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# 3D eclipse mapping in AM Herculis systems - ‘Genetically modified fireflies’

## 1 Introduction

AM Herculis systems (or polars) are a subclass of cataclysmic variables (CV), where a magnetic white dwarf accretes matter from a late type dwarf secondary via Roche lobe overflow. The strong (10-100 MG) magnetic field of the white dwarf prevents the formation of an accretion disc, and thus the accretion proceeds through an accretion stream, which directly impacts onto the white dwarf surface near the magnetic poles (see Cropper 1990 for a review on polars).

Until the early 1990’s it was widely accepted that almost all the optical emission from AM Her systems originates in the cyclotron emission region(s) near the magnetic poles of the white dwarf. However, the discovery of highly asymmetric optical eclipse profiles in systems like HU Aqr (Hakala et al. 1993, Schwope et al. 1993) demonstrated that the accretion stream could contribute as much as 50% of the total optical emission. Since then a number of attempts have been made to use the eclipse profile information of the AM Her systems to reconstruct the location and other properties of the stream emission. These earlier attempts include those of Hakala (1995), Harrop-Allin, Hakala & Cropper (1999) and Kube, Gänsicke & Beuermann (2000). Although considerable improvements have been made to the original concept of fitting a 1-dimensional brightness distribution along the accretion stream path (Vrielmann & Schwope, 2001), all the existing techniques use a pre-determined path for the accretion stream. In this paper we will introduce a new inversion scheme, where this limitation has been removed. This allows us to study the stream emission in AM Her systems in more objective manner.

## 2 The Model

All existing techniques have assumed an accretion stream which is an arc of varying opening angle connecting the L1 point to the white dwarf (Hakala 1995) or more realistic ones combining the theoretical free fall and magnetically dominated trajectories (Harrop-Allin, Hakala & Cropper 1999; Kube, Gänsicke & Beuermann 2000, Vrielmann & Schwope 2001). However, there is observational evidence, for instance in HU Aqr (Hakala et al. 1993) when it was in a low accretion state, the accretion stream was visible for a longer period of time after the start of the eclipse compared to its high accretion state: this extended period of visibility cannot be reproduced by such models. This suggests that it is important to eliminate the constraints imposed by adopting a pre-fixed trajectory.

In our new model, the accretion stream is constructed from 200 individual emission points which are free to move within the Roche lobe of the white dwarf primary. Each emission point (or ‘firefly’) will have an angle-dependent brightness as follows:

$$F_{\mathrm{f}ly}(\alpha )=F_0+A\mathrm{c}os(\alpha ),$$
(1)
where $`F_{\mathrm{f}ly}(\alpha )`$ is the flux emitted by a single firefly at angle $`\alpha `$ between the observer and the white dwarf as seen from the firefly, $`F_0`$ is the minimum brightness of a firefly ($`F_0>A`$, so that $`F_{\mathrm{f}ly}(\alpha )>0`$ for any value of $`\alpha `$) and $`A`$ is the amplitude of $`\alpha `$ dependence. All of the flies have the same $`F_0`$. In most of our modelling we have used $`F_0=3.0`$ and $`A=1.0`$ i.e. the ‘back’ side of the firefly is half the brightness of the ‘front’ side of it. This viewing angle dependence was introduced in order to mimic the effects of X-ray heating and/or optical thickness of the stream, which will produce such a phase-dependent effect on the stream emission properties. We will discuss the effects of this choice later in this paper.

Now that we have the emission law for a single firefly, we can compute the integrated emission expected from any ‘swarm’ of fireflies. If we then add the cyclotron emission component from the white dwarf surface (point source) and the Roche lobe filling secondary star, which acts purely as an obstructive element in the modelling, we are in position to generate eclipse profiles. For the moment we neglect the contribution of the white dwarf which is generally negligible at optical wavelengths, unless the system is in a faint state.

### 2.1 Regularisation

Finding the best swarm of fireflies that can fit the data will generally not produce a unique answer. For 200 fireflies we have 600 free parameters to fit, and our eclipse profiles may not contain that many datapoints. Even if they do, the structure of the swarm may be too complex to recreate from the ’two cuts’ available at eclipse ingress and egress. Thus some sort of regularisation is required in order to generate unique solutions.

Even with a regularisation term there will probably not be a unique set of 200 locations in the parameter space defining the best swarm. Instead, the 200 fireflies act as markers defining the location and shape of the emitting region. Thus the solutions are unique in the sense of location and shape for the resulting swarm. This reduces the effective dimensionality of the problem from 600 (in this case) to $``$dozen. One can roughly estimate the effective number of free parameters, by considering that in a ’banana’ shaped swarm the effective free parameters would be the locations of both ends of the banana (3+3 parameters), some measure of curvature (1-2 parameters), and the thickness of the banana at, say 3-5, locations along it. This would thus result in 10-13 free parameters, if we tried to fit a banana shape for a stream instead of using a swarm.

With this in mind, we have decided on the following regularisation criteria for our swarms. Firstly, in accordance with the aim of allowing a free stream trajectory, we impose as minimal a restriction on the solutions as possible. However, we do know that the stream should start from the L1 point and it should impact on the white dwarf surface. For the regularisation itself, we have chosen to prefer swarm shapes that have minimal distance to a best fitting curve that goes through them. This is physically realistic, since in the case of both the ballistic and magnetically confined trajectories, the stream forms a funnel like structure.

We proceed by finding, for each swarm, the best fitting curve that will start from close to the L1 point, pass through the swarm and end near the white dwarf. The regularisation term is then the squared sum of the minimum distances to this curve for all the fireflies and will a have minimum for banana shaped swarms (see eq. A4 in Appendix A). Such shapes approximate what might be physically expected.

In order to find such a curve for any given swarm, we have used a type of unsupervised neural network called Self-organizing Map (SOM, Kohonen 1990). This algorithm is a topology-conserving clustering algorithm, which will classify any dataset into a predefined number of clusters. In our regularisation application, the locations of the flies form the dataset and the centres of these clusters define the curved line through the swarm and will provide the reference points to which the minimum distances are determined. More details of Self-organizing maps, together with further discussion, is given in Appendix A.

### 2.2 Fitting

The actual fitting procedure is carried out using a variant of genetic algorithms (GA), which have proven successful in a number of astronomical applications (Hakala 1995, Potter, Hakala & Cropper 1998, Harrop-Allin, Hakala & Cropper 1999, Charbonneau 1995 (review)). We give a brief description of our GA procedure in Appendix B.

The fitting consists of minimizing a merit function $`F`$ by evolving the swarm shapes. The merit function $`F`$ is defined by

$$F=\underset{\mathrm{i}=1}{\overset{\mathrm{n}}{}}[\frac{D_\mathrm{i}M_\mathrm{i}}{\sigma _\mathrm{i}}]^2+\lambda S_{\mathrm{r}eg}$$
(2)
where the first part is the normal $`\chi ^2`$ part of the fit ($`D_\mathrm{i}`$ are the data points, $`M_\mathrm{i}`$ the corresponding model values and $`\sigma _\mathrm{i}`$ the errors on the data points), $`\lambda `$ is the Lagrangian multiplier and $`S_{\mathrm{r}eg}`$ is a regularisation term as described above (and in Appendix A). Our GA minimization is carried out using typically 500 different swarms per generation of solutions, and the convergence occurs typically in 50-100 generations. Note, that whilst GA is used to minimize eq. 2, the SOM algorithm is needed for evaluation of the regularisation term ($`S_{\mathrm{r}eg}`$).

Figure 1. shows an interim view of a swarm during the fitting process, as well as the current regularisation curve for that particular swarm.

## 3 Testing the Algorithm

### 3.1 Model fits to synthetic data

Given the nature of the model and the fitting method, there is probably no formal way of proving the uniqueness of the solutions. We therefore need to examine the method numerically, using synthetic datasets for which we know the shapes and locations of the emission regions (synthetic swarms). Here we present four such datasets and the corresponding results from our inversion.

In Figure 2 we have plotted these datasets in three panels, showing the X-Y, X-Z and Y-Z projections of the datasets. The white dwarf is located at (0,0,0), and the centre of the secondary star at (1,0,0). Points with positive Z-coordinates are on the same side of the orbital plane as the observer for inclinations $`<90^{}`$. The free fall ballistic stream has a positive Y-coordinate.

Then, given the four synthetic streams, we have computed four synthetic eclipse profiles, to which we have added noise (2% RMS). These profiles, with corresponding model fits (generated using the GA and regularisation described above) can be found in Figure 3. The stream structures (swarms) producing these fits are plotted in Figure 4: these can be directly compared with the original streams in Figure 2.

We first consider the reconstructions in the X-Y plane. The synthetic streams have been reproduced remarkably well, with only very few points being wrongly attributed to the ballistic portion of the stream in the case of a wholly magnetically channelled stream (streams 3 & 4). In the case of the X-Z and Y-Z planes, we do not expect the reconstructions to be as good because at an inclination of 80 degrees (as used here) the eclipse profiles are dominated by movement in the X-Y plane. Nevertheless, the agreement is sufficient to be encouraging and the method is capable of discriminating between lower pole and upper pole accretion modes.

