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Are “virtual particles” real? What makes a real particle real? And what of Matter Waves? Are the waves real too?
We need to define what “real” means. What is real? I propose that:
REAL = INTERACTION. If Object A changes the state of Object B, then Object A must be “real.”Actions (on another object) are real. An “ELEMENT OF REALITY” OCCURS WHEN AN ACTION OCCURS.
In the EPR paper of 1935, Einstein and Al. hypothesized that “elements of reality” were local, one could always separate the observer from the observed system. Now we know that this is not the case, in space, through various Bell-like experiments (and the formalism of Quantum Mechanics, which predicted it, the main point of the EPR 1935 paper was that the Quantum Mechanics formalism violated the Principle of Locality).
The definition of element of reality I propose here is vastly different from the one proposed by Einstein and Al. And the reason why it is vastly different is that the definition of “reality” proposed by Einstein and Al. does NOT work [1]. We have EXPERIMENTAL (not just theoretical) proof of it.
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The famous COW (Colella, Overhauser, and Werner) experiment gave another more global answer: when going through an interferometer made of two channels, gravity interferes with each, and differently so, according to geometry. So gravity acts on Matter Waves. Conversely one must then consider that Matter Waves generate gravity (in the name of a generalization of the Third Law of classical mechanics: no action without equal and opposite reaction).
If the wave carries energy and momentum (which it must, to interact with gravity), then the wave itself is an “element of reality,” not just a mathematical probability. Indeed, according to my ABR definition of Reality above, the Matter Wave, in whichever channel, ACTS and therefore IS.
The action of Matter Waves on the gravitational field hence the potential divided nature of inertia (using the Principle of Equivalence) are real, because they act on other objects.
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In general, and historically speaking, action on other objects happened at a point, what we call a particle. So a “real” particle is, or describes, action at a point. Quantum Field Theory (QFT) suggests: “Particles” are just localized excitations (ripples) in an underlying field.
The “point-like” nature we perceive is often just a result of the scale at which we measure the interaction. Particle accelerators show “real” particles as humps in a graph with a sigma (a probability) attached.
However, as COW shows, actions do not have to be at a point, and indeed Matter Waves are not localized: waves are never localized. Quantum Entanglement is more of the same.
“Virtual” particles, or more exactly intermediate “propagator” states, act on other objects. Thus, according to the definition of reality we started with, that an element of reality occurs when there is an action on other objects, they are real.
The usual objection is that virtual particles are confined in space, time, and momentum. But, asymptotically, the same objection could be made about any “real” particle. If the proton lived only 10^45 years, would it stop being real?
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The objection made to virtual particles being real because they are not states in Hilbert space, and not directly observable, amounts to the same complaint, namely that they are not final states, namely particle states of the HS (so it’s a tautology). And the same could be said about waves (they are not final states in the Hilbert Space)… However COW definitively shows that the Matter Waves are real.
Similarly the relativistic mass-energy-momentum equation of relativity, E^2=p^2+m^2, is proven, ultimately, by the slowing down of time in the moving frame. But the fact that the “virtual particle”, or, more exactly, the intermediate state, is not directly observable deprives it of the possibility of having its own proper time, thus of the necessity of satisfying the equation derived from it…that what is called “off shell”… The 2026 STAR experiment (see below) shows that, as “on shell” conditions are approached, intermediate states can reveal themselves.
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Reality is a Spectrum of Interaction, rather than a binary of “exists/doesn’t exist.”
Locality is not a requirement for reality (proven by Quantum Entanglement).
Permanence is not a requirement for reality (proven by Particle Decay).
Point-like structure is not a requirement for reality (proven by the COW experiment).
If we accept my premise—that an element of reality is simply an action—then Virtual Particles and Matter Waves are indeed real, as they are indispensable links in the chain of physical cause and effect. We don’t see the “things”; we only ever see the “doings.”
Virtual particles are not real—but neither are, really, real particles. Only interactions are real, and more or less so. “STAR” did not really show that “virtual particles are real”. STAR shows:
👉 correlations between field disturbances (described by the “propagator”) can be made rich enough to reconstruct the internal spin structure of the (otherwise unknowable) intermediate state (STAR uses hyperons which are parity violating and emits protons whose direction is related to the hyperons’ spins! Who dares to say that high energy physics was useless?)
In other words, there is a structured intermediate state… And, although presently unknowable, mostly, STAR showed something about it which was not known before, namely that it can become quasi-real as partons (here quark-anti-quark pairs) approach “on shell” status.
Reality, ladies and gentlemen, is more mysterious, ubiquitous and mystifying than ever!
We focused above on the hard case, the Foundations of Physics. Action Based Reality, ABR has vast consequences there, as it shows that CIQ, the Copenhagen Interpretation of the Quantum, is wrong: the Matter Waves are real, not just observer dependent knowledge waves of some quirky sort (as CIQ has it). If ABR can be crucially effective for the Foundations of Physics, no doubt it will be also crucial in softer domains!
ACTION BASED REALITY has vast consequences, including in the analysis of history and political science: don’t look at what they said, or what was said about them, look at what real real actions ensued!Reality trumps fiction through action.
Patrice Ayme
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[1] In the 1935 EPR paper, an “element of reality” refers to a physical property whose value can be predicted with certainty (probability 1) without disturbing the system. EPR defined it precisely as follows: “The elements of the physical reality cannot be determined by a priori philosophical considerations, but must be found by an appeal to results of experiments and measurements. A comprehensive definition of reality is, however, unnecessary for our purpose. We shall be satisfied with the following criterion, which we regard as reasonable. If, without in any way disturbing a system, we can predict with certainty (i.e., with probability equal to unity) the value of a physical quantity, then there exists an element of reality corresponding to this physical quantity.”
The quark-anti-quark pairs are not directly observed… The claim above is not really that “virtual” is real, but that the intermediate “virtual”, “propagator” state can be somewhat known, thus has more structure than used to be expected: there are elements of reality therein, now partly revealed… There may be perhaps more…
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Abstract: Quantum fields propagate as real, spatially extended nonlinear excitations.
Energy transfer requires singularization.
Singularization is imperfect in weak-gradient environments.
The residual linear debris accumulates as inert stress–energy, interpreted as Dark Matter.
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SQPR IS A PROPOSED BASIS FOR QUANTUM MECHANICS… which it modifies in it s most funadamental axiom, by imposing a finite speed to Quantum Collapse. In SQPR, quanta are self-sustained nonlinear excitation with a real guiding wave, solving that way several weird or paradoxal aspects of Quantum Physics. HOWEVER, SQPR HAS CONSEQUENCES IN COSMOLOGY:
… Indeed, SQPR dramatically contradicts the reigning cosmological model ΛCDM, in testable ways SQPR replaces proposed primordial particle Dark Matter, DM, with GRAVITATIONALLY INERT STRESS–ENERGY DEBRIS GENERATED BY IMPERFECT QUANTUM SINGULARIZATION OF REAL PROPAGATING FIELDS, reproducing Cold Dark Matter (CDM) phenomenology while remaining compatible with General Relativity, GR, GR lensing, structure formation, and the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)..
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SQPR was invented for Quantum Mechanics, modernizing ideas from Einstein and De Broglie in the light of Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Field Theory (QFT), and Soliton Theory… But it turned out SQPR predicted Dark Matter in the simplest manner imaginable [1]. Thus, according to SQPR, Dark Matter is the result of partial Quantum Collapse in some cosmological situations… Whereas in ΛCDM, Dark Matter is primordial, created with the Big Bang… A tall order as standard physics has no idea what Dark Matter could be (MOND, modifying gravity, has been pretty much ruled out by the Bullet Cluster… Among other things… However, SQPR not only creates DM but does modify gravity, at great distance, but not as grossly as MOND does… And as an indirect effect…).
