Eugene Morrow

Studiot, Perhaps I am being too careful. I am trying to stick to Little's writings as best I can. Little is radical enough without me to make the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW) more so ! I have also learned not to speculate any further than TEW itself. I fiddle around with ideas for unknown aspects of elementary waves and think "Why didn't he try this"? Then later I realise he had tried that idea and it just doesn't fit the behavior we observe. Little has thought of a lot of options, and many more than I have, so I assume now he has reasons for choosing things that I either haven't remembered or he hasn't mentioned yet. I am critical of the explanations of quantum mechanics (qm)? I would say of course I am. The predictions are top quality, and yet the explanations involve competing interpretations with all sorts of strange ideas like a particle being a wave at the same time, multiple universes, effects backwards in time and so on. For about 80 years, the physics community has thought "The predictions work and so we are forced to choose qm - there is no alternative". Now we have an alternative, and I believe that someday physics will realise TEW is the better theory. It's not such a big change - just reverse the direction of the quantum wave, that's all. Physics will then look back at the explanations of qm and wonder why it wasn't obvious that qm struggles to explain things. Anyway, I am still very much interested in your criticisms and questions about TEW. What is obvious to one person is strange to another, and the differences fascinate me. I am still ready to read qm points of view too. Eugene Morrow

Studiot, My credit card is being replaced after being lost, so I am unable to buy online at the moment - should be OK next week. I will buy Frank Wilczek's book when I can. I will also get some articles that me and Uncool are interested in - some discussion of the interpretations of entanglement and the quantum eraser experiment. Looking at the abstracts online I suspect the Wilczek book is very different from the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW). The really big revolution in TEW is the wave direction (the opposite of quantum mechanics), and if Frank agreed then it would definitely be mentioned in the abstracts. The only similarity I can see is that the abstract suggested empty space somehow participates in mass, which I guess is true for TEW because what we measure as mass is an attribute of the elementary wave that the particle follows. When I get the Wilczek's book I will see if there is anymore similarity than that. I can see your comment about elementary waves possibly being a stream of particles in Post 160, but I cannot see my comment on it in my Post 161. Anyway, speculating that elementary waves are particles is much more of a quantum mechanics (qm) idea. In TEW, waves are waves and particles are particles - there is no "wave-particle duality". A beam of light has both - the elementary waves coming out of the detector and the photons traveling in the reverse direction back to the detector. The things like frequency and wavelength are properties of the elementary waves. The energy that the photons give (such as the photoelectric effect) are a property of the particles arriving at a point. So in TEW there is a clear distinction between what is a wave and what is a particle. So to speculate that elementary waves are a stream of particles is trying to re-introduce wave-particle duality again. Eugene Morrow

Phi for All, Thanks for the assistance. Studiot, I do like your meticulous approach. You sound more and more like a physicist or at least a senior physics student at University. If you are, you are being very patient looking at a new idea - I generally encounter immediate dismissal when physics specialists hear about a new theory. You asked: No, elementary waves are not dispersive - all wavelengths and frequencies travel at the same speed - c. No, elementary waves do not follow an inverse square law so far as documented. Lewis Little is still working on the details of how the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW) works with general relativity, and obviously the inverse square law of Newtonian gravity will appear at some point. I'm waiting patiently to see what he writes. You wrote: I must have missed your suggestion. You wrote: I assume we are talking about Frank Wilczek? I am not familiar with his model. Are we talking guage theory? Lewis Little has talked a bit about elementary particles and their waves, but not as far as that. Tell me about it. Eugene Morrow

Uncool, Hello - great to hear from you again. Yes, I noticed the comment in Walborn et al 2002 denying backwards in time causality. I have not yet read the two references. While they clearly deny that interpretaton, just what is the quantum mechanics (qm) explanation for the experiment? They offer none. On page 5, just before the Conclusion, they write: To me not attempting to explain what the experiment means is an admission that qm just doesn't really know what is going on. They are claiming that the "which path" information for Photon S was erased (hence the term quantum eraser). The question is - how does that work? Just how does entanglement actually happen, when the change to Photon P happens after Photon S no longer exists? There is a defeaning silence from qm about this. You will see from my writeup, the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW) does have an explanation - two elementary waves are combined at the BBO crystal. This explains why the polarizer in front of Photon P affects the behavior of Photon S, with everything happening in normal time. I will be most interested to hear what you think is happening in this experiment. Eugene Morrow

Everyone, This site has had a few technical problems the last few days - me and Studiot have had posts duplicated by the software, and others have been cut short. Let's hope the software is stable again. Popcorn Sutton, Like Sheever, you are discussing something completely different to this thread, and not relevant. Please start your own thread and have your own discussion. Kramer, You wrote: I think the double slit experiment has been done with detectors that cover lots of points, so I think there is no problem with the results: we get an interference pattern for sure. That much is agreed by all sides. The problem is explaining how one particle at a time creates that pattern. The Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW) is a very new idea, and I think a lot of people find it hard to accept that the particle and the quantum wave are separate. The reason TEW claims this is because of the explanations of experiments. I find the TEW explanations much more convincing, because there is normal cause and effect. In quantum mechanics (qm) there is the idea of "non-locality" where distant things can affect each other instantaneously without a clear mechanism - for example in entanglement. I guess both qm and TEW are weird in some way, so you have a choice of which weirdness you like more. Studiot, I am hoping our team at least make a worthy opponent. There is nothing wrong with losing as long as you play your best. You wrote; What TEW claims is that what looks like spherical waves coming out of the slits is the result of lots of random collisions by rays in the slit area. I am comfortable with that myself, and the claim in TEW that elementary waves are a flux in empty space, not a wave in a medium. I think you are not comfortable with the appearance of spherical waves. What conclusions are you thinking of? Then you wrote: Here I am ready to grant I think I incorrectly described the TEW picture. Looking back at the TEW literature, I think it is saying that when two rays meet with the same marker, then the waves interfere, not the markers. So the elementary wave rays themselves interfere. So the elementary waves may cancel each other out when reaching the source, and that is why the source does not send a particle in response to that particular wave. So I'll get it right this time - the if the markers are the same then the entire wave interferes. If the markers are different then the waves normally ignore each other. You wrote: The waves do keep going - with a different marker from the last mass they went through. I only draw the elementary waves and markers that we are interested in - the ones that get a particle coming back to the detector. There are elementary waves and markers flying around everywhere. For example, there will be elementary waves coming out of the slit walls to the source and there will be particles going from the source to the slit walls. We don't care about those - the slit wall is not a detector and any particles reaching there are ignored. TEW is saying we live in a universe of elementary waves and markers all over the place. We can't see the waves and markers, just like we can't see gravity. We only know they are there because of the effects. In the case of elementary waves, TEW claims that the success of explaining experiments is enough evidence that the waves exist and behave as described. Your final words are very interesting: I'll give you the quick answer, and then explain more. The quick answer is that TEW claims fields are something we measure (like measuring magnetic forces at a point) and that's all. For TEW there are no fields - there are just elementary waves and particles, so TEW does not use "fields" as a concept to explain why something happens. Now for a bit more explanation. TEW is clearly a rival to qm when describing quantum experiments like the double slit. What will surprise readers of the TEW book is that TEW covers the whole of physics, and all sorts of macro physics have a slightly different expalantion in the light of TEW. For example, we believe in conservation of momentum because, well, it just seems to be that way when we measure it. It's always been conserved in experiments, so we believe it always is. In TEW, the collisions of elementary waves are the reason that momentum is conserved for individual particles. Large collections of particles conserve momentum because all the invididual components do. So one law of physics is related back to this fundamental bit of TEW. Another example of this is electic and magnetic fields. For TEW it is all about elementary waves carrying photons. Chapter 10 of the TEW book deals with magnetism and has a fascinating explanation of Faraday's Law. You get the idea. Whereas both classical and quantum physics talks about fields, for TEW there is no such thing as a field (except in the sense that you can describe the final effect of a force as though it was a field). For TEW, this is a step forward. Using a field as an explanation implies a type of "non-locality" - distance things are affected. TEW likes to describe all of physics by clearly stating how one thing can affect a distant thing, and of course elementary waves are how it happens. Please go ahead and talk about fields. I am just preparing you for my answers which will avoid discussing the field as though it actually is a thing in itself. Eugene Morrow