As the regularisation term will force the ends of the stream towards the white dwarf and the L1 point, the resulting streams are also ’rounded’ to some extent. In this sense the regularisation acts somewhat like a rubber band, fixed to the white dwarf and L1 point at the ends and forced to pass through the swarm defining the stream.

### 3.2 Stability of the solutions

Secondly we have studied the stability of our solutions i.e. whether the resulting swarms always have the same location and shape. This is very easily done with our GA optimisation code, as one only needs to start the fitting procedure with a different seed for the random number generator. This naturally leads to different initial swarm populations and thus we start at different locations in the parameter space. We have done this by fitting each of the synthetic datasets 10 times. The results can be seen in Figure 5, where we have plotted the resulting 10 streams on top of each other. This figure, again, is directly comparable with Figures 2 and 4. Clearly all the solutions are comparable with each other. Thus we believe that our method is capable of producing unique solutions.

### 3.3 Fits without the regularisation term

To illustrate the effect of the regularisation we have carried out similar fitting without any regularisation. For this purpose we have used Stream #3, a case where the ballistic part of the stream does not emit. As expected, the algorithm finds a perfectly adequate fit to the data (not shown), but the stream from this fit (Figure 6) is a less faithful reproduction of the original stream (in Figure 2). We can see that the X-Y locations are reproduced to a fair extent, but the Z direction is less well reproduced.

Fits without the regularisation term are nevertheless extremely interesting. Since even when the quasi-linear structure prejudice for the stream is dropped, these fits represent the ‘minimum-assumption’ fits to the data. Multiple fits with different seeds, as used in Figure 7, will indicate where emission from the stream could emanate, while remaining consistent with the data, and where it cannot.

We have therefore perfomed 200 fits without any regularisation for the stream #3. The resulting ’fly densities’ are shown in Figure 7. One can clearly see that the main effect of the regularisation term is that it controls the distribution of flies in Z plane. This is fairly natural since there is less information about the Z coordinate in the eclipse profiles.

### 3.4 Fixed Parameters

In addition to the location of the fireflies, there are fixed parameters in our modelling which will, in principal, effect our results. We discuss these in more detail.

#### 3.4.1 Effects of inclination

The system inclination and mass ratio $`q=M_2/M_1`$ are not, in general, precisely known for all eclipsing systems. However, since we know the orbital period and the eclipse duration, the mass ratio is a function of inclination only. So it is sufficient to study how the results depend on using incorrect fixed inclinations for the modelling.

As earlier, we have used our synthetic stream #3 as a testbed for our simulations. This set has an inclination of 80. We proceed to fit the corresponding eclipse profile with 8 different inclination values (fixed during each fit) ranging from 75 to 87. The results are plotted in Figure 8 (top panel). Clearly, by fitting eclipse profiles using different inclinations, the change in merit function allows the inclination to be constrained by the fitting procedure.

We could leave the inclination as a free parameter in our fits. However, its nature is different from the other fitted parameters (the three degrees of freedom per firefly), and this would require a somewhat different fitting procedure. As it is known for some systems, we have opted to leave inclination as a fixed input parameter.

#### 3.4.2 Effects of angular emissivity function

Secondly, we have studied the effect of the choice of emission law (equation 1). As in the case of inclination above, we have fitted set #3, which was created with $`F_0=3.0,A=1.0`$ (white dwarf side twice as bright as the other side, emissivity ratio = 0.5), with various values corresponding to the emissivity ratios (ER) of 0.2 to 1.0. Surprisingly, there was no significant difference in the quality of the fits, with the exception of ER = 0.2, which gave a somewhat poorer fit. A plot of merit function versus fixed emissivity ratio is shown in Figure 8 (lower panel).

The case of an optically thin stream (and no X-ray heating, ER=1.0) produced a good fit, and the resulting stream structure is almost unchanged from the ($`F_0=3.0,A=1.0`$, ER=0.5) case. The implication is that unless the emissivity function is known, a range of emissivity ratio must be explored to separate out the apparent as opposed to the angle-independent brightness of the stream. On the other hand the choice of ’wrong’ emission law mainly leads to poorer fits, but the resulting stream structure is still very much like the one obtained using the correct emission law. This may be a consequence of a relatively narrow orbital phase range ($``$ 40o) used in our fits (eg. the emission law would play a more significant role in a case where one would try to fit whole light curves of these systems) .

### 3.5 Single pole versus two pole emission

It is known, that some polars only accrete on to a single pole, whilst other accrete on to both poles (Cropper 1990). Some systems can even switch between single and two pole accretion modes. Thus it is worth while considering the effect of this on our modelling.

As our regularisation term favours solutions where the accretion stream consists of a single line or curve like structure, it is clear that such regularisation cannot be correct for two pole emission, where the stream divides. In order to model two pole accretion, we have experimented with regularisation lines that, instead of starting from L1 and ending on white dwarf, will both start AND end on the white dwarf. This would mimic a closed magnetic loop from one pole to another and, in theory, would enable us to find the most probable magnetic loop like emitting stream. However, tests with such synthetic streams did not prove very successful, and thus we have to limit our modelling to single pole accretion case for the time being. Further work on regularisation approach is needed to study this in depth.

## 4 Conclusions

We have presented a novel method to map the 3-dimensional accretion stream structure in eclipsing AM Herculis systems. Our approach is the first in which no a priori information is assumed about the trajectory of the accretion stream. This is important, as it allows us to study the possible changes in accretion stream trajectory and accretion region location at different epochs, in different accretion states and in different systems. Furthermore, by determining the trajectory we will gain insight into the location of the magnetospheric threading region, and especially its distance from the white dwarf. This information, together with some assumptions of the stream density obtainable from the observations of X-ray dips (Watson et al. , 1989), could provide us with more evidence on the accretion rate.

Our tests show that the inversion method is sufficiently robust to be applied to real data. This will be the subject of a forthcoming paper.

## 5 Acknowledgements

PJH is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow.

## Appendix A Regularization using selforganizing maps

Selforganizing maps (SOM) are a type of unsupervised neural networks (Kohonen 1990). Their main use is data mining and cluster analysis of multidimensional data. Due to their topology conserving nature, they can also be used to measure similarities within data samples. In our approach we have used them to find a best fit curve through any given swarm of fireflies, which is then used as a reference for computing the regularisation function for that particular swarm (i.e. we find a smooth line through the swarm using SOM and compute the distances of individual flies to this line) .

SOMs consist of a grid of ‘neurons’, which in the general case could be N-dimensional, but in our case it is 1-dimensional. Each of the neurons has a set of weights associated with it. The number of weights per neuron is exactly the same as the dimensionality of the input data (in our case this means that the SOM ’net’ consists of 20 neurons (defining the smooth line) and each neuron has three weights, which are simply its XYZ coordinates).

In a trained network, these weights will directly define the coordinates of the cluster centre associated with that particular neuron (i.e. the location of the neuron in data space). To start with, these weights can have either random values or they can span some predefined space otherwise. Here we chose to initialize the weights by placing the neurons equidistantly along the line from white dwarf to L1 point.

### A.1 Training SOM’s

The training of the network proceeds as follows. First a random data point $`𝐏`$ is chosen from the training sample of data points, in our case this would mean a selection of a random firefly from a swarm. Next, one computes for each neuron $`𝐍_i`$, that has a set of $`j`$ weights

$$𝐃_\mathrm{i}=𝐏𝐍_\mathrm{i},\mathrm{i},$$
(3)
i.e. the euclidean distance between the sample data point $`𝐏`$ (single firefly) and the neuron $`𝐍_\mathrm{i}`$. Then we define the winning neuron $`𝐍_\mathrm{w}`$ as the one that has minimum $`𝐃_\mathrm{i}`$ i.e. is the closest one to the input point $`𝐏`$ (chosen firefly).

Next, the network is trained. This means simply, that for any given swarm: We select a random fly, find the nearest neuron to it in 3D space (A1), move that neuron (and it’s neighbouring neurons as defined below) towards the location of that fly (A2), and then proceed to the next random fly from our swarm. This is iterated for about 5000 times (every fly gets selected on the average about 25 times) and as a result the neurons define a smooth curve through the swarm.

Formally this happens as follows:

$$𝐍_\mathrm{i}(t+1)=𝐍_\mathrm{i}(t)+h(i,w)(𝐏𝐍_\mathrm{i}(t)),\mathrm{i},$$
(4)
where $`𝐍_\mathrm{i}(t+1)`$ is the updated neuron weight vector and $`h(i,w)`$ is a neigbourhood kernel, which depends on the distance of neuron $`𝐍_\mathrm{i}`$ from the winning neuron $`𝐍_\mathrm{w}`$ in the following manner:

$$h(i,w)=\alpha (t)e^{\frac{𝐫_\mathrm{i}𝐫_\mathrm{w}^2}{2\sigma (t)^2}},\mathrm{i}.$$
(5)
Here, $`\alpha (t)`$ is a time dependant learning rate, $`𝐫_\mathrm{i}𝐫_\mathrm{w}^2`$ is the squared distance between the winning Neuron $`𝐍_\mathrm{w}`$ and the current neuron to be trained $`𝐍_\mathrm{i}`$. Note that this distance is the distance between the two neurons on the grid, and not the distance between their weights. $`\sigma (t)`$ is the time dependent width of the kernel. Other forms than the Gaussian dependance for $`h(i,w)`$ are also possible. The effect of the neighbourhood kernel is that whilst the weights of the winning neuron are moved towards the input data also the weights of its neighbouring neurons (on the grid) are moved, but with smaller amount. This ensures the topology conserving mapping, typical to the SOM.