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Objections to SQPR, mostly result from severely misunderstanding the axiomatics of SQPR, as shown below.
(An important remark is that the way SQPR is applied to cosmology is itself tunable, as hypotheses have to be made on what the (presently incomplete) Quantum Field Theory of free long range fields truly is, and so SQPR can be made compatible with much of the vision of the early universe that ΛCDM profers… In case the latter is proven correct in the future…)
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SQPR Does NOT Cause Blurring: DM Is NOT Fabricated By Baryonic Interactions, But By Direction-Preserving Isotropic Collapse:
Swiss Cal Tech astronomer Zwicky discovered Dark Matter in 1931, by studying clusters of galaxies. Zwicky also suggested tired light to explain the cosmological red shift. His idea could not have been quite that of a sunset, because a sunset blocks all high frequencies. Instead, according to Zwicky, dust interacted with light and re-emitted it at lower frequencies. However, if that were true one should see the blurring of distant galaxies.
But one does not.
The Big Bang Theory instead suggested that the cosmological redshift was caused by the progressive stretching of space itself… Since the Big Bang the stretching factor is supposed to be z ~ 1100. What was originally of length 1 (as measured by light) is now of length 1100…
Implicit in this is the fact that the photon has some length (something that should have a consequence for a full QFT) [2].
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SQPR re-emission after Quantum Collapse is NOT from baryonic re-emission: there is no loss of the DIRECTION of momentum, because momentum is associated to the core soliton S, and the Quantum Collapse is assumed to be symmetric (the parts of the matter wave W closest to W contract perfectly and symmetrically, thus not affecting the direction of momentum; only momentum norm is affected).
So, after each Quantum Collapse, there would be no blurring, but, instead a very slight loss of total energy.
This is not Zwicky tired light anymore — it is emergent dark matter from a nonlinear field instability.
Nor would Dark Matter as created by SQPR re-radiate. Each Dark Matter piece is a residual fragment of linear field amplitude, stripped of phase coherence and nonlinear self-support. Radiation requires:
a nonlinear bound structure (soliton, atom, oscillator)
phase coherence
coupling to a gauge field
SQPR-DM has none of these.
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SQPR Fabricates Dark Matter Over Billions Of Years:
This is confirmed by looking at galactic clusters (GC):
Strong lensing in clusters requires the mass of the lens, which is made of Dark Matter, to be five to ten times larger than the mass of the baryons observed in the cluster.
A simple, but erroneous objection to SQPR would be to pretend that Quantum Collapse energy from the existing e-m radiation + gravitons field is sufficient to build the DM mass.
Indeed, the known mass density of the DM lens of a GC is 4 to 5 orders of magnitude greater than the energy density contained in the electromagnetic and gravitational fields of the cluster.
HOWEVER, in SQPR, the fields are not static, immaterial, ethereal objects. Instead they contain real matter waves of photons and gravitons, constantly expanding and collapsing, before re-expanding. So the em and grav fields are constantly replenished, and keep on producing Dark Matter from quadzillions Quantum Collapses [See my observations on Einstein’s Lichquanten vs QFT; [1], ….
Actually one could compute all that. Given the size of the galactic cluster one can find out how long it takes the field to go across: millions of years. If the cluster has existed for ten billion years, that’s enough for ten thousand transits. If a field particle transiting repeatedly collapses, as it transits across the cluster, one could literally have millions of QC, and a substantial creation of DM… While the field themselves, replenished by baryonic matter of the cluster, would stay the same. . One could object that the DM existed before the cluster, otherwise the cluster would not exist to start with, as it is DM bound, and that this fact fits LCDM, which assumes that DM was there from the start,,, better than an emerging alternative. However not only the objection may not hold if the universe is, say 25 billion years old rather than 13… But computations show that SQPR can reproduce LCDM at will….
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Quantitative problem. Total EM + GW energy density in clusters is: one would miss lensing by 4–5 orders of magnitude… If one assumed the QM happens once and not repeatedly.
But of course, we are talking about immensely long cosmological times billions of years here, and repeated Quantum Collpase is the rule. At short distances the collapse are perfect, at too large a cosmic distance they are imperfect and generate DM.
The same objection has been made about DM built up in the galactic halo.
Actually the very fact the DM is in a halo, not a disk, is testimony to its ancient character. But then if QC is in part created presumably where there is baryonic matter, how come it does not stay in the disk? That’s because the disk is held together by baryonic forces, as with e-m forcing plasmas which in turn create stars. DM is not sensitive to e-m forces like for example e-m radiation pressure (which is pretty obvious in pictures like the “Pillars of Creation”)
Why are there halos of Dark Matter? Because DM does not baryon interact so there is nothing, no force, to form a disk. And one has cosmological time to build up the DM SQPR style.
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Another question pertaining to SQPR is what is really going with QFT? QFT is both the most precise and the most false theory ever produced, immense precision to compute some magnetic moments, and off by 120 orders of magnitude for vacuum energy…QFT uses the agitated vacuum concept, but when one computes its energy, even while introducing a Planck Length cut-off one gets an energy too large by 120 orders of magnitudes… In SQPR, the vacuum is also stuffed with Dark Matter debris, not just arbitrary field fluctuations all the way down to Planck Length…At some scale well short of PL, DM extinguishes the field fluctuations by forcing premature collapse…
In particular a question for QFT is: do particles blob up during QFT field transmission?
QFT sweeps that below the carpet by pretending the field is classical, but then it magically bubbles up into Greene functions, virtual particles, when emitted or received, due to the energy time UP.
If QFT free fields created blobs, and not just permeated space classically, that would provide a potential partial collapse mechanism, hence a way to add to DM fabrication in, say, a cluster of galaxies.
SQPR considers that such bubbling up happens in free Quantum fields, and then that contributes to DM.
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HOW TO FABRICATE COLD DARK MATTER WITH HIGH VELOCITY FIELDS
One objection could be that particles moving at, say, light speed would have to create Dark Matter which has no momentum, the “CDM” in ΛCDM!
How could that be? Well one must suppose that the Third Law of (classical) mechanics is still valid: action equals reaction. The Quantum Collapse over a vast expanse breaks a soliton that requires energy (it’s acquired from whatever in the “vacuum” which initiates the collapse). Let’s write: W = S = NL + L.
L is the guiding Linear wave, NL is the Non Linear core of the Soliton S.
Before breakup we have momentum PS = PL + PNL = q + Q, with q <<<< Q. After the breakup of the initial Soliton S we have momentum PS’ + pDM.
We want pDM to be basically zero so that the newly created Dark Matter DM can be cold and join its friends along a null geodesic.
The break up of S is made possible by an energy caused by the collision of S with the initiator which shows up as ε, a small momentum which characterizes the breakup within S. We have pDM = q – ε, where initially Momentum S = PS = q + Q.
q is the share of the momentum of S of what is going to the new Dark Matter… So PS = (q – ε)+(Q + ε). If q and ε are similar in norm, as they are opposite in direction, pDM = q – ε will essentially stall.
The major part of S, S’ survives with a momentum slightly higher (by ε) than it had before the split, but still inferior to the initial PS. The key here is that energy has been transferred from a basic immobile object, the sub quantum vacuum, to the fast moving Soliton S. The torn small part, DM is hit by a very hard momentum transfer which leaves it cold, and the main soliton S, now S’ keeps on going, but after bleeding a bit of pure scalar energy.
This explains why newly created Dark Matter becomes cold upon the moment of its creation, and thus why it follows null geodesics, makes halos, and why the Bullet Cluster is the way it looks, etc… This way SQPR implies CDM…
In the Bullet Cluster, the Baryonic matter is held back, ironically enough by a somewhat similar mechanism, action = reaction in head-on collision! Ionized gas clouds ram‑pressure collide head on, slowing and stripping each other. The gas experiences a drag force as it plows through the opposing intracluster medium, so it lags near the center, while galaxies… and the Dark Matter… behave as nearly collisionless components and pass right through. (Most of this DM will have been created long ago.)