Popcorn Sutton, The two theories being discussed here are quantum mechanics (qm) and the new Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW). TEW is a local and deterministic description of all of physics, especially the quantum part, and does not create any new branch of physics. What new branch are you thinking of? Why call it linear continuum physics? Eugene Morrow

Kramer, I'm not sure what you mean: What is a hafl circle detector? I think you are saying that a different detector will change the results of the double slit experiment. I need you to talk about this a bit more. Sheever, You are discussing one of the most colorful interpretations of quantum mechanics (qm), where the consciousness of the experimenter makes a difference to the results of the experiment. It can be called the Participatory Anthropic Principle" (PAP) and was partly supported by John Wheeler, a Professor of Physics at Princeton, who had worked with Neils Bohr at times. Stuart Hameroff covers that interpretation, and his video also talks about entanglement where qm claims there is faster-than-light communication between two electrons. I do not accept any interpretation of qm, especially not this one. To me it does not make sense for consciousness of the experimenter to affect the results of an experiment. Why and how could that happen? To me, it's too complicated to consider this possibility. Note that Stuart Hameroff is a doctor, not a physicist. I covered how the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW) explains entanglement when I was discussing the Quantum Eraser experiment recently. I do not accept entanglement proves that there is faster-than-light communication, or any other mysterious things like effects backwards in time. Hameroff talks about the divide between the quantum world and the classical world. For qm this is a mysterious border where behavior changes a lot. For TEW, it's just the border between when a particle can follow a single elementary wave or when it's too big. They can do the doube slit with large atoms and even with molecules like Bucky Balls (multiple carbon atoms) but the double slit does not work with larger molecules. For TEW, the larger molecules do not follow a single elementary wave, so they follow the usual classical laws of motion and so we don't get the interference pattern. So the border simply represents where we can see the effect of elementary waves in experiments. For TEW, the universe is always local and deterministic - it's just that the elementary waves only affect very small things. Eugene Morrow

Studiot, Why not ditch waves and only talk about markers? Dr. Little will have to have the final answer on that one - there are potentially a lot of reasons. I will have a guess. If you read the book, there are lots of things that are properties of the markers, as we have seen. There are also other things that are properties of the elementary waves that carries the marker. So we need both. Your summary is: I would have said when an elementary wave goes through a mass it gains a marker unique to that mass, and the mass can be a electron, photon or neutron, or even an entire nucleus. A particle follows that marker in the reverse direction. The marker may reach a collision point and jump across to a new elementary wave carrier. Yes, elementary waves extend infinitey in both directions. Let's look at an elementary wave coming out of mass A heading towards point B. Point B is a source of particles - let's say an electron gun in this case. An electron E1 comes out of B and is following the elementary wave marker back to mass A. So between A and the E1 we have marker A, which E1 is following. What about the marker the other side - between E1 and B? In that part of the elementary wave the marker is now E1. So E1 is following the marker A from mass A and E1 is also providing it's own marker to the wave the passes through towards B. I think we have enough now to talk about Young's Double Slit experiment. I will cover both the points of view: quantum mechanics (qm) and TEW. Your questions are good ones - I think you will see a lot more of what TEW claims in this experiment. I will cover the Copenhagen interpretation of the double slit experiment which is the most popular qm interpretation. The idea starts with "wave-particle duality", whereby we think of a particle like a photon or electron as both a wave and a particle. We can call the photon or electron as a "wave-particle" or a "wave packet", and professional physicists talk about "matter waves" for electrons and other masses. As I pointed out before, this assumes that the quantum wave goes in the same direction as the particle does - an assumption that TEW wants to highlight and challenge. The critical part of the double slit experiment is one particle goes through the apparatus at a time, and the pattern on the detector or screen builds up slowly to show an interference pattern. When Einstein gave a convincing case that light was actually particles, and we found a single photon can do all this, Physics said "Huh? How can one particle at a time produce an interference pattern?". In the Copenhagen interpretation of qm, the single wave-particle is spreading and so it goes through both slits. On the other side of the slits it interferes with itself, hence the interference pattern: There are problems with this description. We only ever detect a particle, so somehow the particle switches between a wave and a particle - what controls this? After the slits, there is interference in a wide area because the waves are spreading, so how is a point on the detector selected? In qm, they talk of "wave function collapse", which describes the result, but how does it work? There is a lot of maths, but no picture of what is happening in realtiy. There are two particularly difficult problems for qm - let's call then Mass-Energy issue and the Trajectory issue. The Mass-Energy issue is about accounting for the mass and energy of the particle. If a wave-particle goes through both slits, then we should detect half sized particles if we put a detector in the slits. However, when we do this we only ever detect full sized particles. As well, the waves after the slits are spreading out - why don't we lose mass and energy at the edges? We only ever detect full sized particles - meaning something spread out in a wave suddenly becomes one point. It does not make sense: qm has a tricky tiome accounting for mass and energy between the particle starting the source and arriving at the detector or screen. The Trajectory issue is about moving the detector. Let's look at the two waves after the slits heading towards the detector. Every particle that goes through the slits ends up on the detector somewhere, so the two waves somehow come together every time. If we move the detector a bit closer, all the waves should now miss each other. Yet if we move the detector closer we will get all the particles hitting it, so their trajectories must have changed. How do the particles know that the detector has moved? It's a bit spookly, like Photon S somehow knows that Photon P has hit a polarizer in the Quantum Eraser experiment. It is also like the Neutron Interference experiment I looked at before with Uncool - how did the neutrons know what analzyer crystal is ahead? Note that if we move the detector too close, we don't get any interference pattern at all. if the separation of the slits is "d" then the detector has to stay at least 1000d away from the slits. As long as the detector is at least this far from the slits, we get an interference pattern no matter how we move the detector around. Somehow the particles know where the detector is going to be. So we have two big issues for qm (at least) and they are both very challenging - there doesn't seem to be any obvious answer to either of them. Let's look at the TEW view of this experiment. In TEW, the elementary waves are going in the opposite direction. We are very interested in markers that leave each point on the detector, because particles will later come back here and form the results. Let's look at markers leaving point D1 on the detector. The elementary waves carry the markers to both sltis. Collisions there mean some of the markers end up heading towards the source. When the same markers (D1) encounter each other, the interfere. So we get an interference pattern at the source. If there is constructive interference, then a particle gets stimulated at the source. That is a critical part of TEW - the source does not send particles randomly. Instead, the source sends particle in response to incoming elementary waves. Let's assume D1 has constructive inteference there and a particle begins the return journey following marker D1. The particle only follows one of the incoming D1 markers, so the particle only goes through one slit. In the slits area, the particle has the opposite change of direction to the marker, and ends up traveling towards D1. So point D1 gets a particle. Point D5 may get less particles, because there is less constructive interference at the source. Point D10 get no paricles at all because the D10 markers had destructive interference at the source. Point D15 gets a few, and Point D20 gets a lot. I am just inventing points here, to give you the idea of how the pattern is formed at the detector. Each point is completely indepedent of the others. Why are the points independent? Because they have different markers. The markers from D1 completely ignore the markers from D5, D10 and so on. This is the critical bit for TEW - the markers are the reason why all the points don't interfere with each other - if they did, there would be complete chaos and nothing achieved. Of course the markers are a big issue for TEW - we don't know what they are. Why believe in them? Because the TEW description is now a local and deterministic one. Marker D1 meets another marker D1, so they interfere. That's a very local phenomenon. The source produces particles in response to incoming elementary waves (markers). The markers change diretion at the slits as do the particles in response to other elementary waves from the slit walls - again a local effect. This is a huge difference to qm, which claims non-locality. As well, the two issues for qm are solved. The Mass-Energy of the particle goes through one slit and is always the same throughout the entire journey. Of course the trajectory of the particle changes when we move the detector - something travels from the detector to the particle: elementary waves. The Trajectory issue is easily explained by TEW. So we are left with a choice of theories. I can challenge qm on the Mass-Energy issue and the Trajectory issue. You can challenge TEW on the markers, and you can challenge other things too. I much prefer TEW. Most people choose qm, probably now knowing they have a choice. What do you think? Eugene Morrow