This completes one training step. Next one selects a new random input and iterates again. The learning rate $`\alpha (t)`$ and the kernel width $`\sigma (t)`$ are both constantly lowered during the training.

### A.2 Application to regularisation

As a result of training, the SOM will find a predefined number of clusters in the input data. For our purposes we are not really interested in the clustering, but use the SOM to find a predefined ordered set of nodes that define a smooth curve through our swarm of fireflies. This is achieved by training a 1-dimensional SOM with fireflies as input points. In addition, about 20-30 % of the input points are not fireflies but contain either the coordinates of the white dwarf or the L1-point. We also give a constraint that the ‘white dwarf points’ should be mapped to the other end of the map and the ‘L1-points’ to the other. This then produces a curve that stretches from near the L1-point, through the swarm and terminates near the white dwarf.

The regularisation itself means that we prefer solutions that are well represented with the curve computed as above. Formally, we use a SOM with 20 neurons, weights of which originally span the distance from L1 point to the white dwarf equally spaced. After training the net with about 5000 inputs randomly selected as explained earlier, we have the default path defined for the given swarm. We now compute the regularisation term $`S_{\mathrm{r}eg}`$ as a sum of squared distances from this default path for all our 200 fireflies:

$$S_{\mathrm{r}eg}=\underset{\mathrm{k}=1}{\overset{200}{}}(𝐏_\mathrm{k}𝐍_{\mathrm{w},k})^2.$$
(6)
Here $`𝐏_\mathrm{k}`$ is a vector in 3D space representing the location of a single firefly and $`𝐍_{\mathrm{w},k}`$ is the location of the nearest (to the $`𝐏_\mathrm{k}`$ ) neuron . This type of regularisation prefers solutions that are ‘stream-like’ with fixed ends, but leave the stream path totally free.

## Appendix B Genetic Optimisation

The Genetic Algorithm (GA) used here for optimisation is similar to those used in Hakala (1995), Harrop-Allin, Hakala & Cropper (1999) and Potter, Hakala & Cropper (1998). There are, however, some alterations specific to this procedure. In our current approach the ”genes” that define the solution swarm are the locations of the individual fireflies.

In general, the algorithm proceeds as follows. First we create a a population of $``$ 500 random solutions i.e. 500 random swarms inside the Roche lobe of the primary. Secondly, we evaluate these solutions. Next, we select the parent solutions to produce offspring. This is done by first selecting 5 random solutions, the fittest of which is chosen as 1 parent. This is repeated to choose the second parent. Two offspring solutions are produced by ‘mixing’ the parent swarms. In practice this is done by picking fireflies at random from the two parent swarms. Offspring solutions are mutated in three different ways. Firstly, at a small probability of $``$ 0.002 any firefly within the swarm can be removed and replaced by a new random firefly. With slightly higher probability, a firefly can be mutated by changing its location by a small gaussian random number. Finally a small fraction ($`5\%`$) of the fireflies in the resulting swarm are mutated by moving them slightly towards the regularisation curve for that particular swarm (computed using the SOM method as explained above). This speeds up the process when it otherwise gets very inefficient towards the latter stages of fitting.

Having created offspring solutions we then evaluate them and if they are better than their parent solutions they will replace the parents in the population. This procedure is repeated until some predefined convergence criterium is achieved or some fixed number of generations has passed.


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# The Anti-Växjö Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

## 1 28 June 2001, to Khrennikov, “Context Dependent Probability”

###### Khrennikovism 1

: It was nice to meet you in Växjö and discuss fundamental problems of quantum theory. Unfortunetely, I have the impression that my presentation on Contextual Probabilistic Interpretation of quantum theory was not so clear for participants (conversations during lunches and dinners). I try to present my views as short and clear as possible.

Thank you for valuing my opinion on your ideas; I am flattered. So I treated the problem in a conscientious manner: I downloaded and read three of your papers (quant-ph/0103065, quant-ph/0105059, and quant-ph/ 0106073).

I am indeed quite intrigued by the possibility that quantum mechanics may be nothing more than a calculus for comparing probabilities when the experimental context cannot be deleted from the results it brings about. In vague philosophical terms, I think this is precisely the kind of idea Bohr, Heisenberg, and Pauli were bandying about in constructing their interpretation of quantum mechanics. It is certainly the kind of notion Bohr was trying to get at with his emphasis on “complementarity.” So I would welcome a more precise way (a mathematical way) of expressing the essence of all this. I myself have been attracted to this sort of thing for a long time: it is a large part of the thread connecting my “Notes on a Paulian Idea” bbbSee C. A. Fuchs, “Notes on a Paulian Idea: Foundational, Historical, Anecdotal & Forward-Looking Thoughts on the Quantum (Selected Correspondence),” quant-ph/0105039.—that is, that the observer sets the context, and, in the words of Pauli, cannot be “detached” from what he finds. Also you can find discussions of it in Sections 4 and 8 of the large paper I was circulating at the conference, “Quantum Foundations in the Light of Quantum Information.” cccSee C. A. Fuchs, “Quantum Foundations in the Light of Quantum Information,” quant-ph/ 0106166. I say all this to make it clear that I am more than sympathetic to your program.

However, as much as I would like to tell you otherwise (because you are my friend), I do not see that your present formulation of the problem moves very far toward quantum mechanics in a convincing way. There are problems on at least two levels.

Maybe the most devastating and immediate is your move between Eqs. (5) and (6) of quant-ph/0106073. (I’ll focus on that paper for specificity since I did not see you make a stronger argument in either of the other two papers.) You write:

> The perturbation term $`\delta (𝒮,𝒮^{})`$ depends on absolute magnitudes of probabilities. It would be natural to introduce normalized coefficient of the context transition …

The question anyone will ask is, “Why is this natural?” What compels the precise form of the normalization other than that it forces the equation to look of a more quantum mechanical form. Why did you choose the square root rather than the third root, say? Indeed, why not divide by the absolute value of $`\delta `$, or the exponential of $`\delta `$, or any other combination of functions one could pull out of a hat? To put it not so gently, it looks as if you built the desired answer in at the outset, with little justification otherwise.

The second level of my problem is that, even if you do get this far, how do you make the further step to vector space representations of quantum mechanics? Why are observables POVMs and not other exotic entities? What leads us to the starting point of Gleason’s theorem? Etc., etc.? I don’t see that you have enough structure to do that. But more importantly, until you have done that I would have to say that your theory remains fairly empty in making a connection to quantum mechanics. Too empty.

The way I view the problem presently is that, indeed, quantum theory is a theory of contextual probabilities. This much we agree on: within each context, quantum probabilities are nothing more than standard Kolmogorovian probabilities. But the contexts are set by the structure of the Positive Operator-Valued Measures: one experimental context, one POVM. The glue that pastes the POVMs together into a unified Hilbert space is Gleason’s “noncontextuality assumption”: where two POVMs overlap, the probability assignments for those outcomes must not depend upon the context. Putting those two ideas together, one derives the structure of the quantum state. The quantum state (uniquely) specifies a compendium of probabilities, one for each context. And thus there are transformation rules for deriving probabilities in one context from another. This has the flavor of your program. But getting to that starting point from more general considerations—as you would like to do (I think)—is the challenge I haven’t yet seen fulfilled.

I very much hope that I have not offended you with these comments. I greatly respect your program. But because of that I want much from it. I want it to stretch our understanding. John Wheeler used to say, “We must make as many mistakes as we can, as fast as we can, or we’ll never have a hope of gaining a true understanding!” I let that philosophy rule my research life. Thus I can only commend you for your exploration, and hold the strongest hope that something firm will come from it with a little more work and contemplation.

## 2 4 July 2001, to Khrennikov, “Invitation”

###### Khrennikovism 2

: Yes, this is very well! However, for me, the only bridge between “reality” and our subjective description is given by relative frequencies.

But there other ways to make the bridge: this is what gambling situations (like the Dutch-book argument that Rüdiger Schack spoke about) dddSee C. M. Caves, “Betting Probabilities and the Dutch Book,” at http://info.phys.unm. edu/$`\stackrel{~}{}`$caves/reports/reports.html. are about. They give a nonfrequency operational definition to probabilities. Subjective probabilities make their OBJECTIVE mark on the world by specifying how an agent should act when confronted with them.

## 3 4 July 2001, to Khrennikov, “Context Dependent Subjective Probability”

###### Khrennikovism 3

: P.S. But! How can you unify contextuality with subjective probability?