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DM fabricated by SQPR is absolutely NOT matter, it has at most a frequency, it is no guiding wave, it’s not a soliton, it’s just a piece of debris, a piece of torn linear wave guiding nothing, just contributing to overall mass, and subject to the Einstein GR equation… In particular DM cannot radiate: that would require it to have enough of a structure to emit a photon, that is, a soliton.
QC collapse doesn’t happen much inside DM halos because they have so little baryonic matter. If two pieces of DM collide, nothing happens. Whereas, if a piece of DM collides with a full matter wave soliton, a Quantum Collapse can well happen (we need a trigger corresponding to a gradient of the matter wave, and one can write such an equation easily.)
Those occurrences will scale with the intensity of the gravitational potential…because there would be more gravitons bubbling around, a type of matter wave soliton. The hypothesis here is that the gravitational potential is really the measure of how many gravitons are floating around.
Ironically enough, I somewhat give credence to Einstein’s 1905 suggestion in his photoelectric paper, that the field particles stay localized… Except not as a sort of grain, but with the twist that localization here means a pretty symmetric soliton-like matter wave expanding at c…
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Other objections against DM from SQPR have arisen, for example that aging of light is not seen in lensing… But the aging is similar in its shift to the pure stretching of space, so the objection is overruled.
So is the objection that SQPR would do strange things to laser beams over killoparsecs… But I didn’t know we had those yet: last time I checked we didn’t even have a colony a few light years away…SQPR claims the matter waves are real, the QC goes at immense but finite speed, and sure SQPR physics will show real effects, that’s the whole idea.
In any case, Quantum Collapse would happen repeatedly over cosmic time and may well convert vacuum-scale field energy, not just radiation. SQPR also offers an explanation for “Tired Light” which circumvents the usual objections against TL, and removes the main evidence for LCDM. While LCDM fits the Bible very well, and pretends just to depict what is seen, modulo a castle of cards, SQPR removes some of the main objections to Quantum Mechanics… And end up explaining a lot of things. Whereas ΛCDM is fairly rigid, SQPR applied to cosmology is extremely adaptable: from the flexibility provided by the full QFT of the future, SQPR can reproduce the truly observed elements of ΛCDM, but it could also accommodate a much older universe.
SQPR says that delocalization is real, but then localization is also real, propagation is real, collapse is real — and QFT averages over them all. Besides the prediction that Dark Matter is not a particle, SQPR applied to cosmology may explain some other riddles, such as the ISW.
Where SQPR becomes cosmologically testable:
SQPR predicts the following which can be quantitatively assessed:
DM fraction correlates with gravitational potential depth, not baryon mass
Early massive clusters should show excess DM relative to star formation
Slight spectral aging without angular diffusion at extreme redshifts
Possible deviations from ΛCDM in void lensing
These are all falsifiable.
Patrice Ayme
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[1] Einstein’s brilliant explanation of the photoelectric effect was simply that the electromagnetic field energy was absorbed by quanta of energy given by the frequency of the light. In the paper, he asserted that the photon stayed a blob during translation. He had no proof of that, he didn’t need it, and I called it Einstein’s Error (and not the Cosmological Constant, nota bene). QFT instead views quanta as excitations of the (classical) em field.
Einstein’s insistence on a particle-like photon while in flight is explicitly contradicted by interferometer experiments (Mach-Zender, COW), besides being logically added for no good reason besides tradition… It also barred the development of De Broglie “Double Solution” (SQPR is a type of delocalized Double Solution). This explains why Einstein could only take a three week course on QED from Ehrenfest before giving up… Particles as excitations of the field, although that was a perspective that Einstein himself had initially pushed with his Unified Field Theory, was a bit too much, as the Uncertainty Principle was at the core of the apparitions of particles/Greene functions out of nowhere, coming and going while affecting the field.
SQPR takes an in-between approach: singularization of energy transfers is a fact: that was the genius idea of Planck (-Einstein), and it has been amply confirmed, beyond any doubt. The wave nature of matter propagation and fundamental processes is also beyond doubt, and absolutely certain. So if one tries to stand under Quantum Mechanics, one has to explain how one goes from one to another. This is what SQPR does. Purists of never saying something that could be seen as wrong sometimes from some perspective, prefer to stick to the QFT credo of excitations of what is at the bottom a classical field (adorned with the UP). Nobody dares to wonder how one goes from the singularity (Dirac Delta Distribution) to the wave and back. Singularity, Dispersion, Collapse, Singularity… This is what SQPR does in the simplest way imaginable. The two core axioms ((!) real matter wave and (2) finite speed collapse) automatically fabricate Dark Matter. What could be easier?
So we are reconciling Einstein and QFT, by effectively reviving Einstein 1905, but in a modernized form: not a grain, not a classical wave, but a self-sustained nonlinear excitation with a real guiding wave.
QFT evades this by: treating free fields as classical, localization only at interaction vertices, hiding dynamics in Green functions.
SQPR instead says: Localization is real, propagation is real, collapse is real — and QFT averages over it. This is not inconsistent with contemporary experiments; it is simply below the resolution of standard observables… Although, once again, the entire universe may have provided us with a giant Quantum experiment we just need to be smart enough to read.
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[2] The argument that the stretching is purely mathematical, and thus does not ascribe an implicit length to the photon, goes around in circles because the infinitesimal line element is best visualized as a tiny length…
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Abstract: Recent experiments observing and reversing quantum jumps (2025 Nobel Michel Devoret et al.) show that quantum trajectories can evolve deterministically and reversibly, challenging the Copenhagen view of intrinsic indeterminacy. Quantum Trajectory Theory (QTT), implicitly validated by these results, reveals that the Schrödinger equation describes a fully deterministic evolution in function space. Quantum indeterminacy arises from incomplete local description, not fundamental randomness. Through entanglement swapping, determinism can operate beyond the classical causal horizon. Sub Quantum Physical Reality (SQPR) extends this by attributing physical reality to the extended linear part of the wavicle, with finite-speed quantum interactions that reconcile nonlocality with relativity.
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“Classical Horizon” for determinism is not a classical notion, it arises from QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT SWAPPING… Bear with me… QTT, Quantum Trajectory Theory, quietly and implicitly nearly got the last physics Nobel 2025… Through the celebration of Michel Devoret, has used QTT heavily for his spectacular work on Quantum Jumps (in SQUIDs)!
Devoret would not have gotten the Nobel if his work on QUANTUM JUMPS, seeing them EVOLVE, and even REVERSED… Had been in any way controversial. That work, by itself, is certainly worth a Nobel [1].
QTT is fully deterministic. QTT de facto contradicts CIQ, Copenhagen Interpretation Quantum… which is sick (pathologically self-referential and philosophically incoherent, because it assumes enormously without factual basis, denying its own claim to be minimizing the number of axioms)… So this is one more implicit admission of the community of top physicists that Bohr was wrong (in his extreme and final positions; giving the 2003 Physics Nobel to Leggett, who explicitly called Bohr wrong, more than two decades ago, was already such an admission…)
The apparition of precise trajectories in Quantum Mechanics is not surprising as Quantum Theory fundamentally processes WAVEFUNCTION in a fully DETERMINISTIC LINEAR Partial Differential Equation (implicitly) found by De Broglie in 1923 and named after Schrödinger. The Schrödinger equation is indeed linear, which is why superposition (of waves!) works.
The equation says that the differential change of the wavefunction is proportional to the differential increment of time multiplied by the total energy of the wavefunction and a rotation of the phase by pi/2 (i.e. multiplication by the complex number i). Given initial conditions, such an equation has fully determined solutions which are functions of space and time.