Studiot, It is very impressive how carefully you are checking what I am saying about the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW). You wrote: It is exactly right that sometimes I talk about individual rays of elementary waves, and these can pass through masses. It is also exactly right that I have shown waves appearing to act like spherical waves. You are questioning how interference happens, and that is a totally sensible question. The answer to all this is that the markers are "carried" by the underlying elementary waves, and the markers behave a bit differently to the wave itself. I will clear this up before giving my description of the Youngs double slit experiment. Yes, an elementary wave itself can go through a mass and gets a new marker. So the old marker is replaced by a new marker. For example, an elementary wave can go through the walls of the slit material and get a new marker and reach the source directly. They will stimulate a particle coming back, which crashes into the walls of the slit material. We're not very interested in those particles, because they don't reach the detector. I also covered how elementary waves can have collisions near an atomic nucleus, where the marker on one wave jumps across to a different wave. Let's look at that again. There is an elementary wave ray coming from point D1 on the detector. It reaches the slit area where it passes close to some masses in the walls of the slit: So we have an elementary wave going from D1 to Z. It is carryinig the marker from D1. There is an elementary wave for a photon coming out of point W1 in one of the slit walls and it's going towards X1. These two elementary waves decide to have a collision. The result is that marker D1 is now traveling towards the Source S from the collision point. Whatever marker was traveling along that path has been replaced by marker D1. The marker has started to spread out - just like a spherical wave you mentioned before. The TEW book doesn't explicitly say what marker travels between the collision point and Z - I think it's still D1. I think the marker W1 is still going to X1, but that marker W1 is definitely also reflecting back from the collision to W1. These are of less interest, because we only care about what arrives back at the detector. It is markers that form interference patterns. So when two markers that are the same meet each other then the markers form the interference pattern. The underlying elementary wave carriers are still there. Interference happens with the markers arriving at the source, and this can stimulate a particle coming back when there is constructive interference. The markers are important because when a particle is following an elementary wave, the particle behaves like the markers, and so can be strictly said to be following the markers back. So the particle coming from the source changes direction just like marker D1 did in the diagram above. Since the particle then gets detected at point D1, it is part of the double slit results. Markers are what really count in elementary waves. So often when we TEW (and I ) talk about elementary waves having collisions and changing direction, we are really meaning what the markers are doing. It is very impressive that you are picking up on the subtleties of elementary waves. Eugene Morrow

