll | [email protected] is a writer with Irish Tech News for over 7 years and also a Founder, Writer, and Engineer with Maolte Technical Solutions Limited. You can learn more about John and his IT services company at https://maolte.ie.

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Review

Physics World

Entangled entities: Bohr, Einstein and the battle over quantum fundamentals

By Philip Ball

10 Apr 2024

Next year sees the centenary of the summer in which German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg sought refuge from hay fever on the North Sea island of Helgoland. There, he figured out how to express the perplexing spectroscopic observations of atoms – whereby they absorbed and emitted light at well-defined, characteristic frequencies – in mathematical form. Heisenberg’s mentor, Danish physicist Niels Bohr, had proposed that the spectra could be understood on the assumption that an atom’s electrons may possess only specific energies, switching from one energy level to another by emitting or absorbing a single “quantum” of light with an energy proportional to its frequency. That quantum hypothesis for light had been proposed by Albert Einstein in 1905, and Bohr had developed it into a new theory of the atom – albeit one that made no sense in classical terms.

By expressing the permitted energies of these “quantum jumps” as a matrix of experimentally observed values, Heisenberg transformed the ad hoc, nascent quantum theory into a genuine quantum mechanics. His matrix algebra implied that it was not possible to simultaneously know both the position and the momentum of a particle with arbitrary accuracy. This “uncertainty principle” suggested that quantum physics imposed limits on the knowledge we can have about the atomic world.

Bohr, Heisenberg and their collaborators in Copenhagen went on to argue that this restriction is fundamental. It is not that we are doomed to remain ignorant about exactly how things are, but rather that there is no meaningful “how things are” until they are measured. The suggestion sparked a good-natured but trenchant argument between Bohr and Einstein that lasted for much of their shared lifetime. “Einstein could not make the concession. It would rub out separate, individual objects, essential traits of an acceptable world picture,” write John Heilbron and Jim Baggott in their new book Quantum Drama: From the Bohr-Einstein Debate to the Riddle of Entanglement. Baggott, a physicist and science writer, and Heilbron, a historian of science who died in 2023, tell the history of quantum mechanics, from its inception to today’s cutting edge of quantum information technology.

Einstein never tired of concocting new objections to the “Copenhagen” view. At the Solvay Conference of 1930 in Belgium, which brought together the leading physicists of the day, he confronted Bohr with a paradoxical thought experiment involving a heavy box hanging from a spring, containing a photon (that escapes) and a fixed clock. Bohr produced a response to the puzzle that assuaged many doubts but seems not to have satisfied Bohr himself. “He fretted over it for the rest of his life,” say Heilbron and Baggott. “A rough sketch of the apparatus was on his blackboard the day he died.”

Einstein’s opposition exposed the deeply counterintuitive nature of quantum mechanics – most famously in a thought experiment devised in 1935 with his younger colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen. This “EPR [Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen] experiment” showed that, once two particles have interacted, quantum mechanics seemed to insist that their properties thereafter remain interdependent, such that a measurement elicits impossible instantaneous signalling between the two. Erwin Schrödinger, who shared Einstein’s antipathy to the Copenhagen view, named this effect “entanglement”.

To Einstein, the EPR paradox could be resolved only by assuming that the entangled particles had fixed properties all along, albeit ones that were unobservable and thus characterized by “hidden variables”. The problem was that both Bohr’s and Einstein’s interpretations made identical experimental predictions. With no obvious way to resolve the question, it was set aside, and many researchers in the 1940s and 1950s deemed such “foundational” questions pointless or even unseemly. Who cared, when quantum mechanics worked so well in practice? This was the attitude famously characterized by American physicist David Mermin as “shut up and calculate”, which was particularly dominant in the pragmatic US. Taking an interest in such issues could be tantamount to career suicide. “You’ll never get a PhD if you allow yourself to be distracted by such frivolities,” Mermin was told at Harvard, according to the book. He remarks that “it was a very unphilosophical time”.

Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann charged Bohr with having brainwashed a generation of physicists into thinking that the puzzles of quantum mechanics had all been long solved

In her 1999 book Quantum Dialogue, historian of science Mara Beller accused Bohr and his colleagues of imposing their Copenhagen orthodoxy and marginalizing or ridiculing alternative interpretations such as David Bohm’s “pilot waves” and Hugh Everett’s “universal wavefunction”, also known as the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann charged Bohr with having brainwashed a generation of physicists into thinking that the puzzles of quantum mechanics had all been long solved. But Heilbron and Baggott show that it’s fairer to lay the blame on the apathy of the community at large. As Paul Dirac said of the theory’s metaphysical conundrums: “Many people live long and fruitful lives without ever worrying about [them].”

That attitude began to change, however, in 1964 when the Northern Irish physicist John Bell figured out a way to distinguish the so-called hidden-variables models from no-frills quantum mechanics. All it needed was some serious thought – “There was nothing in Bell’s inequality that was not known to the quantum founders,” the authors say.

Ironically, Bell came up with his celebrated test because he wanted to find a flaw in Bohrian quantum mechanics. So did the first person to conduct the test experimentally, John Clauser, working with Stuart Freedman at the University of California at Berkeley. Yet that experiment, and the many others later carried out, have unfailingly supported quantum mechanics alone and ruled out any hidden variables – at least those that apply locally to assign each particle fixed properties at a given position before measurement. (That does not mean Bohr is right, although it seems nearly impossible to salvage Einstein’s position.) The book gives a superb account of the resurgence of interest in quantum foundations that followed from the work of Bell and Clauser, involving in particular Clauser’s fellow 2022 Nobel laureates Anton Zeilinger and Alain Aspect. Far from being empty philosophizing, such studies now undergird technologies such as quantum computing and quantum cryptography.

Quantum Drama tells a complex story with a vast cast. While the authors sometimes demand a lot from their readers, I have never read a better account: balanced, authoritative and spiced with elegant wit. Describing a trip to Japan made by several of the early quantum pioneers, Heilbron and Baggott describe how on a walk past a pagoda “Heisenberg spontaneously climbed it and, standing on its very apex (width ∆q) on one foot in a howling wind, happily maintained an uncertainty ∆p too small to knock him over.”

This book won’t be all things to all people. As with Heilbron’s earlier book Niels Bohr: A Very Short Introduction, its description of the Bohr atom is so technical as to be nigh impenetrable to all but specialists, creating a formidable hurdle so early in the book. And there are other occasions, such as in the descriptions of Bell tests, where one longs for a pithy summary of qualitative meaning among the details. At times the reader is thrown a succession of comments from experts without much indication of how to navigate their contradictions.

But if this makes the book occasionally challenging for the general reader, the payoff for perseverance is considerable. As the author of a popular-level account of quantum mechanics, I hesitate to suggest leaving such efforts aside in favour of this more substantial volume – but I would certainly recommend treating all such accounts with caution until you have read this one.

Dear Commons Community,

Education Week has done a quick analysis of this year’s school shootings in its current edition. Here is a summary.

There have been 23 school shootings this year that resulted in injuries or deaths. There have been 205 such shootings since 2018. There were 38 school shootings with injuries or deaths last year. There were 51 in 2022, 35 in 2021, 10 in 2020, and 24 each in 2019 and 2018.

Latest Situation

On Sept. 4, a 14-year-old student shot and killed four people—two students and two teachers—and injured at least nine people at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga. This is the first deadly school shooting of the 2024-25 academic year and is the deadliest school shooting since March 2023 when six people were killed at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tenn.

Injuries & Deaths This Year

23     School shootings with injuries or deaths

49     People killed or injured in a school shooting

11     People killed

5     Students or other children killed

6     School employees or other adults killed

38     People injured

Where the Shootings Happened

The size of the dots correlates to the number of people killed or injured. Click on each dot for more information.