I just don’t see this as a problem. In choosing one experiment over another, I choose one context over another. The experiment elicits the world to do something. To say that the world is indeterministic means simply that I cannot predict with certainty what it will do in response to my action. Instead, I say what I can in the form of a probability assignment. My probability assignment comes about from the information available to me (how the system reacted in other contexts, etc., etc.). Similarly for you, even though your information may not be the same as mine. The OBJECTIVE content of the probability assignment comes from the fact that no one can make tighter predictions for the outcomes of experiments than specified by the quantum mechanical laws. Or to say it still another way, it is the very existence of transformation rules from one context to another that expresses an objective content for the theory. Those rules apply to me as well as to you, even though our probability assignments within each context may be completely different (because they are subjective). But, if one of us follows the proper transformation rules—the quantum rules—for going to one context from another, while the other of us does not, then one of us will be able to take advantage of the other in a gambling match. The one of us that ignores the structure of the world will be bitten by it!

## 4 18 February 2002, to Preskill, “Psychology 101”

Let me reply to some of your points in a way that doesn’t reflect their original order.

###### Preskillism 1

: In the past I have sensed that you and I differ in how we regard ourselves. I believe that I am just another physical system governed by the same fundamental laws as any other system. You seem to think there is a fundamental distinction between yourself and the system you are observing. To me the Everett view is appealing because it turns away from this egocentrism.

It’s funny, but when I read this, my reaction went in two rather peculiar directions. First I thought, “I wonder if, in the end, the only thing the great quantum foundations struggles will leave behind is a few psychological observations? If so, what a shame.” But secondly, I imagined Galileo hoisting me up to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropping me off it along with his two famous stones. Even though I cursed and screamed the whole way down, I went “splat” at the same time that they went “thud.”

Here’s the psychological thought in a little more detail. One of the things that bugs me about the Everett view is what I consider its extreme egocentrism! Now, how can that be—both of us accusing the other’s view as the egocentric view? I’ll tell you what I think, trying to express the problem from both sides of the fence.

My side gets to go first. What I find egocentric about the Everett point of view is the way it purports to be a means for us little finite beings to get outside the universe and imagine what it is doing as a whole. And what is it doing as a whole? Something fantastic? Something almost undreamable?! Something inexpressible in the words of man?!?! Nope. It’s conforming to a scheme some guy dreamed up in the 1950s.

This whole fantastic universe can be boiled down to something representable within one of its most insignificant components—the brain of man. Even toying with that idea, strikes me as an egocentrism beyond belief. The universe makes use of no principle that cannot already be stuffed into the head of an average PhD in physics? The chain of logic that leads to the truth of the four-color theorem (apparently) can’t be stuffed into our heads, but the ultimate operating principle for all that “is” and “can be” can?

It’s a funny thing: I don’t think I’ve met anyone who would imagine that mathematics will ever come to an end. Or even that it can come to an end. There’ll always be new axiom sets to play with, new formal structures to write down. But with physics it’s a completely different story. People are always wanting to say, “Well we’ve finally gotten there.” Or, “Even though we’re not there, we’re pretty damned close.” It’s OK, even condoned, to have Dreams of a Final Theory. From this point of view, all the mathematics yet to come is worthless as far as the essence of the universe goes; the wad was already shot.

You get the point. It’s a psychological one, but it’s one that I find overwhelmingly powerful. It is that anytime any of us ever has the chutzpah to say, “Here’s an ultimate statement about reality,” or even a potentially ultimate one, what we’re really doing is painting the world in the image of man. We’re saying that the measly concepts we’ve managed to develop up to this point in time fit the world in a way that none of our previous concepts have, that none in the future will ever do better, and, most importantly, we view this not as a statement about ourselves and the situation set by our present evolutionary and intellectual stage, but rather as a property of the universe itself.

Now let me start moving toward the other side of the fence. The question someone like me—someone who has these kinds of blasphemous thoughts—has to ask himself is, how can I ever hope to be a scientist in spite of all this? What can science and all the great achievements it has given rise to in the last 400 years be about if one chooses to suspend one’s dreams of a final theory at the very outset? (Or, to tribute Johnny \[Wheeler\], how can one have law without law?)

I think the solution is in nothing other than holding firmly—absolutely firmly—to the belief that we, the scientific agents, are physical systems in essence and composition no different than much of the rest of the world. But if we do hold firmly to that—in a way that I do not see the Everettistas holding to it—we have to recognize that what we’re doing in the game of science is swimming in the thick middle of things. We’re swimming in this undulant sea, and doing our best to keep our heads above the water: All the concepts that arise in a physical theory must be interpreted to do with points of view we can construct from within the world.

That is to say, we have to loosen the idea that a physical law is a mirror image of what “is” in the world, and replace it with something that expresses instead how each of us can best cope with and hope to take advantage of the world exterior to ourselves. This, it seems to me, is something that by its very definition can be stuffed into the human brain. The current state of science is our presently best known means for survival. A scientific theory indeed, from this point of view, is yet another expression of Darwinian principles. Scientific theories evolve and survive because the survivors have a kind of staying power that none of the rest of the competition have. Not because they are part of the blueprint of the universe.

The situation of quantum mechanics—I become ever more convinced—illustrates this immersion of the scientific agent in the world more clearly than any physical theory contemplated to date. That is because it tells you you have to strain really hard and strip away most of the theory’s operational content, most of its workaday usefulness, to make sense of it as a reflection of “what is” (independent of the agent) and—importantly—you insist on doing that for all the terms in the theory.

I know you’re going to find the last sentence debatable, but that is what I see as the danger in the Everett point of view: You are able—or at least purportedly so—to view the universal state as a reflection of something, but at the cost of deleting all the concrete things it was meant to reflect in the first place. What I mean by this is, if we take any concrete situation in quantum mechanics—a system, a measuring device, and some kind of model for the beginning stages of a measurement—we can indeed construct a Church-of-the-Larger-Hilbert space description of it. I’ll grant you that. But try to go the other way around without any foreknowledge of the “measurement”: Start with the Church, and try to derive from it that a concrete measurement has taken place, and you encounter an embarrassment of riches. You don’t know how to identify the valid worlds, etc., etc. (And, if you ask me, invoking decoherence as a cure-all is little more than a statement of faith that some guy in Los Alamos has the all the answers to all the tough questions the rest of us are too lazy to work out.)

So, I myself am left with a view of quantum mechanics for which the main terms in the theory—the quantum states—express nothing more than the gambling commitments I’m willing to make at any moment. When I encounter various other pieces of the world, if I am rational—that is to say, Darwinian-optimal—I should use the stimulations those pieces give me to reevaluate my commitments. This is what quantum state change is about. The REALITY of the world I am dealing with is captured by two things in the present picture:

1. I posit systems with which I find myself having encounters, and
2. I am not able to see in a deterministic fashion the stimulations (call them measurement outcomes, if you like) those systems will give me—something comes into me from the outside that takes me by surprise.

OK, now let me put myself squarely in your pasture. You worry that having those main terms in the theory refer to my (or your, or Joe Buck’s) eeeSee pages 125 and 156 of quant-ph/0105039. gambling commitments, is committing a kind of egocentrism. What respectable theory would refer to my particular vices, my desires, my bank account in making its most important statements?

This is going to surprise you now, but I agree with you wholeheartedly. Even enthusiastically so. Where I seem to disagree is that I do not find this a good reason to promote those vices, those commitments to an unearthly realm and call them “states of the universe” (or relative states therein). Instead, it seems to me to be a call to recognize them for what they are and to redouble our efforts for getting at the real nub of the matter.

Let me try to give you a way of thinking about this that you might respect. What was Einstein’s greatest achievement in getting at general relativity? For the purposes of the present exposition, I would say it was in his recognizing that the “gravitational field” one feels in an accelerating elevator is just a coordinate effect—it is something that is induced purely with respect to the description of an observer. In this light, the program of trying to develop general relativity thus boiled down to trying to recognize all the things within gravitational and motional phenomena that should be viewed as consequences of our coordinate choices. Or to use a phrase I’ve come to like, it was in identifying all the things that can be viewed as “numerically additional” to the observer-free situation which come about purely by bringing the observer (scientific agent, coordinate system, etc.) onto the scene.

Now the point is, that was a really useful process. For in weeding out all the things that can be viewed as “merely” coordinate effects, the fruit left behind could be seen in a clear view for the first time: It was the Riemannian manifold that we call spacetime.

What I dream for in my foundational program for quantum mechanics is something just about like that. Weed out all the terms that have to do with gambling commitments (I used to call it information, knowledge, or belief), and what is left behind will play a role much like Einstein’s manifold.

This much of the program, I hope and suspect you will understand even if you are not sympathetic to it. But, I don’t know, you might be sympathetic to it. (Especially if I’ve done a good job above.) However, it is also true that you have rightly suspected some tendencies in me that go further. In particular, in opposition to the picture of general relativity, where reintroducing the coordinate system—i.e., reintroducing the observer—changes nothing about the manifold (it only tells us what kind of sensations the observer will pick up), I do not suspect the same of the quantum world. This is why I recommend to all my friends that they read William James’s little article “The Sentiment of Rationality.” fffW. James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition, edited with an introduction by J. J. McDermott (Modern Library, Random House, New York, 1967), pp. 317–345. It sort of sets the right mindset, even though it has nothing to do with quantum mechanics (other than in the efficacy of taking gambles) and goes much further on religion than I myself would go.