This is a day later - some extra thoughts. Studiot, I realise I have not made one point clear enough. When I say "mass" I am meaning electrons, protons and neutrons. These definitely have a unique marker in the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW). So A and B will be one of these. When you discuss an elementary wave ray partly hitting and partly missing a mass, I am not very interested because the mass is so small. It will be a very impressive experiment if we can demonstrate this for sure, and investigate the results. Your situation will remain unanswered for a long time, I think. Imatfaal, Uncool, I have pointed out that quantum mechanics (qm) does not have an explanation for entanglement in the Quantum Eraser experiment. I can give a new perspective on why qm has a problem here. The foundation of qm is "wave-particle duality". This is the idea that a particle is also a wave - either a "wave packet" or a "wave particle". It is how qm explains the wave behavior of matter, such as the double slit experiment. As soon as you say wave-particle duality, you are making an assumption: that the wave is traveling in the same direction as the particle. Most qm supporters would say this is self-evident. One catch: we don't ever directly see or directly detect a wave - we only detect particles. The particles might be in a wave-like pattern, but we only ever detect individual particles at our detectors. So wave direction is an assumption. In entanglement in the quantum eraser experiment, a photon reaches the BBO crystal and splits into two photons that qm claims are entangled. So a single wave-particle becomes two wave-particles: Photon P going to detector P and Photon S going to detector S. Photon P is a wave and a particle, and so is Photon S. They always have polarizations that are orthogonal, and the sum of the wavelengths totals the wavelength of the photon coming into the BBO crystal. In qm they talk about a "super-position of states", which means a wave-particle can have many possible states, such as polarizations. If we put a polarizer in the path of Photon P, then if we detect Photon P the other side then we know the polarization. Immediately, we know that Photon S has the orthogonal polarization. This works for different polarizer settings for Photon P. How does Photon S know the polarizer setting in front of Photon P? There must be some communication going on between the polarizer setting for Photon P across to Photon S. In qm, there is no reason given for this communication - they just say "entanglement" and that's it. I want to put a new perspective on why qm has a problem explaining how this happens. Focus on the wave direction in qm - the wave travels along with the particle. That means when Photon P and Photon S leave the BBO crystal, they are no longer connected. A wave and a particle head towards detector P and a separate wave and particle head towards detector S. Let's do something really bizarre - let's consider what happens if the wave is traveling in the opposite direction. I know you will say "Huh?" and shake your head. Just take a deep breath and see what happens. The idea in TEW is that a wave goes from A to B first and if B provides a particle then the particle goes backwards from B to A. I've been discussing this with Studiot. That's the essential heart of TEW: a particle is following a wave backwards. Let's apply that to this sitaution. For TEW, there are elementary waves leaving everything in all directions at all times. The ones we are interested in are the elementary waves that will get Photon P and Photon S returning along them. These elementary waves start from detector P and detector S and head towards the BBO crystal. From the TEW point of view, the BBO crystal takes two elementary waves that have orthogonal polarizations, and then combines them into one elementary wave. This combined wave reaches the laser. You can see the elementary waves in the diagram below. The laser sends back a photon in response to the incoming combined elementary wave. At the BBO crystal, the one photon splits into two - the reverse of of the elementary waves that came into the BBO crystal. So now we have Photon P going to detector P and Photon S going to detector S. What is important is that Photon P already knows what polarization it is going to have as soon as it is created. In TEW, the polarization of a photon is an attribute of the elementary wave that it is following. The same for Photon S. Photon P and Photon S have orthogonal polarizations, because the BBO decided to combine to elementary waves with orthogonal polarizations. In the TEW picture, if we place a polarizer in front of Photon P then this changes the elementary wave that travels to the BBO crystal. The BBO crystal selects an appropriate partner elementary wave and it all happens. Photon P and Photon S have orthogonal polarizations at all times thanks to the BBO crystal. Can you see now how entanglement is a local and deterministic process in TEW - the elementary waves are the connection between Photon P and Photon S. The secret to TEW is that the quantum wave goes in the opposite direction. In qm, the wave direction causes all sorts of problems explaining this. There must be communication between Photon P and Photon S, called "entanglement", but there is no mechanism why it happens. There is "super-position of states" until we measure things. There is "non-locality" which is a more general way of describing entanglement. There are also the multiple "interpretations" of qm which allow for multiple universes, and even particles traveling backwards in time. This shows the lengths that qm has to go to in order to explain experiments like this. All of these qm explanations are not necessary in TEW. The wave direction makes TEW much simpler than qm. The wave diretion of TEW may see really strange at first, but after a while it is qm that looks strange in comparison. Eugene Morrow Studiot, I've just seen your reply. Nice to have a Somerset welcome - I'm still pessimistic for the results at the end of the tour. Good point about elementary waves going through masses. To explain the Youngs double slit experiment, I will have to talk about the markers, and how they move around. You can see the idea in the diagram I posted above - the markers start from the detectors and combine in some way at the BBO, and then reach the laser. That is all showing what markers are doing. I will discuss that more in my next post. Eugene Morrow

Studiot, I understand about cricket and googlies - I come from the same nation as Shane Warne (and we're about to lose the Ashes again by an even wider margin). I'm definitely in trouble if I get some Ian Botham deliveries, so I consider myself warned (!) You are asking about the granularity in the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW) - how wide is an elementary wave? Your example is about a ray going from A to B and part of it hitting B and part of it missing. You wrote: My only answer is that the rays going from A to B all carry the marker from A - the same marker. How many rays there are travelling between A and B appears not explicity defined in TEW but since each photon follows a single elementary wave, then between two mases there should be a lot of rays (since we can assume any mass is larger than a photon). Whether a single ray can partly hit B and partly miss B is an open question as far as I read the TEW material. I really cannot answer you question any further. You could ask a question to Lewis Little himself if you like by going to the website http://elwave.org/ and selecting Resources, and then posting a comnment which contains your question. I imagine either Lewis Little or another physicists Jeff Boyd will answer your question. I suggest this so that you can get the answer directly from them. I do not consider the question worthwhile and will not ask it, because any question at such a minute scale will always have some sort of doubt: we just can't see it directly. To me it's like asking what color an electron is - it's seems a rather unimportant question. You also wrote: Just a minute - I pointed out to others on this thread that qm claims entanglement but do not say exactly how it works. Why throw out TEW just because there is one question not answered yet? That's a double standard. If qm cannot explain how entanglement works, why don't you throw out qm as well? Eugene Morrow

Stutiot, Thank you for going to the trouble to draw a diagram to show that point C on the wave hits B, but point D does not. You are making a point about what happens when part of an elementary wave ray hits a mass and part of it does not. It's a fair enough question. None of the material on the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW) talks about this situation. Dr. Little has definitely not discussed hypothetical points C and D that are side-by-side like that in the same elementary wave. I can only guess at what Dr. Little might say. My guess is that he would say it's a topic for future research. There are issues like this one, and the issue of what the markers are, where we don't know, and only future experiments and more theorising will provide answers. This is the best I can do. You wrote: I do not agree with the conclusion, because TEW does not make any statements about two such points C and D in the same elementary wave. imatfaal, You wrote: You are denying any communication between the particles. Look closely at the experiment - if Photon P does NOT pass through a polarizer, there is NO interference seen of Photon S, but if Photon P DOES pass through a polarizer there IS interference for Photon S. Why is Photon S affected by what happens to Photon P? Logically, there must have been communication of some sort between the two photons. You are denying the result of the quanum eraser experiment. The whole name of the experiment is about Photon P "erasing" the "which path" information about Photon S. That is an effect. How could Photon P do it? There must be some communication between the Photon P side of the experiment and the Photon S side of the experiment. To me, if you don't know why one part of the experiment (Photon P) affects the other part of the experiment (Photon S) then you don't know what is going on in the experiment. I conclude quantum mechanics (qm) does not know what is going on. In qm, they talk about "entanglement" which implies that one partner particle affects the other, but qm does not say how it happens. What is the mechanism for entanglement? None is ever given in qm. What I like about TEW is that it gives a clear mechanism - elementary waves coming from the detectors. There is a clear reason why we get the results, even when Photon P hits the polarizer after Photon S no longer exists. Everything happens in normal time. I much prefer a theory that can give me a reason why Photon P affects Photon S. Eugene Morrow

Kalynos, You wrote this about entanglement: The whole idea of entanglement in quantum mechanics (qm) is that changing entangled particle affects the other - that's why they call it entanglement. Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance" and that remains a good description of the qm explanation. Uncool is reading an experiment where the experimenters are using this very fact - changing one particle affects the other. The experiment is this one: S. P. Walborn, M. O. Terra Cunha, S. Padua, C. H. Monken, "Double-slit quantum eraser", Physical Review A, Volume 65, 033818, Feb 2002. You can download it for free: [*]Go to http://en.wikipedia....aser_experiment The link is en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_eraser_experimentzZ I'm very aware of what entanglement is and the eraser experiment, you giving a very common and often related misconception. It is still wrong.