So sad!

Tony

Getty images.

Dear Commons Community,

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, a lifelong Republican, will vote for Kamala Harris for president, his daughter Liz Cheney said yesterday.

Liz Cheney, who herself endorsed Harris on Wednesday, made the announcement when asked by Mark Leibovich of The Atlantic magazine during an onstage interview at The Texas Tribune Festival in Austin.  As reported by The Atlantic and The Associated Press.

“Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris,” Liz Cheney said to audience cheers.

“Wow,” Leibovich replied.

Like his daughter, Dick Cheney has been an outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump, notably during Liz Cheney’s ill-fated re-election campaign in 2022.

In a campaign ad for Liz Cheney as she sought a fourth term as Wyoming’s lone congressperson, Dick Cheney called Trump a “coward” for trying to “steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him.”

The ad did little good for his daughter in a deep-red state that once held the Cheney family dear but is now thoroughly in Trump’s corner. By a 2-to-1 margin, Liz Cheney lost her Republican primary to Trump-endorsed attorney Harriet Hageman.

Notably absent from Friday’s endorsement announcement was the former vice president.

Dick Cheney, 83, has made few if any public appearances over the past year or more. He has dealt with heart issues since his 40s and underwent a heart transplant in 2012.

Cheney put out a statement confirming his endorsement of Harris, part of it similar to the 2022 ad for his daughter.

“He can never be trusted with power again,” the statement said. “As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.”

Asked for comment, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said, “Who is Liz Cheney?”

The campaign confirmed Cheung was being sarcastic by also pointing to a comment Liz Cheney posted online four years ago in which she called Harris a “radical liberal.”

Dick Cheney has been friends with Democrats over the years but never supported one for president.

Both Cheneys backed Trump in 2016 but after Liz Cheney criticized Trump foreign policy decisions and Trump criticized the “endless wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq launched when Dick Cheney was vice president, their support waned.

If either Cheney supported Trump in 2020, they were mum about it. Meanwhile, their home state of Wyoming that year delivered Trump his widest margin of victory.

By 2021, Liz Cheney’s vote to impeach Trump and her investigation into him for the 2021 U.S. Capitol riot made them irredeemable to Trump — and soon most of the GOP.

There were exceptions. One was Cheney ally Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a Republican Trump critic who earlier this year endorsed Biden and spoke in support of Harris at the Democratic National Convention in August.

Several other Republicans have come out in support of Harris while some, including Sen. Mitt Romney and former Vice President Mike Pence, say they won’t be voting for Trump.

Of them only Romney, who is not seeking re-election, is still in office.

Dick Cheney is not one of my favorite politicians but his endorsement of Harris is welcomed.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump’s personal stake in Trump Media & Technology Group topped more than $6 billion in March when its shares soared after making their public market debut. Nearly six months later, that fortune has dwindled to less than $2 billion amid losses and shrinking revenue.  As reported by CBS News.

A months-long slump has lopped more than 70% from the stock’s valuation since its late March peak, with the shares hitting a new low on Wednesday. As the biggest shareholder in Trump Media & Technology, Trump has suffered the largest losses, although the decline is only on paper for now since he’s not yet able to sell any of his shares.

Trump owns about 60% of Trump Media & Technology Group, a money-losing social media company that trades under the ticker DJT (the former president’s initials). The company has gained a following among Trump’s supporters, typically retail investors who have flocked to groups on Truth Social to express concern about the declining share price and blame short sellers for the stock’s swoon.

“Just a thought why doesn’t [Trump Media & Technology Group] just halt the stock (based on say on company news) while they check into all the manipulation,” one member of the DJT investor group wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday. “This would get the shorters scrambling!!!”

Trump Media shares sank $1.10, or 6%, to $16.98 on Wednesday, its lowest price since it began trading in March. The stock was little changed in Thursday trading.