Anyway, here I suspect that reintroducing the observer will be more like introducing matter into pure spacetime, rather than simply gridding it off with a coordinate system. “Matter tells spacetime how to curve when it is there, and spacetime tells matter how to move when it is there.” Observers, scientific agents, a necessary part of reality? No. But do they tend to change things once they are on the scene. Yes. Or at least that’s the idea.

Does that mean that the scientific agent is something outside of physical law? Well, to give this an answer, you’ve got to go back and be very careful to use the picture of “physical law” that I built up at the beginning of the essay. What we are “governed” by, God only knows. He’s the one, if anyone, who sits outside the physical universe and has a chance to look back at it whenever he pleases. Our task is to build up as good and solid a set of beliefs as we can from within it. In that way, we increase our survival power, and use our spare time to try to bring forth a few progeny of our own. (I used the word “governed,” by the way, because you had used it above.)

If Galileo had dropped me from the tower, I feel pretty confident that I would have gone splat.

## 5 25 February 2002, to Wootters, “A Wonderful Life”

Thanks for the two notes, and wow, thanks for reading the James essay. Your questions were anything but naive. In fact, they were much needed. In trying to answer them, I think I significantly clarified—to myself even!—what I’m hoping to get at. Besides, I certainly don’t have a final stand yet; the whole point of view is in the process of formation and questions like yours really help.

I’ll do my best to reply to your questions below, and in the process I think I’ll finally compose what I’ve been wanting to say about your “private-world-within-entanglement” musings. At the end of the note, I’ll list some of the open questions on my mind. (These are likely to be the naive ones!)

###### Woottersism 1

: Of course I’m very sympathetic to the perspective you express in this paragraph … but couldn’t one still argue that as a matter of methodology, the tactic of pretending that we can know the whole story has served science well? We make up a model of the world, and this model gives us something to shoot at. We hang on to the model until we have found an explicit flaw in it (other than the flaw of hubris). And then we move on to a new model.

I find this an interesting question. On the one hand, I think this strategy does work well in advancing science. On the other hand, scientists (and others) are much too prone to accept as true the pragmatic lie that says we can fully understand the world.

Your note to John \[Preskill\] goes some way toward laying out an alternative methodology. You speak of science in Darwinian terms: the most successful theories survive. How then do we proceed as scientists? I suppose the answer is that we still make up theories and test them, but the theories are not tentative descriptions of the world. Rather, theories are schemes for making predictions. But you obviously also want to say that our theories tell us something about reality, even if they are not descriptions of reality. Moreover, our theories will tell us more about reality if we identify and remove from them those aspects that are subjective. So your view of science is not entirely operational. There is realism in the background.

Have I understood you correctly?

Yes there is certainly a kind of realism working in the back of my mind, if what you mean by “realism” is that one can imagine a world which never gives rise to man or sentience of any kind. This, from my view, would be a world without science, for there would be no scientific agents theorizing within it. This is what I mean by realism: That man is not a priori the be-all and end-all of the world. (The qualification “a priori” is important and I’ll come back to it later.)

A quick consequence of this view is that I believe I eschew all forms of idealism. Instead, I would say all our evidence for the reality of the world comes from without us, i.e., not from within us. We do not hold evidence for an independent world by holding some kind of transcendental knowledge. Nor do we hold it from the practical and technological successes of our past and present conceptions of the world’s essence. It is just the opposite. We believe in a world external to ourselves precisely because we find ourselves getting unpredictable kicks (from the world) all the time. If we could predict everything to the final T as Laplace had wanted us to, it seems to me, we might as well be living a dream.

To maybe put it in an overly poetic and not completely accurate way, the reality of the world is not in what we capture with our theories, but rather in all the stuff we don’t. To make this concrete, take quantum mechanics and consider setting up all the equipment necessary to prepare a system in a state $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ and to measure some noncommuting observable $`H`$. (In a sense, all that equipment is just an extension of ourselves and not so very different in character from a prosthetic hand.) Which eigenstate of $`H`$ we will end up getting as our outcome, we cannot say. We can draw up some subjective probabilities for the occurrence of the various possibilities, but that’s as far as we can go. (Or at least that’s what quantum mechanics tells us.) Thus, I would say, in such a quantum measurement we touch the reality of the world in the most essential of ways.

With that said, I now want to be very careful to distance this conception of reality, from what I’m seeking in the foundation game of quantum mechanics. Here’s the way I originally put it to John \[Preskill\] the other day. Let me repeat a good bit of it so that it’s at the top of your mind:

> OK, now let me put myself squarely in your pasture. You worry that having those main terms in the theory refer to my (or your, or Joe Buck’s) gambling commitments, is committing a kind of egocentrism. What respectable theory would refer to my particular vices, my desires, my bank account in making its most important statements?
>
> This is going to surprise you now, but I agree with you wholeheartedly. Even enthusiastically so. Where I seem to disagree is that I do not find this a good reason to promote those vices, those commitments to an unearthly realm and call them “states of the universe” (or relative states therein). Instead, it seems to me to be a call to recognize them for what they are and to redouble our efforts for getting at the real nub of the matter. …
>
> What I dream for in my foundational program for quantum mechanics is something just about like that. Weed out all the terms that have to do with gambling commitments (I used to call it information, knowledge, or belief), and what is left behind will play a role much like Einstein’s manifold.
>
> This much of the program, I hope and suspect you will understand even if you are not sympathetic to it. … However, it is also true that you have rightly suspected some tendencies in me that go further. In particular, in opposition to the picture of general relativity, where reintroducing the coordinate system—i.e., reintroducing the observer—changes nothing about the manifold (it only tells us what kind of sensations the observer will pick up), I do not suspect the same of the quantum world. …
>
> Anyway, here I suspect that reintroducing the observer will be more like introducing matter into pure spacetime, rather than simply gridding it off with a coordinate system. “Matter tells spacetime how to curve when it is there, and spacetime tells matter how to move when it is there.” Observers, scientific agents, a necessary part of reality? No. But do they tend to change things once they are on the scene. Yes. Or at least that’s the idea.

From some of my choices of words, I think you probably got the impression that this thing—this structure within quantum mechanics—that I’m hoping to find at the end of the day is meant to be a model of “reality.” Or at least our “current best guess” of what reality is. But no, that’s not really what I want. And your questions helped make that much clearer to me. Remember, for me, the mark of reality is its indescribability.

What I’m asking for instead is something like what one finds in the old movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. That is to say, in our scientific theories, we codify some fraction of what we know about manipulating the world and conditionally predicting the phenomena about us. However, suppose we wanted to get at a measure of our place in the world. How would we quantify it, or at least qualify it? That is, how might we ask how important our lives and agential actions are with respect to the theory we ourselves laid out?

Our only tool, of course, is the theory; for it defines the frame for optimal thinking (and imagination) at any given moment. We can only gauge our measure by deleting the free variable that is ourselves and seeing what is left behind. You surely remember what George Bailey found when his guardian angel granted his wish in It’s a Wonderful Life. He found that his life mattered. So too is what I suspect we will find in quantum mechanics.

But all of that is the sort of thing I won’t be able to say in a conference presentation for quite some time. It’s the sort of thing that we discussed once before, in the context of some Jamesian quote. gggIn particular I was thinking about this quote of William James:  The history of philosophy is to a great extant that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophies by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries, when philosophizing, to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making a more sentimental or more hard-hearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of opposite temper to be out of key with the world’s character, and in his heart considers them incompetent and ‘not in it,’ in the philosophic business, even though they may far excel him in dialectical ability. Yet in the forum he can make no claim, on the bare ground of his temperament, to superior discernment or authority. There arises thus a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of all our premises is never mentioned. I am sure it would contribute to clearness if in these lectures we should break this rule and mention it, and I accordingly feel free to do so.  It’s the underground reason for the philosophy.

At the level of convincing our peers, let me put it to you this way. Within quantum mechanics, there is an invariant piece which is common to all of us by the very fact of our accepting the theory. That is what we are in search of because in some sense—which need not pertain to a realistic conception of a theory’s correspondence to nature—it is the core of the theory. It is the single part that we agree upon, even when we agree upon nothing else. In the direction I am seeking to explore, the quantum state is “numerically additional” to that core. (That is, the quantum state is a compendium of Bayesian “beliefs” or “gambling commitments” and is thus susceptible to the type of analysis James gives in his “Sentiment of Rationality.” Our particular choice of a quantum state is something extra that we carry into the world.)

I hope that clears up some of the mystery of my thoughts for you—it did for me. Given John’s implicit acceptance of the idea that “a true theory is a mirror image of nature,” I should not have said in my note that I agreed with him “wholeheartedly.” I do not intend for any part of the formal structure of quantum mechanics to be a mirror image of nature (in the sense of a proposed final theory). However, I do not intend to give up the reality of our world either.

From my point of view, the only “true” reality that creeps into quantum mechanics is “in the differential”—i.e., in the changes we induce upon our (personal) quantum states for this and that due to any stimuli we give to or take from the outside world. That, however, is a pretty amorphous thing as theoretical entities go. It is little more than what might have been called in older language, the measurement “click.”