Studiot, Am I still not directly answering your questions? I will keep trying. You wrote: I need to give more detail in my answers. I had explained that Dr. Little is working on how the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW) works wtih general relativity. That will require that an elementary wave will curve under the influence of gravity. That means that between A and B, it will not be a straight line if there is a gravitational field close by. I am certain Dr. Little would not agree that an elementary wave ray is only in one dimension. His work on general relativity is still going on, so this part of TEW is not yet complete. You wrote: I think you're making the point about the dimensions of a ray, and the idea that parts of a single ray do not hit B. The understanding I have got from his book and article is that a single elementary waves ray is always smaller than the smallest mass, and must be at least as small as a photon, so even though the ray might curve (and hence be in 3 dimensions) the entire ray will either hit B or not hit B. So either the entire ray hits B and emerges the other side with a new marker, or misses B entirely and something else happens. An infinitesimal time after the ray hits B, it now has the marker from B. You wrote: Well said - of course a theory must not contradict itself. One of my own criticism of quantum mechanics (qm) is that to me qm does contradict itself. That is because my idea of the universe is a local and deterministic one with nothing happening backwards in time, so a lot of qm is contradictory on that basis. Of course when people read TEW they will check if TEW contradicts itself. I am not expecting anyone to believe something just be I or Dr. Little said so. I don't believe what qm says even though the predictions are so good. I am only here to debate TEW and qm. The first step is for me to let everyone know what TEW claims, so the debate can then start. I prefer to quote Dr. Little because I want to avoid mis-representing his theory as much as possible. I just want to be fair on his ideas. However, I don't want to go too far and answer nothing, because then there is no debate. So I do the best compromise I can. When you initially say nothing, I assume it is because you are thinking about the TEW position, not because you have accepted anything. I always assume participants like you have a healthy skepticism unless someone comes out and says they agree with TEW (which has never happened). I am interested to see what parts of TEW people choose to question. For example, I have been very surprised by your questions about how many dimensiions a ray is in. There's nothing wrong with you checking TEW out - I find if fascinating to hear how someone else approaches TEW ideas. Cold logic is most welcome. I wish there was more of it in the qm explanations of reality. You wrote: I am reluctant to accept elementary waves as longitudinal waves because of interference patterns. To me, the interference in the double slit experiment seems inconsistent with a longitudinal wave. To my knowledge, Dr. Little has not ever used the term longitudinal in discussing elementary waves, and I assume that is intentional on his part. Uncool, You wrote: The link you provided has the summary of interpretations of qm, but there was no mention of super-determinism. To me, super-determinism is just a concept, not an actual explanation. As others have said, if super-determinism is true, then it's not worth performing experiments because the outcomes are already determined by the universe, and need not make any sense. So super-determinism is just giving up on physics making sense, which I won't do. If you look at the link for entanglement on that page, it says: This is what qm claims - entanglement involves communication between the particles faster than light. You are very rare in claiming that this is not necessary. I talked about qm being non-local (just like the entanglement above) and you wrote: I think that sums up the claims of qm - we need to give up one of the three: locality, determinism or counter factual definiteness. To me that is too much to have to give up one of the three. Philosophically, I judge that all three are valid if a theory is working. In TEW I can have all three, so it wins me. When qm says one of the three must be false, I conclude qm is false purely on the logtical choices it presents. You wrote: I have learned from you another reason I prefer TEW - because I want to keep counterfactual definiteness. Thanks for looking into the Quantum Eraser experiment. There is no rush - I am happy to give you as much time as you want to consider it. I like it that finally we can both see the paper, and both can see the TEW explanation. Eugene Morrow

Studiot, You have an interesting point of view. You wrote: I think Dr. Little would still say that the waves are three dimensional. He has hinted that his work on the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW) and General Relativity requires that an elementary wave curves under the influence of gravity. So even though an elementary waves is very thin, it still travels in three dimensions. Dr. Little has said that an elementary wave is a flux that propagates in a vacuum (there is no medium). He has not attempted to give dimensions (e.g. thickness) - this is a subject for more research. I don't think he would agree that an elementary wave is one dimensionsal. It would be like saying a photon is one dimensional: it might be very small but we cannot say it has zero width. The same with elementary waves - they are definitely very thin, but it's going too far to say they are one dimensional. You wrote: I am sure Dr. Little would not agree with phrases like "no transverse dimensions to vibrate in". Elementary waves are some sort of flux, that's all we know about them. How far apart to B1 and B2 need to be? We don't know yet, but any two masses that are separate are far enough apart to have a different elementary wave. Why do elementary waves avoid interfering most of the time? Dr. Little bases it on behavior - they only interfere when they have the same marker. He does not know why, mainly because he doesn't know what the markers are. You wrote: Yes. Rays are leaving A in all directions, including the BA direction. So there are rays going outwards from A in all directons and all have the marker from A. All of those rays have different directions, but are otherwise identical. You then asked: The rays leaving A are all going in different directions, so they don't meet each other. They will meet each other when at least one of the markers changes direction, such as at the slits as I described. As for rays coming into A from all directions, they normally have different markers, so they will not interfere. If you set up a double slit arrangement near A, then yes there will be waves coming into A that are interfering. If A is not a source like a light bulb, then A will do nothing in response to the interfering elementary waves. Only sources of particles care about interference. Your questions surprise me and are really fascinating to bring such a different point of view. Uncool, Granted - I'm no good at mind reading ! You did say something that is potentially very controversial: What are these "local interpretations of quantum mechanics"? Do you have any references? The quantum mechanics (qm) I read is explicitly non-local, and qm even claims that a non-local description of the quantum world is not possible. Remember the quote from David Bohm: I would be very interested to see publications claiming a local and deterministic version of qm. It looks like we will not make any further progress on the neutron interference experiment Kaiser et al 1992. I think we should turn our attention to the entanglement experiment I mentioned before. The actual experiment is this one: S. P. Walborn, M. O. Terra Cunha, S. Padua, C. H. Monken, "Double-slit quantum eraser", Physical Review A, Volume 65, 033818, Feb 2002. You can download it for free: Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_eraser_experiment The link is en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_eraser_experiment Under “External links”, look for “The original paper on which this article is based.” The experiment creates two “entangled” photons, and investigates how one entangled photon appears to affect the other photon backwards in time. The experiment starts with a basic setup to create two entangled photons. See the diagram below. An Argon laser at A creates a photon called Photon A of wavelength 351.1 nm, which is in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum of light. Photon A bounces off a mirror at B to pass through a lens at C which changes the photon in a way to assist results in this experiment. Photon A bounces off a mirror at D to reach a crystal at E. Located at E is a beta Barium Borate (BBO) crystal. This crystal splits Photon A into two photons: Photon P and Photon S, each with a wavelength 702.2 nm (which is twice the incoming photon wavelength). This new wavelength is in the red part of the spectrum of visible light. Photons P and S have orthogonal polarizations which add up to the polarization of Photon A. For qm, Photons P and S are “entangled” which means they are linked: a change to one will change the other instantaneously (while the entanglement lasts). The experimenters then put Photon S through a double slit experiment, and then make changes to Photon P to show it affects the interference of Photon S. The really critical part is that they make the changes to Photon P further way, so that the changes happen after Photon S has finished the double slit apparatus and already been detected. Photon S is still affected, so for qm there absolutely has to be communication between the photons and backwards in time. There is no getting around the qm claims here. TEW can explain the same experiment in a local and deterministic way, with everything happening in normal time. See an explanation that I wrote here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/99753535 I will be most interested to see if you can explain what qm says in this experiment. Eugene Morrow