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So why do people say so much that Quantum Mechanics is indeterministic? Perhaps because they view points as the fundamental objects, and that is how calculus started, centuries ago… whereas QM is about function spaces, calculus of variations, and functional analysis.
The fundamental objects of QM are thus intrinsically nonlocal, because they are waves. This nonlocality is called “Quantum Entanglement”. Interacting with that wave at any point has an immediate effect all over: Quantum Collapse (aka “decoherence”), or “Spooky Interaction At A Distance” as Einstein, who discovered it in 1935, humoristically put it [2].
Quantum Entanglement can be swapped through “Bell Pairs”, thus the instantaneous interaction at a distance can propagate well beyond the classical horizon, making the Quantum capable of determining outcomes where classical mechanics never dreamed of.
Patrice Ayme
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[1]. Interestingly Devoret, French genius, financed by the USA, is exiled from degenerating woke France… where there is no more money for geniuses but plenty of French taxpayer money for all anti-French causes which can be found worldwide.
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[2] EPR apparently profited from an earlier debate with the philosopher Popper, whose name labels a version of the EPR… Something to think of for those who claim wisdom is useless in physics…
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Highly technical P/S: The “sick” part of CIQ which is eliminated has to do with extravagant claims of Bohr, Von Neumann which boiled down to the will to simplification, or self-glorification, or both, of claiming that their knowledge of Quantum Mechanics was ultimate (mathematician Von Neumann wrote a book demonstrating the unicity of QM, although De Broglie had already rolled out his alternative Pilot Wave theory… The VN “proof” had a flaw). Nobel laureate Leggett explained very well, decades ago, that this meta-claim was contradicted by experiments.
It may be said that the sickness has been merely relocated within the theory. However, what QTT shows is where the singular part of the nonlinear, soliton-like wavicle is located… QTT does not address the nature of the wavicle.
SQPR does this. SQPR, Sub Quantic Physical Reality, attributes a physical reality to the extended, linear part of the wavicle (what CIQ describes the first order of…)… Where QTT reveals the hidden determinism of quantum evolution, SQPR grounds that determinism in a physically real subquantum substrate — extending de Broglie’s insight while reconciling locality with superluminal causation through finite propagation speed. That substrate is actually a hiden thermodynamics of wavicles and debris thereof.
Interactions within that “substrate” causes the Quantum Interaction, which is superluminal (thus violating the common meta-spiritual interpretation of Relativity… But NOT its equations… In first order…). Much of SQPR extends De Broglie’s Pilot Wave Theory, but with an important distinction, namely the QI speed is FINITE (also it transfers nearly infintesimal energy it many configurations, hence DM and DE). Out of that finite speed requirement pops out obvious explanations for several mysteries of physics (DM, DE, Renormalization, but also how classical physics arises from QM…) . .
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It is often said that simultaneity can’t exist in Relativity Theory. In the context of Relativity as defined by Poincaré, that’s entirely correct, and a major consequence of LOCAL TIME theory. Actually Local Time is not just a theory, but a fact… a fact of classical (non-Quantum) physics
However, as far as I know, the problem of simultaneity in Relativity as it is now, is somewhat similar to that of prehistoric men sitting here and there in the darkest night, making noises for establishing simultaneity. When the sound is perceived depends upon how close one is from the source of the sound. In Relativity, it depends upon both the speed of the source, and its location, in time, and in space (a term (-vx/cc) in the transformation of time coordinates appears… that term has real, not to say dramatic, physical consequences, in my not so humble opinion) In Relativity, light is the measure of all things, just as, in the dark, sound was the measure of all things for prehistoric men.
The problem of simultaneity as found in what would become Relativity was encountered first in the most practical manner when using Morse code along telegraph lines… well before Einstein’s birth (in an unscientific and grotesque bias, the simultaneity solution was attributed to Einstein, as the rest of Relativity… although as far as I can see, Einstein plagiarized the whole thing…) Poincaré knew this well, as he was a telecommunication engineer (plus the top mathematician and a top physicist).
The solution to simultaneity was used in Poincare’s theory of “Relativity” (as Poincare called it even before 1904).
Poincaré pointed out that there was no simultaneity if one used his generalization of Lorentz’s local time theory… Einstein and his friends studied some of Poincare’s publications very carefully.
Poincaré got the full and correct Lorentz transformations, as rotations in (+++-) spacetime, and they were revealed on June 6, and formally published on June 9, 1905. Einstein reproduced a particular case of that mathematical logic in a paper sent to Planck June 30, 1905 (published in September as Einstein’s miracle paper as it was apparently miraculous that a German could understand Poincaré’s Relativity and reproduce it without quotations; in all justice, Einstein did also lift a reasoning from the most famous Austrian physicist to “prove” (incorrectly) Poincaré’s E = mcc in a more general setting than Poincaré had proven it… for light).
Is simultaneity forever gone? Never ever possible? ONLY IF the Poincaré-Lorentz local time theory and the speed of light are as fundamental as we can go, and we can go no further. However, we have a candidate for establishing simultaneity: Quantum Entanglement. QE is very close to enabling us to transmit information at a speed 10^23c or higher.
How come? Analyzing Spin in one direction at A enables us to know Spin in the same direction at B, if the particles at A and B are entangled. A and B could be a light year apart… This would allow us to establish a superluminal Morse code (after some preliminary, but then fixed cosmic engineering)… As long as we can prepare, or select the Spin states at A.
Yes, we can’t do this now, in 2024. HOWEVER, the claim has appeared recently that, by instrumentalizing QTT, Quantum Trajectory Theory,one can see a Quantum Jump being prepared and then reverse it (a Nobel worthy discovery in my not so humble opinion)… So one may imagine preparing a Quantum Spin state, and then, not liking where it prepares to point, subsequently reverse it, then try again until one gets the direction one wants, and then collapse THAT… Thus creating a Spin in a particular direction at B!
So yes, no simultaneity now. However, as (nonlocal hidden variable) Pilot Waves and QTT are rising their sophisticated heads, it may become possible to prepare Quantum states, and then superluminal communications should be possible.
Patrice Ayme
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We describe an Operational Physical Definition Of Synchronization, free of magical nonlocal observations
Abstract: Parroting Poincaré from 1900, Einstein used a non-operational retrospective definition of synchronicity of clocks for clocks in a rest frame, which requires a couple of observers. I propose instead an operational construction for generating synchronized clocks, starting with the one at the origin of the rest frame. A first interest is that one makes a physical concept, synchronicity, independent of human “stipulation” (to quote Einstein). The functioning of nature should be made independent of human observers as much as we can!
Another reason for being so precise and operational is that synchronization blows up, once and if the frame is accelerated. The role played by light, which, absent obstacles, has infinite range, is thus crucial and contrasted with, say, the nuclear force field, which has finite range. As I explained, this causes the apparition of a speed limit less than c.
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Here is a quote from Einstein’s 1905 ultra famous publication on the Electrodynamics of Bodies in Motion, where he exposes what he calls, following Poincaré in 1904, the “Theory Of Relativity” (TOR). Einstein describes Poincaré’s synchronization (published by 1900) without quoting him (although there are several independent proofs that Einstein, in charge of electromagnetism, in particular telegraphy at the Patent Office was perfectly aware of Poincaré’s work!):
Einstein: “If there is a clock at point A of space, then an observer located at A can evaluate the time of the events in the immediate vicinity of A by finding the clock-hand positions that are simultaneous with these events. If there is also a clock at point B-we should add, “a clock of exactly the same constitution as that at A”-then the time of the events in the immediate vicinity of B can likewise be evaluated by an observer located at B. But it is not possible to compare the time of an event at A with one at B without a further stipulation; thus far we have only defined an “A-time” and a “B-time” but not a “time” common to A and B. The latter can now be determined by establishing by definition that the “time” needed for the light to travel from A to B is equal to the “time” it needs to travel from B to A. For, suppose a ray of light leaves from A toward B at “A-time” tA, is reflected from B toward A at “B-time” tB, and arrives back at A at “A-time” t’A
The two clocks are synchronous by definition if tB – tA = t’A – tB. We assume that it is possible for this definition of synchronism to be free of contradictions, and to be so for arbitrarily many points, and that the following relations are therefore generally valid: etc…”
(Einstein writes then that “having synchronized time” (call that T) is reflexive: ATB → BTA and associative: ATB & BTC → ATC).