There is a temptation to go further—to say that the POVM element $`E_b`$ associated with a measurement outcome $`b`$ is itself an element of reality. But I think that has to be resisted at all costs. There are several arguments one can use to show that the ascription of a particular POVM to a measurement phenomenon is a subjective judgment at the same level of subjectivity as the quantum state itself. (In fact the two go hand in hand, one cannot support the subjectivity of the quantum state without also taking the subjectivity of the POVM.) Instead, one should view the (theoretical) ascription of a POVM to an actual measurement device as an attempt to set the significance and meaning of the “click” it elicits. Similarly for the Krausian quantum operation associated with the measurement: It describes the subjective judgment we use for updating our quantum-state assignment in the light of the “click.” (If you want more details about these arguments, I can forward you some of my old write-ups on the subject.)

So, you probably ask by now, “What does that leave for the core of the theory? Aren’t you throwing away absolutely everything?” And the answer is, “No, I don’t think so.” Let me give you an example of something which I think is left behind. Recall my favorite argument for why the quantum state cannot be an element of reality—it’s the Einstein argument I wrote about in Section 3 of my NATO paper. Once I posit a state for a bipartite system, even though by my own admission my actions are purely local, a measurement on one of the systems can toggle the quantum state of the other to a large range of possibilities. Thus, I say that the quantum state of the far-away system cannot be more than my information or the compendium of subjective judgments I’m willing to ascribe to that system.

Notice, however, that in positing the original state, I had to also implicitly posit a tensor-product space for the bipartite system. Let me ask you this: Once this tensor-product space is set, is there any way to toggle one of the factors from afar just as with the quantum state? As far as I can tell there is not. Thus I would say that the Hilbert space of the far-away system is a candidate for part of the theory’s core. Well, the Hilbert space—once the choice of a particular quantum state within it is excluded—really carries no substance beyond its dimensionality $`d`$. Thus, in a more refined way of speaking, what I really mean to say is that when I posit a quantum system, I am allowed to also posit a characteristic property of it. It is a property that can be captured by a single integer $`d`$.

There are some other things which I can argue will be “left behind” in such an analysis, but I don’t want to clutter this note too much. Mainly I presented the example above so that I could give you a clearer sense of how I want to draw a distinction between the rawest forms of “reality” (the surprises the world gives us) and the “core of a theory.”

It is the core of the theory (along with the theory as a whole) that I am starting to view in Darwinian terms. But don’t we have every right to posit that core as a property of the world itself, at least as long as that belief serves us well? This, as you point out, has been the predominant image of what science is about heretofore.

The only answer I can give you is “yes, we can” (just as indeed we have heretofore). So, your point is well-founded. What I am worried about is whether we should posit it so.hhhHere is the way I put it to Henry Folse when he asked, “Every attempt to sketch a conception of the universe from our best theories at any date in human history in effect commits such arrogance. Were the Newtonians of the end of the seventeenth century being “egocentric” to think that Sir Isaac had done nothing less than peer into the mind of the Divine and discerned God’s blueprints for the universe?”:  Yes. (In my opinion.) And you might interpret James and pragmatism in general as a reaction to that. However, I think in our modern age with quantum mechanics we have a motivation and opportunity in front of us that James did not have. Try to give quantum mechanics a naive realist interpretation—you can do it, or at least both Everett and Bohm tell us we can—and you find yourself contorting yourself beyond belief. It’s as if nature is telling us for the first time, “Please don’t interpret me in a naive realist fashion. I can’t stop you, but please don’t.” Folse, by the way, points out that what I really mean here is Cartesian representational realism—that reality is as we represent it mathematically in our theories—rather than naive realism. You say that this view has guided science well in the past. But how do you know? In a world with a view that there is no ultimate law, how do you know that we would not be a thousand years more advanced if we had only better appreciated our role as the substratum of our theories? I think it boils down to the difference between an active and passive view of what existence is about. Or maybe the difference between a positive and a negative view.

To make this point, let me try to put things back into the context of regular Darwinian evolution. Consider the word “elephant.” Does it denote anything that exists in a kind of timeless sense, in a way that we usually think—or in my case, previously thought—of physical theories as existing? If the concept of an elephant is worthy of treating as a candidate for an element of reality, then so too will a theory’s core.

Well, if we have bought into Darwinism in any serious way, then I would say, no, there is nothing particularly timeless about the concept of an elephant. There was once a chance that it might not even arise in the world. The “elephant” is merely a function of the selective pressures that cropped up in our world’s particular history. And, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the poor elephant may eventually disappear from the face of the universe, just like so many species that arose in the course of evolution only to be never discovered by a single archeologist.

But now, contrast the evolution of the elephant with the possible future evolution of the human species. The elephant was an accident pure and simple, from the strictly Darwinian view. But I would be hard pressed to apply pure Darwinism to the future of mankind. The birth of my oldest daughter, for instance was no accident. Her traits were selected based on personal visions that both her mother and I had for the future. Similarly, but not so excitingly, with the golden retriever, and all our other domesticated species. The key point is that in the present stage of evolutionary development, we have it within our power to move beyond strict Darwinism. This is what our industry of genetic engineering is all about.

However, we would have never gotten to this stage if we had not first realized that the concept of a species is not immutable. As strange—and as crazy and as scary—as it may sound, this is where my thoughts are starting to roam with physical theories. This does not mean, however, that we can have exactly what we want with our physical theories—that they themselves are little more than dreams. Just as the genetic engineer can make a million viruses that will never have a chance of surviving on their own, there is more to the story than our whims and fancies: There is the ever-present selective pressure from the outside. But that does not delete the genetic engineer’s ability to make something that was never here before.

But now, I go far, far, far beyond what I needed to say to answer all your questions. Mainly, I just wanted to emphasize why I intentionally placed the words “a priori” in my definition of reality way above.

I fear now slightly that you’re going to realize I’m one of the craziest people you’ve ever met! And, trust me, I’m not sure I really believe all that I said in the last three paragraphs. But it does strike me as a productive, or at least hopeful, train of thought that someone ought to explore. I guess I offer myself as the sacrifice.

— — — — —

There. I think that’s enough of my going around your questions in a rather wide way. Let me now zoom back to the center of one of them for purposes of a final emphasis.

###### Woottersism 2

: But you obviously also want to say that our theories tell us something about reality, even if they are not descriptions of reality.

I hope you can glean from all the above that I do indeed believe our theories tell us something about reality. But that something is much like what the elephant tells us about reality. It’s presence tells us something about the accumulated selective pressures that have arisen up to the present date. A theory to some extent is a statement of history. It is also a statement of our limitations with respect to all the pressures yet seen, or—more carefully—a statement of our limitations with respect to our imaginations for classifying all that we’ve yet seen. (I for instance, cannot jump off the leaning tower of Pisa unprotected and hope to live; you, for instance, cannot get into your car and hope to push on the accelerator until you are traveling beyond the speed of light.) Finally, to the extent that we the theory users are part of nature, the theory also tells us something about nature in that way.

But for any theory, there is always something outside of it. Or at least that’s the idea I’m trying to build.

PS. Way above, I said I would finally say a few words about your “private-world-within-entanglement” musings. But somehow it didn’t quite fit in with the flow of the rest of what I wanted to say. So, let me try to present the statement in isolation. From my point of view, the quantum state, and with it entanglement, never pierces into the quantum system for which we posit a parameter $`d`$ (the “dimension”). Similarly for any bipartite system for which we posit two parameters $`d_1`$ and $`d_2`$. The quantum state is only about what I’m willing to bet will be the consequences when I reach out and touch a system. Otherwise, indeed, a quantum system denotes a private world unto itself. And similarly with bipartite systems. We have very little right to say much of anything about the goings-on of their insides. (This part of the picture is something I’ve held firmly for a long time; it even shows up in my Physics Today article with Asher Peres.)

PPS. I also promised to end with some open questions. But I’m petered out now. And if you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably exhausted too. So I’ll just leave it for the future, depending upon how interesting you find the ideas above, or how much you think they’re nonsense!

## 6 Acknowledgements

I thank Jeff Bub, Henry Folse, Bas van Fraassen, Julio Gea-Banacloche, Lucien Hardy, David Mermin, John Preskill, Terry Rudolph, and Bill Wootters for saying things that encouraged me—whether they wanted them to or not—to make these letters more public than usual.


text:
# Classifications of the Host Galaxies of Supernovae

## 1 Introduction

Supernova statistics require a large data base for which the selection effects are well understood. Such a sample is provided by the 177 supernovae (SNe) discovered since 1997 by the 75-cm Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT) during the course of the Lick Observatory Supernova Search (LOSS; Treffers et al. 1997; Li et al. 2000; Filippenko et al. 2001). The data base examined in the present investigation extends from SN 1997bs (1997 Apr. 15) to 2002as (2002 Jan. 30). Both radial velocities and modern spectroscopic classifications are available for almost all of these objects. A complete listing of the Lick Observatory data on all of these discoveries is given at http://astron.berkeley.edu/$``$bait/kait.html.