Uncool, I will answer you first because there is one important point about quantum mechanics (qm). I wrote: You wrote: The experimenters have given us everything we need to know. Table VIII on page 41 shows the analyzer crystal gives different results for the coherence length: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ TABLE VIII. Calculated longitudinal coherence lengths delta x of the neutrons in the different analyzer configurations. Beam...................................Delta X (Angstrom units) Direct C3 (and C2)_______________86.2 PR analyzer, (111) parallel_________ 97.5 PR analyzer, (111) antiparallel______148 NP analyzer, (111) antiparallel_____3450 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The experimenters write on page 41: And later on page 41: Notice how the second quote says "vary their physical extent, at will, after the fact". This says it all - the coherence length (physical extent) which affects the interference in the NI is varied by the experimenters after the neutrons have left the NI. If the analyzer crystal changed the coherence length, then the experimenters would not have bothered to measure the coherence length after the neutrons have gone through it. It would be like trying to measure the fridge temperture of a glass of water - after you have taken the glass of water out of the fridge and boiled it. They know that the coherence length is a property of the interference in the NI, and it was changed in the NI by something that the neutrons had not reached yet. I think you find it hard to acknowledge quantum weirdness. You also denied that qm claims entanglement involves instantaneous communication between particles - but that is exactly what qm claims. I think secretly you know underneath that qm makes claims that simply don't make sense, and you are trying to avoid that. It is great to celebrate the predictive successes of qm. The only way we will improve qm is to face the reality the explanations have bits that are just totally weird. This is one of them - the analzyer crystal is affecting the NI apparently backwards in time. Studiot, I will answer each of your questions on the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW) in the same way I have been answering Uncool, so hopefully I'll cover everything. You wrote: I will be careful here. Dr. Little has not, to my knowledge, said anything directly about Hughen's principle. I think elementary waves do effectively follow Hughen's principle. If you look at the first diagram I have for TEW in the double slit experiment, where we have number 1 for the waves coming out of point D1 and number 2 where there interfere after the slits. That diagram has similarities to Figure 3.3 on page 29 of the TEW book. You can see Hughen's principle in action there, so I think we can say it applies. Notice how elementary waves have a different mechanism for spreading out at the slits. Instead of a wave in medium, the waves have collisions in the slit area. This is a different physical mechanism, but the final effect is the same. Your next question is: When a wave hits a mass called B the wave already has an existing marker (say A). What happens is that marker A is replaced by marker B. Marker A is entirely wiped clean from that point on. This happens everytime an elementary wave enters a new mass and leaves the other side. If point B is on the light bulb, the light bulb may supply a photon to make the return journey to point A. That is an option that the bulb has (as do all sources of particles) and the particle will follow marker A because that is what stimulated it. No matter whether the light bulb sent a photon or not, the elementary wave with marker A still changes to marker B once it exits point B on the light bulb. You next question: When a wave goes from the surface of a room to the light bulb, the journey is passing through many points in the air in between. Nothing happens as the wave propgates through the air. The marker is still A. Rermember that the marker stays the same unless the wave has a collision or enters a new mass. So going from the surface of the room to the light bulb does not change the wave or the marker. You seem to have worked this out when you wrote: This is a good question to ask, becuase I have not made myself clear. The wave going form point A on the surface of the room to point B1 on the light bulb is entirely separate from the wave going from point A to point B2 on the light bulb. Both waves carry marker A. In the abstract for the article Boyd 2013 in Physics Essays, Jeff Boyd talks of each wave being a "ray" and he writes: Since elementary waves are waves that propagate themselves in a vacuum, you can think of them as these rays, rather than a collective wave front, which is how we often think of waves. Your next question follows on: Each ray coming out of point A has marker A and each of those rays has it's own journey. Some will hit points on the light bulb and hence change marker (and they may get a photon coming back). Other rays will hit the socket for the light bulb and change marker (probably lots of times as they pass through many masses). The entire "wavefront" is really individual rays and each is entirely separate. I will jump forward a question, becuase it is linked: You can see now that a ray going to point C gets the marker for C as it leaves C and that is entirely seperate from the ray that gets marker B as it leaves B. Now back to the question I jumped over: As above - each ray is separate. An important point to raise here. Imagine a photon is coming from the sun to the earth to a camera. In the 8 minute journey, the photographer puts the lens cap on the camera. What happens? The photon was following a marker from a mass in the camera. Suddenly, the marker on that same elementary wave changes to the marker from a mass on the lens cap. The photon is now following the marker from the lens cap and eventually gets absorbed there. This is the idea that a particle is always following a particular elementary wave with a particular marker, but the marker may change while the particle is "in flight". Clearly this happens many times for photons traveling in space. Just because the photon started it's journey following a particular marker, it is forced to follow whatever that marker changes to during the journey. It's the reason we can get interference patterns from photons from distant galaxies. The incoming photons are effectively a source of photons, and it's the elementary waves from our measuring devices here on earth that reorganize the incoming photons into an interference pattern. Your last question: I think you are saying that as waves are leaving point A there are other elementary waves coming into A. Yes, there are elementary waves going into and out of every point in the universe in all directions. Normally all these elementary waves ignore each other. They will interfere only if the have the same marker (like the two waves on the other side of the slits). If they have different markers, there is still a slight chance they have a collision (of markers) like the collisions I described happening in the slits area. Overall, both interference and collisions are rare - most of the time elementary waves are busy ignoring each other. Eugene Morrow