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Poincaré was not just the physicist, president of the French Physics Society, who established Relativity (TOR), he was also arguably the world’s top mathematician, and thus loved definitions. The preceding definition of synchronization is mathematically cute, but it does not describe an engineering system to create synchronization (Poincaré was also an engineer in telecommunications, and no doubt could have thought of what I am suggesting here… but he didn’t!)
Can we do better by finding an operational, experimental definition? Einstein was talking about “hands of clock”. Can we do better? Yes, light enlightens us. Poincaré said in 1904 or before that the constancy of the speed of light, an experimental fact, was a law of nature, and made it , an axiom (“stipulation” in Einstein’s parlance)… thus deducing what Poincaré generously called the “Lorentz Transformations” (elements of the Poincaré group). So instead of talking hands like Einstein, one should just talk light. Here is what I propose:
LIGHT CLOCKS SYNCHRONIZED:
A light clock is simply made of two parallel mirrors. A photon, or more generally a light pulse (a bunch of photons) bounces between the mirrors. One can count the recoils (a photon of energy E has momentum, E/c, which becomes -E/c as it rebounds, transmitting 2E/c to the mirror. (Such devices exist in practice and one can measure the passing light with phase shifts in an atom; Haroche and his group could count the photons inside a cavity, and he got the Nobel for that.)
The trick is to put a half silvered mirror before the upper (say) mirror, of light clock A at the origin, and similarly for the distant light clock B a distance x away.
Then part of the bouncing pulse at A will create a bouncing pulse at B (there could be a shutter between A and B so that only one pulse would go through (this is a thought experiment, but a practical device can be built from it!).
Obviously B would beat at the same exact rate as A, just with a delay of x/c…
… No need for a magical reading of TB comparing it to TA and TA’… Reading the times TAs automatically tells us what the times TBs are. My preceding construction is device based, not a mathematical abstraction requiring an observer a posteriori comparing hands of a clock in various locales.…
In conclusion, we have replaced Poincaré (-Einstein) nebulous nonlocal observers retrospectively observing hands of clocks by a proposed engineering device which is nonlocal in an electromagnetic fashion… can be readily built, and is fully capable of illustrating the problems of non-simultaneity and its dependency upon acceleration.
Patrice Ayme
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P/S: The notion of observers in physics was launched (as far as I know) by Poincaré. The notion of observer later became pathological in Quantum Mechanics (see Schrodinger Cat). Some say that Einstein’s work on Relativity was superior to Poincaré’s because Einstein did without observers in Relativity… But that just demonstrates they didn’t read Einstein… who mentions “observers” repeatedly. When Poincaré derived the Poincaré group and Lorentz transformations as rotations in spacetime (couldn’t be more abstract and observer-free; Einstein repeated the proof in a simpler, less general context, a few eeks later…)
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Adulation for great thinkers is perfect, as long as proper attributions are given correctly enough to describe the logic of invention… Adulation can be used as a Trojan Horse for expanding knowledge and discovering the arcane laws of metathinking.
However, in the case of Einstein, and also other heroes of the Anglosphere, such as Newton, Darwin or Godel, or Watts, fake attributions have distorted the cognitive picture. Those five scientists made major discoveries, but they were very far from making all the discoveries attributed to them.
Lamarck (and Cuvier, and others) established scientifically the long-guessed evolution theory,(while competing fiercely about evolutionary mechanisms… both were right, probably)… two generations before Charles Darwin (who recognized, as newton did, hiis predecessors). No wonder: France was the land of Revolution and England was where the Anglican Church explicitly forbade the teaching of evolution.
Newton was an important brick in the wall of Classical Mechanics as he (more or less) demonstrated that the laws of mechanics plus Bouillaut/Bullialdus Formula for gravitational attraction were equivalent. But the mechanics and calculus revolution had started in Paris, under Buridan and his students (including the Oxford computational school…) three centuries earlier.
Godel is singled out in the debate on the Foundations of Mathematics… But there are at least a dozen of important names: Buridan, Oresme, Cardano, Descartes, Fermat, Leibnitz, Newton, Euler, Laplace, Cauchy, Cantor, Russell, Brouwer… and dozens of others, sometimes even more important as they were the true originators (in particular around Cardano). By insisting on Godel, one insists on a single aspect of mathematics, namely that math is made of never ending rabbit holes (I fix that with my ultrafinitude).
(t−vx/cc) is what Poincaré defined as local time in 1900. Not only Poincare discovered this, but he realized it meant that length contracted in the direction of motion (the contraction itself was a discovery made by the Irish physicist Fitzgerald (and Lorentz) to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment).
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Local time theory was a reinterpretation and extendion by Poincare of Lorentz’s work on the spacetime transformations necessary to keep the equations of electromagnetism independent of uniformly moving frames. This work was published in 1895 by Lorentz when Einstein was still a child [1]. By 1905, when Einstein published his work on Relativity, all the equations had been published.
Local time theory was a rephrasing by Poincare of Hendrik Lorentz’s work on the spacetime transformations necessary to keep the equations of electromagnetism independent of uniformly moving frames. Published when Einstein was still a child. By 1905, when Einstein published his work on Relativity, all the equations had been published.
“Relativity” was Poincaré’s and so was E = mcc, which showed that light carried inertial mass (Cours a la Sorbonne, 1899).
Poincaré is the one who said first that the fact that the speed of light was everywhere measured to be the same (from Michelson and Morley experiment of 1887), and thus it was a physical law. Einstein read it in Science and Hypothesis (La science et l’hypothèse, published 1902, modified 1903, when Poincaré realized electromagnetism a la Maxwell was 100% true after French experimenters confirmed it following rumors to the contrary…).
The term “Relativity” was indeed used by Henri Poincaré even earlier than in his 1904 book titled “Science and Hypothesis” (French: “La Science et l’Hypothèse”) [2]. Poincaré himself said that Einstein’s work was a nice rephrasing of relativity (to be honest, it was a tidy exposition relative to what was before, but not as tidy as one can now do!)
Poincaré is the one who said first that the fact that the speed of light was everywhere measured to be the same (from Michelson and Morley experiment), and thus it was a physical law. Einstein read it in Science and Hypothesis.
Gravity waves in relativity were published by Poincaré in 1905.
The principle of relativity, according to which the laws of physical phenomena should be the same, whether for an observer fixed, or for an observer carried along in a uniform movement of translation; so that we have not and could not have any means of discerning whether or not we are carried along in such a motion.
— Henri Poincaré, 1904
Einstein and his friends (and collaborators, Besso, etc.) spent years studying Poincaré’s Relativity
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Einstein was a genius at seeing the work of others and improving its presentation. This is not to be despised. He did this with Brownian motion, the quantum, Bose-Einstein statistics, and he recognized the importance of De Broglie’s work, and, according to Popper, of Popper’s contribution to the fact the quantum is nonlocal. Popper was a philosopher and Bose an Indian physicist who realized that photons like to gather.