A drawback of this data set, however, is that the images of host (parent) galaxies of SNe obtained with KAIT have a rather coarse scale, short exposures (25–30 s), and were taken in typical seeing of $`2^{\prime \prime }`$. These data were therefore supplemented by the images of the same galaxies obtained with the Palomar 1.2-m Schmidt telescope on 103aO emulsion during the first Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS I), and by POSS II (Reid et al. 1991) images in the red on IIIaF emulsion and in the blue-green on IIIaJ emulsion. (At the time of writing IIIaJ digitized data were not yet publicly available for all galaxies in the Survey.) Inspection of these images made it possible to classify each of the host galaxies of a supernova on the DDO system (van den Bergh 1960a,b,c). The somewhat underexposed KAIT images are particularly well adapted to the examination of the high surface-brightness central regions of some galaxies. On the other hand they are not very suitable for the classification of galaxies of below-average surface brightness. Such objects can, however, be classified very well on the longer-exposure images obtained in the POSS I and POSS II.

Due to the effects of seeing and image resolution the nuclear bulges of some galaxies appear larger in POSS-I images than they do in the blue-green POSS-II images. Another factor that has to be taken into account when making classifications is that bulge size is overestimated in the red POSS-II images, compared to its size in blue images. This is so because most bulges are intrinsically red. Furthermore, spiral structure (which is blue) is suppressed in red images. As a result there is a systematic tendency to classify galaxies too early in red images. Finally, the high signal-to-noise ratio in digitized IIIaJ images of the POSS II allows one to see spiral structure much more clearly in the POSS II than in the POSS I. These images are therefore particularly useful for the luminosity classification of spiral galaxies. At the time of writing digitized IIIaJ images were only available for 76% of the galaxies contained in the present survey.

In assigning DDO classification types to the host galaxies of SNe the information available from each of the four (three) sources of images was taken into account. The classifications so obtained are collected in Table 1. In this table uncertain values are followed by a colon. A “t” in some classifications indicates evidence for tidal interactions. All the redshifts and SN classifications in this table were taken from the KAIT web site.

## 2 Comparisons with Other Classifications

Many of the present classifications were made on small images. It is therefore of interest to compare these classifications with those that Sandage & Tammann (1981; hereafter S&T) have published for 27 of the present galaxies. Their classifications were mostly based on inspection of plates obtained with large reflectors. A caveat is that it is usually not possible to distinguish between types E and S0 on the images of the host galaxies of SNe that were employed in the present supernova survey. Another problem is that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish distant cD galaxies from distant objects of type Sab. In such cases the presence, or absence, of a swarm of nearby early-type galaxies can be used to distinguish between probable cD and Sab galaxies.

A total of 24 objects contained in both the Shapley-Ames Catalog and in the present data set on host galaxies of SNe could be placed on the sequence E-Sa-Sb-Sc ($`x`$ = 0, 1, 2, 3). The other three objects are NGC 788, NGC 6240, and NGC 3432, which are classified in the present study as E/Sa, Merger, and S (respectively), while they were S0/Sa, Sa, and Sc (respectively) in the S&T classifications (in other words, not all of these classifications fall on the sequence E-Sa-Sb-Sc). For the 24 objects that do fall on this sequence from both studies, we found $`<\mathrm{\Delta }x>=0.04\pm 0.12`$ in the sense $`x`$(DDO) $``$ $`x`$(S&T). This shows that there is no significant systematic difference between the present Hubble-type assignments and those by S&T. The standard deviation of $`x`$ was found to be 0.58 Hubble classes, so that the standard error for each the individual DDO and S&T classifications is probably $``$0.4 Hubble classes.

For 13 of the host galaxies of SNe in the present sample luminosity classifications were available on both the DDO system and S&T systems. The mean difference between these two data sets (in the sense DDO $``$ S&T) was 0.11 $`\pm `$ 0.20 luminosity classes, i.e., there is no statistically significant difference between these two sets of luminosity classifications. The standard deviation of the differences between individual luminosity classifications was 0.72 luminosity classes. This suggests that the accuracy of each set of luminosity classifications was probably $``$0.5 luminosity classes. It is concluded that the present set of galaxy classifications is on a system that is statistically indistinguishable from those employed by van den Bergh (1960a,b,c) and by S&T.

## 3 Discussion

Table 2 gives a compilation of the frequency with which SNe of different types occur in galaxies with various Hubble classifications. It is of interest to note that Li et al. (2001) discussed the selection process of the LOSS galaxy sample, and showed that it is representative of the general population of galaxies. The data in this table indicate the following:

1. SNe Ia occur in galaxies of all Hubble types. This result is in agreement with previous work (e.g., van den Bergh & Tammann 1991).
2. The frequency distributions of SNe Ia and SNe Ia-pec, as a function of Hubble type, do not differ at a respectable level of statistical significance.
3. SNe Ib and SNe Ic (collectively referred to as “SNe Ibc”) occur mostly in late-type (Sbc-Sc) spirals, whereas SNe of type Ia are mainly observed in early-type (E-Sb) galaxies. A Kolmogorov-Smirnov test shows that there is only a 0.6% probability that the SNe Ia and SNe Ibc in the present sample were drawn from the same frequency distribution over Hubble types. This confirms the suspicion (e.g., Filippenko & Sargent 1985; Wheeler & Levreault 1985; Porter & Filippenko 1987; Fransson & Chevalier 1989) that SNe Ibc have massive progenitors.
4. The small number of data on SNe IIn in Table 2 suggest that these objects have a frequency distribution over Hubble type that does not differ greatly from that of ordinary SNe II. In the subsequent discussion, data on SNe II and SNe IIn will therefore be combined and referred to as “SNe II.”
5. Inspection of the data in Table 2 confirms that SNe II are most common in late-type galaxies, whereas SNe Ia occur more frequently in galaxies of earlier types. A Kolmogorov-Smirnov test shows that there is only a 0.8% probability that these two types of SNe were drawn from the same frequency distribution over Hubble types. These data are consistent with the widely held view (e.g., Filippenko 1997) that the progenitors of SNe of type II are associated with a younger and more massive population than is the case for the progenitors of SNe Ia. However, a possible exception is the SN IIn 2001I, which occurred in the E2 galaxy UGC 2836. Such a young massive object would not have been expected among the old stellar populations in an elliptical galaxy. For example, Filippenko (1997) writes that “SNe II, Ib, and Ic have never been seen in elliptical galaxies and rarely if ever in S0 galaxies.” It would clearly be great interest to obtain deep images to check the E2 classification of UGC 2836. It is also possible that SN 2001I actually occurred in a late-type dwarf galaxy near UGC 2836.

## 4 Conclusions

Homogeneous Hubble-type classifications (on the DDO system) are given for the host galaxies of the 177 SNe that have been discovered since 1997 by LOSS. Almost all of these SNe have homogeneous spectral classifications. The data strengthen the existing consensus that SNe Ia occur in galaxies of all spectral types, but that SN Ib, Ic, and II preferentially occur in galaxies of later type that contain a significant population of young massive stars.

One of us (SvdB) wishes to thank Chris Pritchet for comments on an early draft of this paper and Marcin Sawicki for a search of data bases containing the galaxy UGC 2836. The work of A.V.F.’s group at U. C. Berkeley is supported by the National Science Foundation grant AST-9987438, as well as by the Sylvia and Jim Katzman Foundation. KAIT was made possible by generous donations from Sun Microsystems, Inc., the Hewlett-Packard Company, AutoScope Corporation, Lick Observatory, the National Science Foundation, the University of California, and the Katzman Foundation. A.V.F. is grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation for a Fellowship.


text:
# 1 Introduction

## 1 Introduction

Searches for variable stars in star clusters are very useful, because both variable stars and clusters are important sources of information on fundamental problems of stellar astrophysics. Variable stars which belong to cluster are especially well suited for studies of stellar dynamics and evolution. From their observations also many information on cluster age, distance and chemical composition may be obtained.

Our search is part of the long term project, aiming at systematic search for variable stars in open clusters initiated at the Warsaw University Observatory. Observations were conducted with both: 0.6 m telescope located at the Ostrowik Station near Warsaw and 1.3 m Warsaw telescope, located in the Las Campanas Observatory (LCO), Chile in the course of the OGLE project (Udalski, Kubiak and Szymański 1997). At the Ostrowik Observatory four Northern Hemisphere clusters were monitored: NGC 654, NGC 663, IC 4996, NGC 659 (Pietrzyński 1996abcd, 1997, Pietrzyński 2001) and in total 21 variable stars were discovered. Southern Hemisphere clusters were monitored from the LCO observatory and 59 new variable stars were discovered in the fields of two clusters: NGC 5999 and NGC 5381 (Pietrzyński et al. 1997, 1998). In this paper we present results of the search for variable stars in the field of another, Northern Hemisphere open cluster: NGC 581.

The cluster was cataloged already in XIX century by Messier (1850) with number 103. Later it was observed by Alter (1940), who first derived its distance. Since then NGC 581 has been a subject of several investigations, including photographic UBV studies of Hoag et al. (1961), McCouskey and Houk (1964), Moffat (1972), Sagar and Joshi (1978), and RGU study by Steppe (1974). Recently, Phelps and Janes (1994), based on precise BV CCD photometry, derived the distance and the age of this cluster of about 2690 pc and 22 Myr, respectively.