Studiot, I am sad to see you go. I realize that I should have adopted the style of answers I used for Uncool - do it quote by quote. I have been very much pressed for time in my debating, I think I have rushed too much. I apologise again for not answering questions well enough to keep you in the thread. For the record, I think the bits I missed out I think were these. You wrote: Yes, the elementary waves (ignoring markers) continue to infinity in both directions. It is the markers that jump between waves or get into interference and make things interesting. You also asked: They are definitely 3 dimensional, although the width of one elementary wave is not known. As for amplitude, I am not sure. Dr. Little does not talk a lot about amplitude of an individual wave - it is more about the number of waves of a certain type that are arriving at a source of particles. I was hoping to get onto the mechanism where particles follow waves. I will cover it anway, even if you are no longer reading. If an elementary wave is traveling in a straight line, then there is no problem for the particle following in the reverse direction. The tricky bit is when the marker on that elementary wave changes direction. The best example is the double slit experiment. Let's look at the double slit experiment from the point of view of quantum mechanics (qm) point of view and then the point of view of the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW). The double slit experiment has always been a mystery because a single particle traverses the apparatus at a time, and we get an interference pattern on the detector or screen. In qm, the double slit experiment is normally described by the Copenhagen interpretation, where the particle is also a wave, so the particle is a "wave packet" or "wave particle'. The spreading packet goes through both slits and interferes with itself. I have pointed out the problems with mass and energy with this picture before. There are also more problems when we move the position of the detector or screen. Despite problems, many people are still very comfortable with the qm view. In TEW, the waves are going in the opposite direction, from each point on the detector through the slits to the source of the particles: Here is where the markers come in. Each point on the detector produces a unique marker on the elementary wave. Since waves with one marker normally ignore all the other waves, we can consider each point on the detector separately. For point D1, the waves go outwards like a wave normally does. At the slits, the waves from D1 go outwards from the two slits. Here is where waves from D1 will meet other waves from D1, so they interfere. At the source, the waves from D1 will arrive if there is constructive interference there. The more waves from D1 that arrive at the source the more likely it is that the source sends a particle back. The particle is following just one of the waves from D1, so the particle only goes through one slit. The particle arrives back at D1 (if there was some sort of constructive interference of the waves from D1 at the source). Let's say that at D1 there was such constructive interference and many particles come back to D1. At D2, there was less constructive inteference, so less particles arrive. At D5 there may be none, because the waves from D5 interference totally and none arrive at the source. By D10 there is constructive interference again, so particles arrive. You can see how an interference pattern is formed at the detector, one particle at a time. The waves are always going out - it simply depends on the source how many particles are sent back. An interference pattern still builds up one particle at a time, because the waves are always interfering at the source. The number of particles coming back simply decides how fast the pattern at the detector builds up. The important bit is what happens to the particles at the slits. The particles are coming from the source, and so most particles will change direction at the slit to keep following their marker and reach the point on the screen where the marker came from (such as D1). How does the particle change direction to match the marker changing direction? The elementary wave from D1 has collisions with other elementary waves in the walls of the slit. Collision are likely to happen near an atomic nucleus. The collision happens with an elementary wave coming out of a nuclues of an atom in the slit. The colliding elementary wave is called a "photon" elementary wave for reasons we will see in a moment. The marker D1 jumps across to an elementary wave heading off in a different direction as shown. The marker from the nucleus of the atom in the slit sort of "reflects back" to where it came from. Remember that there are lots of elementary waves coming from D1 and they all have different collisions with different atoms in the walls of the slit, and so randomly some of the D1 markers end up traveling towards the source. There are the elementary waves that after interfering may get a particle coming back. Let's look at when a particle is coming back. Normally, the particle is following marker D1, and is ignoring other waves. At the actual collision point the particle "experiences" the colliding photon elementary wave. This allows the particle to behave like a source, and it emits a photon back along the colliding elementary wave. By emitting the photon, the particle changes direction to head towards D1, with a reduced momentum because of emitting a photon. Why does the particle change direction to match the change of direction of the D1 marker? Because both changes of direction were caused by the same thing - the colliding photon elementary wave. All that is necessary is that the colliding photon elemetary wave causes the marker and the particle to change direction in the equal and opposite way. You could say that the particle and the markers are correlated in how they change direction. So the elementary wave carrying the marker did not "make" the particle follow it - the particle and the marker simply behave in a correlated way to collisions with other elementary waves. There is a more comprehensive picture of elementary waves and particles. I hope you continue in this debate, because now that I have given a lot more details, you should be able to find things to refute and challenge. Uncool, I will reply to you in a short while. Eugene Morrow Uncool, You are convinced that the analzyer crystal changes the coherence length at that point. Table VIII shows the calculated coherence lengths that apply to the NI. You are not looking at the results that show the analyzer crystal affects the NI. I see the aim of your variation on this experiment. The problem is measuring a difference between qm and TEW is that the elementary waves are traveling at the speed of light, so we'd have to have the NI some miles/kilometers away from the analyzer crystal, and have neutrons that will make such a long journey. The experiment ues "ultra cold" neutrons that travel at just a few metres per second, so they will take a long time to travel such distances, and with a half life of just under 15 minutes free neutrons decay into a proton. Perhaps they can use faster neutrons for the longer distances involved. I do not agree with your statement: This is Uncools view. I hope Helmut Kaiser replies and clear that one up. I guess he may never reply because I am not one of his students and life is busy. I will certainly show the entire email exchange. Eugene Morrow