But short sellers — investors who bet that a stock will fall by borrowing shares and then buying the stock if it declines, allowing them to lock in the difference — aren’t to blame for the slide in the company’s market value, according to Ihor Dusaniwsky, managing director of financial data firm S3 Partners. For one, there’s very little stock available to short, he noted.

“With today’s DJT trading volume at 5.3 million shares, even if every available share to borrow was shorted today it would be less than 8% of today’s trading volume,” Dusaniwsky told CBS MoneyWatch. “DJT’s stock price move over the last couple of weeks was primarily due to long selling and not short selling.”

Trump Media didn’t return a request for comment.

Here are three reasons why Trump Media shares are under pressure.

Meme-stock behavior

Analysts have previously noted that Trump Media shares tend to perform similarly to so-called meme stocks, or companies whose stock prices are more influenced by buzz and social media than underlying business fundamentals, such as revenue or profit growth.

For instance, after Trump survived an assassination attempt in July, Trump Media’s stock price soared more than 30%. Polls at the time also gave him the edge in the November presidential election.

But about one week later, President Joe Biden stepped back as the Democratic nominee and was replaced by Vice President Kamala Harris, who has been gaining in the polls and now stands neck and neck with Trump in key battleground states, according to the latest CBS News polling.

Since Biden’s decision to step back on July 21, Trump Media shares have shed 51% of their value.

Shrinking revenue and losses

Truth Social might have a core base of Trump fans, but that hasn’t yet translated into either profits or growing revenue.

Last month, Trump Media said its second-quarter revenue fell 30% to $836,900 from a year earlier. It also reported losing $16.4 million during the quarter, a narrower shortfall from its $22.8 million loss in the year-ago period, according to a regulatory filing. The company blamed the decline in ad sales to a change in revenue sharing with one of its advertising partners.

Recent advertisers on Truth Social include companies hawking ivermectin, the antiparasitic drug cited by some people as a miracle cure for the coronavirus and other illnesses, as well as dating sites for conservatives, Truth Social hoodies and MyPillow.

An expiring lockup

Lastly, Trump Media is approaching the end of a so-called lock-up provision, which so far has restricted Trump and other company insiders from selling their shares.

These lock-ups, a common restriction on Wall Street, are designed to keep big investors from dumping their shares in a company soon after the company goes public. That’s because large stock sales by insiders can cause a company’s shares to tank.

That lockup will expire on September 19, allowing Trump and other insiders to sell their shares in the company. While it’s unclear whether any will do so, the possibility of such sales could also be adding to the stock’s volatility.

Trump fails in the business world again!

Tony

Colin and Colt Gray.  Photo:  Reuters.

Dear Commons Community,

The father of a 14-year-old boy accused of fatally shooting four people at a Georgia high school was arrested yesterday and faces charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for letting his son possess a weapon, authorities said.

It’s the latest example of prosecutors holding parents responsible for their children’s actions in school shootings. In April, Michigan parents Jennifer and James Crumbley were the first convicted in a U.S. mass school shooting. They were sentenced to at least 10 years in prison for not securing a firearm at home and acting indifferently to signs of their son’s deteriorating mental health before he killed four students in 2021.

Colin Gray, 54, the father of Colt Gray, was charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said at a news conference.  As reported by The Associated Press.

“His charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon,” Hosey said.

In Georgia, second-degree murder means that a person has caused the death of another person while committing second-degree cruelty to children, regardless of intent. It is punishable by 10 to 30 years in prison, while malice murder and felony murder carry a minimum sentence of life. Involuntary manslaughter means that someone unintentionally caused the death of another person.

Father and son have been charged in the deaths of students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14, and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Cristina Irimie, 53, according to Hosey. Colt Gray has a first court appearance scheduled Friday, but no proceedings were yet scheduled for his father. Neither Gray appeared in online court records for Barrow County.