## 2 Observations

Presented data were collected in 1999 during 19 nights at the Ostrowik Station of the Warsaw University Observatory. The 0.6 m Zeiss reflector equipped with $`512\times 512`$ pixel CCD detector was used. The scale of 0.74 arcsec/pixel corresponds to the total field of view of about $`6.5\times 6.5`$ arcmin. The gain and readout noise were about 9.4 e-/ADU and 13.7 e-, respectively. More details about the instrumental system can be found in Udalski and Pych (1992).

Observations were performed through the Cousins I filter with exposure times of 10 sec and sequence of $`3\times 120`$ sec and through the V filter with exposure time of 120 sec. The map of the observed region is shown in Fig. 1.

All images were de-biased, dark current subtracted and flat-fielded using the IRAF***IRAF is distributed by the National Optical Astronomy Observatories, which are operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under cooperative agreement with the NSF. package. Sequences of the three 120 sec images were then co-added in the following way, adopting the software from the Difference Image Analysis (Woźniak 2000). First, the shifts between all three frames were calculated and every frame was resampled into the coordinates of the first one. Then, the frames were summed using the IRAF package. This operation changed depth of our photometry from about 18 mag to about 19 mag in the I filter.

Profile photometry was determined using Daophot and Allstar programs independently for all sets of data: 10 sec, 120 sec and $`3\times 120`$ sec in the I filter and 120 sec in the V filter. The stellar point spread function (PSF) was obtained from an average of 6 visually selected isolated stars. Table 1 contains information on total number of frames, mean error returned by Daophot, approximate brightness of faintest stars and number of objects in database of every set of data.

In order to create databases, images obtained at the best seeing conditions for every set of data were selected. Then, the master list with positions of all stars from the “template” image was prepared. Positions of stars from the remaining frames were compared with this list and for every star from the master list individual file with photometry was created. After subtraction of comparison star for all detected stars periodograms based on the AoV method (Schwarzenberg-Czerny 1989) were calculated and searched for significant maxima. Independently all stars were also examined visually for variability. This procedure was repeated for every set of data. In databases of stars obtained from 120 sec and combined $`3\times 120`$ sec exposures made in I filter we found five variable stars. Another star, which was saturated on longer exposure frames, was found to be variable in 10 sec I filter database. All variables, except for the saturated one, were confirmed in the V filter database.

Magnitudes of all stars were transformed from our instrumental system to photometry obtained by Phelps and Janes (1994), taken from the database of Galactic open clusters BDA (Mermilliod 1995). Common stars were identified visually. Then, coefficients of transformations were calculated using the least squares solution. Transformation equations and coefficients for summed I filter images and 120 sec exposure V filter are:

$`V`$ $`=`$ $`0.9929v0.0632(vi)0.1493,`$
$`VI`$ $`=`$ $`0.7874(vi)0.6911,`$
$`I`$ $`=`$ $`1.0210i+0.0939(vi)+0.2996.`$
Accuracy of transformations was about 0.04 mag for magnitudes in V and I, and about 0.03 for $`VI`$ color.

## 3 Variable Stars

In total six variable stars were found. Fig. 2 shows location of detected variable stars in V vs. V–I color-magnitude diagram (CMD). Table 2 contains their description. The following columns contain: designations of variable stars, their numbers in BDA database (Mermilliod 1995), brightness in V and I filter (for phase 0.5 for V1 and V2, for HJD–2 450 000 of 1432.5 for V5 and mean brightness for V3, V4 and V6), times of primary minima (for V1 and V2) or maxima (for V3, V4 and V6), derived period (if exists) and observed amplitudes (for V1 amplitudes of primary and secondary minima are given).

### 3.1 Eclipsing Binary Stars

Light curves of two newly discovered detached eclipsing binary systems: V1 and V2, are shown in Figs. 3 and 4.

Light curve of variable V1, phased with the period of 4.5020 days suggests large eccentricity of the system orbit. Because of scarceness of our data this period is still preliminary. Observations can also be phased with the period of 6.006 days. The light curve of V1 phased with this period does not show eccentricity. This stars was classified by Hoag and Applequist (1965) to have the spectral type of B2 V, what is consistent with its position in our CMD (see Fig. 2).

Period of another eclipsing binary star (V2) is also very preliminary. Some other periods are not excluded, but the chosen one (1.6828 d) seems to be the best.

Positions of both detached eclipsing systems in the CMD (Fig. 2) support their cluster membership. Additionally, Sanner et al. (1999) confirms cluster membership of star V2 based on the study of proper motions.

For better determination of the periods of both stars, V1 and V2, further observations are recommended.

### 3.2 $`\gamma `$ Dor Candidates

In Fig. 5 light curve a pulsating variable star, designated as V3 is presented. This star was previously investigated for its cluster membership by Sanner et al. (1999) (their star B). The derived proper motion turned out to be very different than the proper motion of the cluster. The spectral type of V3 is either A9 V (Sowell 1987) or F0 V (Jensen 1981). The only known pulsating variable stars of this type are stars of $`\gamma `$ Dor type (e.g., Kaye et al. 1999). The period of V3, equal to 0.6260 days, is also typical for this type of variable stars. Liu et al. (1989) noted variations of radial velocity of V3. We conclude then that star V3 is most probably a background $`\gamma `$ Dor star.

In Fig. 6 light curve of another $`\gamma `$ Dor candidate, V4 is displayed. This star is a member of NGC 581 (Sanner et al. 1999), what is in agreement with its location in the color-magnitude diagram. The most probable period of this star is 0.6751 days. When the same data are phased with the two times longer period the shape of its light curve is similar to the light curves of W UMa stars. Taking into account the young age of the cluster we can exclude this hypothesis. Unfortunately the spectral type of this star is not available. Its position in the CMD suggests the spectral type of late B or early A. This star can be then either a Slowly Pulsating B star (SPB, Waelkens 1991) or a $`\gamma `$ Dor variable. SPB stars are known to be multi-period variables, so we performed check for multiperiodicity. No other periods except for 0.6751 days, were found. It seems therefore that this object is more likely another $`\gamma `$ Dor type star, found in the field in NGC 581. Also the brightness of V4 compared to other $`\gamma `$ Dor candidates, found in our previous work in NGC 659 (Pietrzyński et al. 2001), seems to be similar, when the difference of 0.5 mag in distance modulus of both clusters is taken into account. Spectral observations of this star would help in distinguishing between these possibilities.

### 3.3 Miscellaneous Stars

In the field of NGC 581 there are four known Be stars (Schild and Romanishin 1976, Mermilliod 1982, Phelps and Janes 1994). Two of them were monitored during our observations. Star with BDA number 49, did not show any brightness variability. Light curve of another Be star, designed as V5 is presented in Fig. 7. Our data are too scarce to allow any conclusion about possible periodicity of this star, but its behavior (irregular changes of the brightness by a couple of tenths of magnitude, over the relatively long period of time) is typical for Be type star. Its position in the CMD is consistent with the B spectral type of this star. Unfortunately because of the very close proximity of the very bright star (of $`V=7.26`$ mag) and low accuracy of previously derived coordinates, it is not easy to cross-identify this star with the BDA database. Most probably our star designated as V5 corresponds to an object with the number 178 in BDA. This star was discovered to be a Be star (e.g., Schild and Romanishin 1976, Mermilliod 1982). Also the brightness and color of star 178 seems to be similar to V5, (e.g., Burnichon 1976 gives $`V=9.90`$ mag and $`BV=0.24`$ mag, Purgathofer (1964) gives $`V=10.04`$ mag and $`BV=0.19`$ mag, Sagar and Joshi (1978) give $`V=10.09`$ mag, $`BV=0.01`$ mag, Hoag et al. (1961) give $`V=9.35`$ mag, $`BV=0.29`$ mag). One can also suspect that relatively large differences in brightness determinations of this star obtained in the past were due to intrinsic photometric variations of this object.

Light curve of another variable, V6, found in the field of NGC 581 is presented in Fig. 8. Brightness of this star varies with the period of 1.1494 days. However, the period two times longer cannot be excluded. Because V6 is very red with the mean $`VI`$ color equal to 2.61 mag we suspect that, it is a pulsating red giant star.

## 4 Summary

We have presented results of a photometric search for variable stars in the field of young open cluster NGC 581. We have found six variable stars based on observations collected during 19 nights. Two detached eclipsing binaries were found in the field of NGC 581. Unfortunately, because of the scarceness of our data the periods derived for these stars are only preliminary. Stars designated as V3 and V4 are probably new $`\gamma `$ Dor candidates. Variable star designated as V5 seems to be the previously known Be star. Irregular changes of its brightness detected during our observations are typical for this class of stars. Another known Be star from NGC 581 was observed, but we did not notice any changes of brightness. Star V6 is most likely a pulsating red giant star.

Acknowledgments. We would like to thank to Prof. Marcin Kubiak for his comments and help in preparation of this note. Thanks are also to Dr. Wojtek Pych and Dr. Grzegorz Pojmański for making their computer programs available and to many students for their help during observations. The work was supported by the KBN BW grant to the Warsaw University Observatory.

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