The idea that force could be viewed as curvature in the appropriate space was revealed by Riemann in 1854 in his famous Habilitationsschrift. It has been hanging around ever since. It works well with gravity, but not so much with the other forces, because the quantum messes up with energy-momentum, the more localized it gets, thus the right side of the Einstein gravity equation: Curvature = Energy…
So what did Einstein really contribute personally? The idea that the Quantum of electromagnetic energy of Planck could be absorbed as a packet, explaining the photoelectric effect (Nobel work). Further work on viewing gravitation as a curvature of spacetime (with Hilbert and other friends). And paradoxically the nonlocality of quantum mechanics (which he demonstrated by trying to prove that the quantum was spooky at a distance).
Einstein presented clearly the postulates of relativity and light-speed invariance as foundations of Relativity (Einstein, 1905, §3). Einstein showed that the equation of a spherical lightwave in one frame, xx + yy + zz = cctt has the same form when x and t are Lorentz transformed (it is hard to believe that Poincaré, the world’s top mathematician didn’t know this…) A spherical wave propagating with the speed of light in one frame, Einstein remarked, is thereby another spherical wave propagating with the speed of light in a second inertial frame. As the British mathematical physicist Ebenezer Cunningham pointed out a two years later, form-invariance of the lightwave equation is all that is required for the derivation of the Lorentz transformation, along with a linearity constraint (Cunningham, 1907).
Einstein was a great physicist, but was not as much a revolutionary as legend had it. Einstein’s work was not as original as the local time theory (misattributed to Einstein). And, although Einstein was one of the founders of quantum theory, the original idea of the quantum came from Planck.
Ironically, nonlocality, which “spooked” Einstein, he said, may have been Einstein greatest original contribution…
Quantum Field Theory, which surfaced in the 1920s was deeply revolutionary in a way Einstein never was. Now of course, QFT had many genial contributors, starting with De Broglie (“everything is a wave”)… But then Einstein is the one who gave De Broglie his thesis, basically (the top PhD com of De Broglie threw its nads and asked Einstein to decide on what they called the De Broglie’s “circus”).
Einstein himself once was asked by a French literary genius why he never had a notebook to write his ideas down, and Albert replied (paraphrasing): because new ideas are so rare, I can’t forget them. Ideas are a bit like the theory of types of Russell: they come in many different types…
Civilization class ideas are very rare… And Einstein, after all, stumbled on nonlocality… so well, he fell flat on his face…
Patrice Ayme
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[1]: Lorentz referred to as “Ortszeit” (Lorentz, 1895), and which Poincaré (1900a, 273), following Alfred Liénard, called “temps local”, or local time. In Poincaré’s mind, Lorentz’s local time took on an operational meaning, as the time read by a clock in uniform motion of velocity v with respect to the ether, synchronized by crossed light signals with other identical comoving clocks…
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[2] Henri Poincaré, in his book, 1904:
The Principle of Relativity.—Let us pass to the principle of relativity: this not only is confirmed by daily experience, not only is it a necessary consequence of the hypothesis of central forces, but it is irresistibly imposed upon our good sense, and yet it also is assailed… Indeed, experiment has taken upon itself to ruin this interpretation of the principle of relativity; all attempts to measure the velocity of the earth in relation to the ether have led to negative results.
…experimental physics has been more faithful to the principle [of “RELATIVITY”] than mathematical physics; the theorists, in accord with their other general views, would not have spared it; but experiment has been stubborn in confirming it [the principle of relativity]. The means have been varied; finally Michelson pushed precision to its last limits; nothing came of it. It is precisely to explain this obstinacy [of nature]…
The most ingenious idea was that of local time. Imagine two observers who wish to adjust their timepieces by optical signals; they exchange signals… The watches adjusted in that way will not mark, therefore, the true time; they will mark what may be called the local time, so that one of them will be slower than the other. It matters little, since we have no means of perceiving it. All the phenomena which happen at A, for example, will be late, but all will be equally so, and the observer will not perceive it, since his watch is slow; so, as the principle of relativity requires, he will have no means of knowing whether he is at rest or in absolute motion.
Unhappily, that does not suffice, and complementary hypotheses are necessary; it is necessary to admit that bodies in motion undergo a uniform contraction in the sense of the motion. One of the diameters of the earth, for example, is shrunk by one two-hundred-millionth in consequence of our planet’s motion, while the other diameter retains its normal length.
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Abstract: That photons delocalize in flight was so obvious, Huyghens described them as waves four centuries ago. That’s reinforced both from the math of Quantum Mechanics, and traditional diffraction math. Let alone 2023 Quantum Entanglements of Pions. Time to erect bolder hypotheses to try to understand what’s really going on.
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That a photon is received as a photon, a single localized energy-momentum jolt, or quantum, explains the photoelectric effect’s characteristics, so we should accept that localized impact. This was Einstein’s hypothesis, and because it explains the photoelectric effect, one should assume it to be true. Einstein deserved his Nobel… And indeed, since then many experiments, including those of Nobel Haroche, have dealt with the single photon impacting or influencing something… In a very localized way.
HOWEVER, localization on impact doesn’t mean that, in “flight” the photon, or any particle is localized as much [1]. It just means that the photon behaved as if it had… “collapsed”. Einstein assumed localization in flight, I call it Einstein’s error. Modern QFT has discreetly strayed away from Einstein, as the “particle” has become an excitable Quantum Field (hence nonlocal) subjected to renormalizing perturbation theory. Moreover, Basic Quantum Mechanics assumes delocalization, but then claims only the math delocalize, not the whatever-is-going-on physically, about which CIQ (Copenhagen Interpretation Quantum) can say nothing.
Yes, maybe CIQos can say nothing, but smarter minds can make hypotheses, and then try to find out if observed effects derive from these hypotheses… Details that normal Quantum mechanics does not predict, like Dark Matter and Dark Energy.
The evidence, from diffraction, is to the contrary of the gratuitous and unnecessary Einstein’s in-flight-localization hypothesis. Both from the grossest observations (namely deflection by a pinhole/slit) and from the way the mathematical treatment of said pinhole/slit works… Because those classical mathematics of diffraction work, indeed, but they assume DELOCALIZATION… to make the computation. So the computation’s result being correct, one feels inclined to believe that its mathematical axiom, delocalization, is also correct… as a physical axiom.
As seen below the usual classical computation for diffraction assumes re-emission, thus delocalization, all along the throat of the slit:
Patrice Ayme
[1] SQPR assumes that “particles” in flight don’t really exist (de facto, so does QFT). The “particles” instead are of type NL + L, where NL is the NonLinear part, and L the Linear part (corresponding to the amplitudes of traditional Quantum Mechanics). L guides NL during dispersion (outward momentum from the singularization/particle state… the opposite of collapse, when the momentum goes towards the singularity). A mathematical description may involve a wave acceleration proportional to its amplitude… So that L can become unstable and grow into a NL, after interacting with another L from another “particle”.
How localized is NL? The Quantum Eraser experiment of Kim and Al., in 1999, indicates that NL is somewhat localized, at least in its apparatus… But it’s very far from a particle. Moreover, as NL feeds L, so to speak, one expects NL to get ever more nonlocalized…
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Referring to Quanta, foundations of physics expert Dr. Ian Miller said in a comment on this site: “What the particle does it will do irrespective of whether you wish to try and calculate it.”
This is, rephrased, an affirmation of LOCALITY found in Einstein’s famous EPR paper of 1935 [1]. Let’s try to dispose of it.
The “particle” “is”/or is “guided by”… a wave W… Of this all those who passed a course in Quantum Mechanics agree. Basic QM consists in computing amplitudes of complex probability waves W.
That W is the Quantum Wave appearing all over Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory. Right, the nature of the wave W will change according to what Quanta we consider… Let’s neglect this for a moment.
[[In SQPR, the quanta is a nonlinear wave with a linear tail, expanding and contracting at a quasi-infinite speed (that allows SQPR to quasi-duplicate Bohm’s quantum potential)… But this is irrelevant here for the most general argument. We only need the concept of a wave.]]