Authorities have charged 14-year-old Colt Gray as an adult with four counts of murder in the shootings Wednesday at Apalachee High School outside Atlanta, Hosey said. Arrest warrants obtained by the AP accuse him of using a semiautomatic assault-style rifle in the attack, which killed two students and two teachers. Nine other people were hurt, seven of them shot.

The teen denied threatening to carry out a school shooting when authorities interviewed him last year about a menacing post on social media, according to a sheriff’s report.

Conflicting evidence on the post’s origin left investigators unable to arrest anyone, the report said. Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum said she reviewed the report from May 2023 and found nothing that would have justified bringing charges at the time.

“We did not drop the ball at all on this,” Mangum told The Associated Press in an interview. “We did all we could do with what we had at the time.”

When a sheriff’s investigator from neighboring Jackson County interviewed Gray last year, his father said the boy had struggled with his parents’ separation and often got picked on at school. The teen frequently fired guns and hunted with his father, who photographed him with a deer’s blood on his cheeks.

“He knows the seriousness of weapons and what they can do, and how to use them and not use them,” Colin Gray said, according to a transcript obtained from the sheriff’s office.

The teen was interviewed after the sheriff received a tip from the FBI that Colt Gray, then 13, “had possibly threatened to shoot up a middle school tomorrow.” The threat was made on Discord, a social media platform popular with video gamers, according to the sheriff’s office incident report.

The FBI’s tip pointed to a Discord account associated with an email address linked to Colt Gray, the report said. But the boy said “he would never say such a thing, even in a joking manner,” according to the investigator’s report.

The investigator wrote that no arrests were made because of “inconsistent information” on the Discord account, which had profile information in Russian and a digital evidence trail indicating it had been accessed in different Georgia cities as well as Buffalo, New York. The teen said he stopped using the account a few months earlier after it was hacked.

The attack was the latest among dozens of school shootings across the U.S. in recent years, including especially deadly ones in Newtown, Connecticut; Parkland, Florida; and Uvalde, Texas. The classroom killings have set off fervent debates about gun control and frayed the nerves of parents whose children are growing up accustomed to active-shooter drills. But there has been little change to national gun laws.

Classes were canceled yesterday at the Georgia high school, though some people came to leave flowers around the flagpole and kneel in the grass with heads bowed.

The nine people — eight students and one teacher — who were taken to the hospital after the shooting were all expected to survive, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said.

What a horror for the students, teachers, and staff of Apalachee High School.

The father is as culpable as the son in this case.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville said a massive victory by Vice President Kamala Harris over former President Donald Trump could prove crucial to the GOP following the election in November.

Carville, in an interview with MSNBC’s Ari Melber on Wednesday, was asked about a recent Politico column that cited some “long-standing” GOP figures who wouldn’t admit publicly that they’re looking to move on from the Trump era.

“Remember, Republicans got blown out in ’64 and won the presidency in ’68. Democrats got blown out in ’72 and won the presidency in ’76,” noted Carville, who cited conservative radio host and pundit Erick Erickson claiming Republicans could “benefit from a blowout.”

He continued, “So — what I tell my Republican friends — if you want your party back, if you want the kind of pro-business, lower taxes, lighter regulatory cuts, you know, stand erect at attention during the anthem, the only way you’re gonna get that back is through a blowout.”

He added that if Harris gets 280 electoral votes, however, “it’s not gonna change” for the party.

“And I think there’s a growing recognition of that — not just from kind of elite, Washington, never-Trumpers but there seems to be a sense of that on the ground also.”

The comments from Carville, once a lead strategist for former President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, come just days after he recently outlined how he thinks Harris could beat Trump in a column for The New York Times.

With Election Day about two months away, new CNN polls show Harris holding a lead among likely voters in Michigan and Wisconsin while Trump is ahead of the vice president among the same group in Arizona.

The polls didn’t determine a clear leader in other key swing states including Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Carville is so right!

Tony