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I wish we had more radio dramas like this one from the BBC by Robert Barr.

Set on an island in the Outer Hebrides in north west Scotland, a fisherman discovers what appears to be a torpedo washed up on a deserted beach. Upon closer examination, the container is found to contain materials for a spy and a couple of army officers go under cover to investigate.

“Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”

-Aaron Levenstein, associate professor of business administration at Baruch College from 1961 to 1981

I’ve also heard it as “Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is exciting, but what they conceal is critical.”

It has not been a good century for deterministic views of the universe.

In the early 1900’s, Gödel destroyed the work of many prominent mathematicians by proving that no one mathematical model will ever be able to describe reality.

He proved that any set of axioms you could posit as a possible foundation for math will inevitably be incomplete; there will always be true facts about numbers that cannot be proved by those axioms. He also showed that no candidate set of axioms can ever prove its own consistency.

His incompleteness theorems meant there can be no mathematical theory of everything, no unification of what’s provable and what’s true. What mathematicians can prove depends on their starting assumptions, not on any fundamental ground truth from which all answers spring.

Since Gödel’s discovery, mathematicians have stumbled upon just the kinds of unanswerable questions his theorems foretold. For example, Gödel himself helped establish that the continuum hypothesis, which concerns the sizes of infinity, is undecidable, as is the halting problem, which asks whether a computer program fed with a random input will run forever or eventually halt. Undecidable questions have even arisen in physics, suggesting that incompleteness afflicts not just math, but—in some ill-understood way—reality.

Well, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics may just be another nail in the coffin for determinists.

2022 Nobel Prize in Physics

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was just awarded to scientists that just proved one of the more unsettling discoveries in the past half a century: the universe is not locally real. In this context, “real” means that objects have definite properties independent of observation—i.e. an apple can be red even when no one is looking. “Local” means that objects can be influenced only by their surroundings and that any influence cannot travel faster than light. This means that the influence of a particle can’t move faster than the speed of light. Investigations of quantum physics have found that these things cannot both be true. Instead the evidence shows that objects are not influenced solely by their surroundings, and they may also lack definite properties prior to measurement.

Many determinists held out the idea there were ‘hidden variables’ – or a lower level of reality we haven’t found yet – that would somehow be communicating between the particles and keeping the idea of realism (locally real) alive. However, in 1964 Bell released a paper showing that quantum mechanical behaviors do violate the idea that there could be ‘hidden variables’ – and even described the ways those violations would show up mathematically. What remained to be done was to develop an experiment to prove or disprove his assertions.

To disprove this idea of ‘hidden variables’ and prove Bell’s assumptions, they did this by using experiments on entangled particles that keep their state linked. Particles that are entangled (in this case photons with a certain polarization) and sent in two different directions yet still remain entangled in state.

They devised a clever experiment in the dungeons under Vienna’s Hofburg palace over the space of kilometers. They analyzed the results of passing these entangled photons through different filters and found that they do indeed adhere to Bell’s equations – and hence disprove particles adhere to the properties of being locally real (both at the same time).

The work does not prove which of those two principles (local or real) are false. Just that at least one (or both) is false.

Confused? Here’s a video that also describes the conundrum and what is going one really well:

Side note: Reading the state of one entangled photon determines the state of the other – but this state is always completely random (which is why faster than light quantum communication is not possible – you still need to compare the two results independently of the system to know if the random result was the ‘correct’ bit in the original message or the ‘wrong’ bit. Otherwise you just get a string of bits each random set to being correct or incorrect – which as it turns out is the only truly safe and unbreakable cipher).

Links:

• https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-universe-is-not-locally-real-and-the-physics-nobel-prize-winners-proved-it/
• https://www.wired.com/story/how-godels-proof-works/
• https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.250401

Left bundle branch block is a problem with the heart’s electrical wiring (conduction) system.

Your heart has 4 chambers. The 2 upper chambers are called atria, and the 2 lower chambers are called ventricles. In a healthy heart, the signal to start your heartbeat begins in the upper right chamber of the heart (right atrium). From there, the signal activates the left atrium and travels to the lower chambers (right and left ventricles) of the heart. As the signal travels along the heart’s conduction system, it triggers nearby parts of the heart to contract in a coordinated manner.

Two bundle branches carry the electrical signal through the ventricles to the bottom of the heart and cause the ventricles to beat. These are termed the right bundle and left bundle. In left bundle branch block, there is a problem with the left branch of the electrical conduction system. The electrical signal can’t travel down this path the way it normally would. The signal still gets to the left ventricle, but it is slowed down. That’s because the signal has to spread from the right bundle branch through the heart muscle and slowly activate the left ventricle. So the left ventricle contracts a little later than it normally would. This can cause an uncoordinated contraction of the heart. As a result, the heart may eject blood less efficiently. For most people, this is not a big problem. But if you have underlying heart failure, left bundle branch block can make it worse.

Some people may have left bundle branch block for many years without any problems. But a newly diagnosed left bundle branch block may mean there is some underlying heart condition that requires prompt treatment. An aggressive evaluation may be necessary if you have new onset of a left bundle branch block.

Some people with left bundle branch block may need a permanent pacemaker. A pacemaker helps keep the heart beating at the correct rate. This is usually only needed if you are having symptoms or have another conduction problem along with left bundle branch block.