Now if one sets up an experiment E, wave W, being a wave, will interact specially with E. The point is that (W,E) is different from (W, E’), if E is different from E’. Niels Bohr made, basically, that argument to Einstein, who couldn’t understand it… (Nor could I, for the longest time!)
But SQPR makes clear why that’s true… And, even simpler, so does the simplest wave mechanics, as long as the wave interferes with the environment. But that matter wave interferes with the environment, we know, and have known for a million years, because light coming out of a hole diffracts, or makes rainbows coming out of eyelashes…. Diffraction patterns are everywhere.
More sophisticated, and for spin: Stern-Gerlach magnets…. Which shows that spin measurments don’t commute, and “which path” information is crucial… The “which path” data is itself nonlocal…
We know of “the particle” W because we put some experiment E in its way. W is different from the entangled pair (W,E). This is the core of what Einstein didn’t get. The biggest notions in physics are the simplest [2].
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TRYING TO BE MORE SOPHISTICATED REINFORCES THE ARGUMENT:
So the argument was disposed of, and Einstein instructed…I agreed with Einstein for years before realizing my mistake, and that Bohr was right.
However, classically inclined skeptics will moan, what is this W?
W could be the Dirac wave representing the relativistic electron, W could be the wave of the W boson, whatever, they are in different spaces. And they all need to be “renormalized”, right… because the fields self-interfere (“fields” and “waves” are the same things)
But that greater complexity doesn’t change the simplicity of the argument above. It actually makes it even more powerful. Indeed W is truly a wave in the appropriate Hilbert space, itself revealed by the nature of the experiment E one intends to reveal W with…
If I remember well, Niels Bohr made that argument to Einstein, but in a more obscure way, and he aggravated his case with some philosophical mumbo-jumbo…
The point remains: what we want to measure, the Experiment E that we have in mind, determines the grossest mathematical nature of the wave W. W does not just interfere with E, E creates the grossest nature of the W to start with (for example Dirac wanted a first order PDE conserved by relativity to depict the electron; out of that requirement popped out spin and antimatter… Among other things…)
Patrice Ayme
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P/S: Some want to grab the wave W, and complain they can’t, because W lives in “phase space” (aka the Hilbert Space which is the experiment E. But that’s misunderstanding about how thinking works: One can’t decide the universe, and all its objects are three dimensional, when we have plenty of forces, and, as Riemann more or less pointed out, each of them brings us one or more dimensions, each of them potentially (joke intended) in a fancy space (for example so-called Clabi-Yau manifolds…)
Diffraction Pattern. This shows that a light wave interfere with its environment, E (in this case a hole). In QFT, one has an evolution equation on one side, and a space dependent energy term on the other, plus a potential A. The A represents the environment E. In the grossest analysis, the situation is the same as above.
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[1] Einstein used that point, that the particle was always there, untouched, to affirm that, thus, there were HIDDEN (from Quantum Mechanics) variables. It’s not really an argument, because it’s the reaffirmation of the same point. Alain Aspect’s experiment for which he got the Wolf and Nobel prizes in physics, disposed of that the “particle” was TOUCHED… demonstrating that god refused to listen to Einstein.
[In SQPR, there are hidden variables, however they are, de facto nonlocal, as they change at speed in excess of 10^23c. Thus SQPR doen’t contradict the prohibtion against “LOCAL” hidden variables. Anything above c is “nonlocal”. As in “NONLOCAL hidden variables”. We know from experiments (Aspect, Zeilinger, labs in China, etc.) that the QUANTUM NONLOCALITY proceeds at speeds orders of magnitude greater than the speed of light…]
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[2] E itself is typically NONLOCAL (for example two arms of an interferometer…
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Fundamental ideas can be simple, yet subtle. Take the “Higgs” Field idea. Dirac’s simple first order PDE for the electron (QED, Quantum ElectroDynamic) had to be modified to incorporate the “weak” nuclear force. But that worked with massless particles. Yet, particles had mass. What to do? The solution was to make the equations even more complicated by introducing a “Higgs” field, which, once it is non-zero on average, can give the electron a mass by interacting with the electron field without messing up the workings of the “electroweak” force. Basically the interaction with the Higgs Field acts like a glue, giving an inertial mass.
Complications on top of complications… Not necessarily a bad thing: after all we got away from the magical world by introducing extremely complex explanations elaborating from a few concepts, sort of all biology from DNA and RNA… A danger, though, is to start from erroneous concepts. As Henri Poincaré put it:
C’est même des hypothèses simples qu’il faut le plus se défier, parce que ce sont celles qui ont le plus de chances de passer inaperçues. It is the simple hypotheses of which one must be most wary; because these are the ones that have the most chances of passing unnoticed. (Thermodynamique: Leçons professées pendant le premier semestre 1888–1889 (1892), Preface)
The principle of relativity, first proposed by Galileo, was stated thus by Newton:
“The motions of bodies included in a given space are
the same among themselves, whether that space is at
rest or moving uniformly forward in a straight line.”
That says nothing about how to define “uniform”, except circularly. Nor does it says all inertial frames are equivalent, just that they “are the same among themselves”…
Quantum Vacuum Fields Radiate Under Acceleration (Un. Chicago 2019 picture).
A great progress attributed to Einstein was the disappearance of any absolute motion. The irony, hidden to the profane, was that Einstein set on developing General Relativity (GR) precisely to explain the “Mach Principle” that he was obsessed with… That thing of Mach was actually discovered by Newton. Put water in a pail hanging from a rope, said Isaac. Twist the rope slowly, rotation after rotation. Release. Pail starts to rotate, water climbs on the side of the pail. Why a rotation relative to the fixed stars would have such an effect is a mystery (Mach observed, Einstein tried to elucidate with GR).
So the idea of GR, as far as Einstein was concerned, was to find a mechanism to explain absolute motion! Indeed the standard Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) Big Bang model defines, de facto, an absolute state of motion… the one relative to which the Cosmic Background Radiation looks isotropic… Except, oops, it’s not (latest news).
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But let’s go back to Relativity. It was named thus by Henri Poincaré, and rested on the notion of LOCAL TIME. In Fast Moving frames, time runs slow. That immediately led to the so-called “Twin Paradox” launched by Paul Langevin in 1911 (Einstein had mentioned the slowing of the moving clock in his 1905 paper). Langevin describes the story of a traveler making a trip at a Lorentz factor of γ = 100 (99.995% the speed of light). The traveler remains in a projectile for one year of his time, and then reverses direction. Upon return, the traveler will find that he has aged two years, while 200 years have passed on Earth. Langevin attributed the effect to ABSOLUTE acceleration (that’s reproduced by Richard Feynman, in his Lectures on Physics, but it’s not correct, I feel).
However, looking at the math more carefully, what really matters is how long the world-lines are, not how bent they are. The bending (acceleration) enables the length. The length referred to here is the Lorentz-invariant length or “proper time interval” of a trajectory which corresponds to the elapsed time measured by a clock following that trajectory. Basically the fast frame exchanges time for space: it covers lots of space, thus leaving little energy to spend on time: one can literally see the effect by looking at light wiggling back and forth between two mirrors. If the two mirror assembly goes fast, the wiggling is slow.
A related question is mass (like in “proper mass”). I have argued that it is time which slows down, not mass which goes up (as some texts have it, erroneously). Related to this is the Force-Acceleration law which involves now a (gamma)^3 factor… from multiple divisions by slow infinitesimal time…
All of this will leave some scratching their heads. Am I saying there is a notion of absolute motion? Well, the evidence is overwhelming. It’s time to remember the philosophy of Henri Poincaré: if it looks like a duck in all ways, it’s a duck. Poincaré was actually saying that if all experiments give a speed of light equal to c then the speed of light c is a constant of nature (ironically, that’s true only locally… that is “infinitesimally”. In GR the speed of light is all over the space and, although locally constant, certainly not nonlocally constant… you see physics can be more subtle than basic logic…)
A notion not usually considered is that any manifold, or pseudomanifold, of dimension n can be embedded in manifold or pseudo manifold, of dimension (2n+1)… If one applies that to the curved spacetime of the LCDM, one gets an absolute reference frame… As de facto observed: the tapestry of galactic clusters is pretty much static…
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Where am I drifting with these pseudo-idle considerations? Well, I am reinstating in catimini the honorability of space and time absolutism… Comrade Poincaré, a colossal topologist, seems to have been aware of much of this… but he died at 58 in 1912, before GR was finished (Henri had introduced gravitational waves in 1905), and long before De Broglie came up with his ubiquitous Matter Waves. Matter Waves necessitate derivation relative to time… Which local time is that? Differently from Relativity, which starts with a non-accelerated frame, the class of uniformly moving ones, Quantum Physics is indifferent: any time will do. How could that be? Accelerated time is slow time, says General Relativity (this is actually an independent, most simple piece, a building block of GR, which doesn’t require the full theory). Quantum Physics doesn’t care about time as defined by light. It differentiates as if there was one and only one time, as In Newton’s time.
Why? An obvious explanation could be that the architecture of Quantum Physics implicates a much higher speed, the collapse/entanglement/Quantum Interaction speed… In any case, to go from our class of uniformly moving frames to any others implicates Quantum fireworks, as pictured above… No uniformities are accessible, but for the one we enjoy…
Patrice Ayme
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According to Einsteinian lore, one cannot have such an “instantaneous” interaction, it would contradict “Relativity”. (From my point the interaction is not instantaneous, just more than 10^10 c, that is 10^10 the speed of light, at least.)
Jules Henri Poincaré asserted the Principle of Relativity (1904) and demonstrated that, supposing that the speed of light was always constant, one could get all the equations of Special Relativity. Then Einstein, opportunistically jumping on the immensely famous Poincaré’s work, asserted that the Frenchman’s work showed that the speed of light was constant (whereas a more cautious Poincaré asserted earlier that, considering that the speed of light was always found experimentally to be constant, one should view that as a law of physics). Of course, Einstein did not quote the French, as he was a good Swabian (and not a good European), keen to ride, as his mentor Planck was, Prussian fascism.
This Field Of Galaxies Defines An Absolute Frame. It Is Plain To See, Only Years Of Learning Academic Physics Can Brainwash Someone, Not To See It.
Poincaré knew very well Lorentz’s Local Time theory, which he had helped established, in the preceding quarter of a century. However, Jules Henri still believed in Absolute Time (Einstein did not).
Why to believe in Absolute Time? Poincaré did not wax lyrical on the subject. He actually said nothing (contrarily to Nobel laureate Bergson twenty years later, who violently contradicted Einstein). Nor did any physicist, in the meantime (110 years), dare defend Absolute Time (we have lived in an Einstein terror regime!) But this what Quantum Physics quietly does and what I will now dare to do (if I can contradict professional Salafists, I surely can dare to contradict professional physicists).
Suppose we have an absolute reference frame. Bring a light clock there, at rest, call that time: Absolute time. One can slow transport clocks (say using chemical rockets, and taking 100,000 years to get to Proxima Centauri) all over the universe, establishing UNIVERSAL TIME. Relativistic effects depend upon vv/cc. The square of speed, divided by the square of the speed of light c. If v/c is small, vv/cc is even much smaller, and negligible. (Poincaré showed this first.)
So is there an absolute reference frame? Sure. That frame is the one steady relative to distance pulsars, quasars, distant galaxies, etc. (no rotation) and steady relative to the Cosmological Background Radiation. Then one can talk about simultaneity, absolute time, and thus instantaneous interaction at a distance.
(This is one approach; there is another approach of mine, more mathematical, using the fact a manifold of dimension n can be embedded in one of dimension 2n +1 (Whitney). Or then one can use the celebrated Nash’ embedding theorem.)
There is no contradiction of Absolute Time theory, or should we say, possibility, with Local Time Theory (LTT). LTT is about light clocks. Relativity is about light clocks. Yet we know of other interactions… plus the QUANTUM INTERACTION.
BTW, in “General Relativity”, “Einstein’s theory of gravitation”, the speed of light is not constant. Even Einstein recognized this.
Conclusion? One can profitably consider Ian Miller’s “Dark Energy and Modern Science“. Even physicists can believe what they believe in, on the most important fundamentals, because it is fashionable, a rite one has to believe in, so that one can become an initiated member of the tribe. And the more absurd the belief, the better.
Patrice Ayme’
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EVIL EVOLUTION
Evil Is Not An Accident But A Necessary Mean To ecological Sustainabiilty. That It Is A Solution Is Also A Warning.
Ian Miller
New Zealand Physical Chemist musing very cogently about the state of everything
Our Friend Barry.
On Barack Obama’s formative years as a scholarship student at the Punahou college preparatory school in Hawaii, by his classmates and friends.
Tyranosopher
State of the Art Philosophy, Devouring the Feeble Minded.
Blogroll
AKIRA Intellectual Property Law
Intellectual Property Attorney, PhD Biophysics, California Bar, UK Solicitor, Member of the Bar of the Supreme Court, Computer Science Professor
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EVIL EVOLUTION
Evil Is Not An Accident But A Necessary Mean To ecological Sustainabiilty. That It Is A Solution Is Also A Warning.
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Ian Miller
New Zealand Physical Chemist musing very cogently about the state of everything
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Our Friend Barry.
On Barack Obama’s formative years as a scholarship student at the Punahou college preparatory school in Hawaii, by his classmates and friends.
0
AKIRA Intellectual Property Law
Intellectual Property Attorney, PhD Biophysics, California Bar, UK Solicitor, Member of the Bar of the Supreme Court, Computer Science Professor
EVIL EVOLUTION
Evil Is Not An Accident But A Necessary Mean To ecological Sustainabiilty. That It Is A Solution Is Also A Warning.
Ian Miller
New Zealand Physical Chemist musing very cogently about the state of everything
Our Friend Barry.
On Barack Obama’s formative years as a scholarship student at the Punahou college preparatory school in Hawaii, by his classmates and friends.
Philosophy and science: the human adventure. Philosophy is not as popular as it should be, as it supports not just civilization, but human evolution. It matters what we love. Philo-Sophy: Love of Wisdom. But what is love, and what is wise? We humbly examine all the issues we can possibly imagine having to do with defining love, and wisdom. Plus Oultre!
New logic solving 25 centuries old logic problems such as the Liar Paradox And Incorporating Spirits of Quantum Logic, Local Time, And Local Truth. More General Than PDL ,
Trying To Think Better By All & Any Means. To Be Human Is To Unleash As Much Intelligence As Possible, Instincts & Values Flow, Even Happiness. History and Science Teach Us Not Just Humility, But Power, Smarts, And The Ways We Should Embrace. Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum
New logic solving 25 centuries old logic problems such as the Liar Paradox And Incorporating Spirits of Quantum Logic, Local Time, And Local Truth. More General Than PDL ,
Trying To Think Better By All & Any Means. To Be Human Is To Unleash As Much Intelligence As Possible, Instincts & Values Flow, Even Happiness. History and Science Teach Us Not Just Humility, But Power, Smarts, And The Ways We Should Embrace. Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum
New logic solving 25 centuries old logic problems such as the Liar Paradox And Incorporating Spirits of Quantum Logic, Local Time, And Local Truth. More General Than PDL ,
Trying To Think Better By All & Any Means. To Be Human Is To Unleash As Much Intelligence As Possible, Instincts & Values Flow, Even Happiness. History and Science Teach Us Not Just Humility, But Power, Smarts, And The Ways We Should Embrace. Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 