Uncool, One of your comments seems to be agreeing with me - perhaps I have not understood it. I had written: You replied: The wave in quantum mechanics (qm) is traveling with the neutron, so it is going from the NI to the analyzer crystal. Your second sentence claims the analyzer crystal changes the wave which changes the coherence length. Are you saying the analyzer crystal changes the coherence length in the NI? That is in the opposite direction to the direction the wave is traveling in - which is the evidence that supports the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW). I've already given a quote from the experimenters that confirms this interpretation. The experimenters write on page 41: Physical extent" means coherence length of the wave packets. "After the fact" means the coherence length is varied in the NI when the neutrons have left the NI and reached the analyzer crystal. So the experimenters are backing this interpretation. I claim there is already enough information available. The figures I quoted for Table VIII are not explained by qm - the analzyer crystal should not be affecting the NI coherence length, but it does. I will see if it is possible to email to one of the experimenters. Sam Werner has passed away. It is possible the other two Americans (Kaiser and Clothier) are still contactable. I am reluctanct to contact the Austrian experimenters as I am not sure how comfortable they will be emailing in English. Sudiot, I think Dr. Little prefers the idea that elementary waves propagate from A to B. Very happy to answer these questions. Yes, two or more TEW waves can pass through the same space at the same time. This is the normal situation for every point in the universe - there are waves coming from and going to all directions. One elementary wave (going in a single direction) has one and only one marker. Markers are unique to a particlar mass. So in a screen in the double slit experiment, each point (atom) on the screen has a unique marker. So yes, it distinguishes individiual silicon atoms, for example. How clear are these answers? I like your approach - find out exactly what TEW is claiming, so you can formulate counter arguments. Eugene Morrow

Studiot, You and Uncool are a very patient debaters, and that is a big compliment. There is quite a bit to the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW) and for you to debate the merits of it will need a bit of input from me. All I ask is to be heard and your idea of snall doses is good. Of course there will be healthy skepticism and many people will think TEW is rubbish- c'est la vie. I think the explanations of qm are rubbish too, so it's a good topic for a debate. You are asking all the sensible questions. I will answer the first one today, and will need more posts to answer the others: Yes, elementary waves are going through all points of the universe in all directions at all times. So yes, there are elementary waves always going between the walls of the room and the light globe and there are elementary waves going from the light globe to the walls and so on. The elementary waves going from A to B and the waves going from B to A can be considered entirely separate from each other. An important extra piece of this picture is that when an elementary wave goes through a mass they get a marker or signature that is unique to that mass. An analogy I Iike to use is think of light relecting off the surface of something - the reflected beam has changes in frequencies and polarization that are unique to the reflecting surface, but that surface did not have to expend any energy in supplying those changes. In the same way, an elementary wave gets a marker from the last mass it came out of, and the mass did nothing to impart that marker. The elementary wave is travelling at speed c in all frames of reference, and we can think of the marker as being carried along with the wave. What is the marker? Dr. Little does not know, and is quite open about this. On page 31 of the TEW book he writes: There are some very important behaviors that come from these markers. If two elementary waves meet and the have the same marker then they will interfere, in the normal way we see wave interference patterns. This is a key to the double slit experiment and to the Neutron Interferometer (NI) in the Kaiser et al 1992 experiment. So the wave interference pattern only happens in quite a specific situation. If two elementary waves meet and have different markers, then the normally ignore each other. In some situations, yet to be comprehensively cataloged, elementary waves that have different markers will meet and have a "collision". A collision is actually something that affects the markers, not the waves themselves. In a "collision" the marker from the first wave jumps across to the marker in the second wave. This may seem rather dull, but it affects the next behavior. When a particle is following an elementary wave, the particle is in fact following the marker of that wave. If the elementary wave has a collision and the marker is now coming from a different direction, then the particle follows the new direction that the marker is coming from. So the particle changes direction to match the (opposite) change of direction of the marker. For an elementary wave coming from the wall of a room to a light globe, there is no collision along the way, so the photon travels directly from the light globe to the mass that imparted the marker. However, in the double slit experiment, the markers have collisiions at the slits and can change direction, so the particles can change drection at the slits coming back. The same applies to the NI in the Kaiser et all experiment, as well as the analyzer crystal. So particles change direction in their journey back to the mass that imparted the marker. That's quite a bit for you to swallow for now. I will cover more on the particles following a marker and how this happens in my next post. Uncool, We are debating Kaiser et al 1992 - a neutron interference experiment. You are very patient in carefully reviewing the statements of the experimenters and that is a very thoughtful approach. The best way to understand the analyzer crystal is to think of a prism splitting a beam of white light, to give a red beam. No one said that the prism had created red light - they are saying the red light was part of the original beam. For quantum mechanics (qm) the beam is a stream of photons that are also waves, and so each photon is a "wave packet" with a coherence length. The prism did not change the coherence length of the red photons - is just selected them from the stream of photons. In the same way, the analyzer crystal simply selects neutrons from the beam, but it did not create entirely new neutrons. The analyzer crystal did not change the coherence length of the wave packets as they pass through it - how could it? Yet for some strange reason, when a different analyzer crystal is present, the coherence length that controls behavior in the NI is different. In the NI a single neutron wave packet takes two routes and the two packets meet againo (according to qm). By delaying one packet we can see how this changes the interference pattern. Why should the analyzer crystal affect this? You don't like the word "determine" being used for the coherence length in the NI. If you like you could call it "measured" in the NI. That is where the coherence length matters - when the two wave packets meet. The situation is still clear - the analyzer crystal affected the neutrons in the NI, and that is before the neutrons reached the analyzer crystal. I think you are trying to deny the facts of this experiment, simply because qm cannot explain them. I am reluctant to quote more of the experiment - you can just keep playing that game until I have quoted the lot, which is not fair on the journal Physical Review A or the experimenters. You should download your own copy to argue your case. Eugene Morrow

Uncool, This is a welcome simplification: we are debating Kaiser et al 1992, and we have one main point of discussion: This is given away by one of the quotes from the experimenters: Notice how they say they have determined the coherence length downstream (away) from the interferometer. That implies they are at least measuring the coherence length in the interferometer, and that it has not changed since then. When you stand back from the experiment, you can see the whole point of why they had an interferometer in the first place. In the quantum mechanics (qm) picture given by these experimenters, neutrons are "wave packets" that must have a coherence length. How do you find how big a wave packet is? You run it through an interferometer, which is like a double slit. The wave packet goes through two paths and then interferes with itself. By delaying one of the packets with Bismuth, you can investigate how big that packet is, because if you delay one packet enough it 'misses" the other packet. This is discussed in the abstract that you have. One sentence reads: The "perfect-silicon-crystal neutron interferometer (NI)" means that the three bits of the NI started out as a single silicon crystal, and then acid was applied to eat away everything except the three segments shown on one leve, but underneath the block is still there holding them together. It is expensive to make, but it gives you an interfereometer accurate to atomic distances. The "loss of fringe visibility" means the interference disappears (becuse the two wave packets miss each other completely). So we can work out the coherence length in the NI. The analyzer crystal just selects a subset of the neutrons coming in. It should not be changing the size of the wave packet. The experimenters are clearly saying the analyzer crystal changes the coherence length in the NI. That is the key result of the experiment. By the way, because neutron experiments are so expensive to perform that only about 50 people have ever done neutron interfereometry (also called neutron optics). Of the five experimenters: Kaiser, Clothier, Werner are US professors of physics (Werner has passed away) and Rauch and Wolwitsch are Austrlan professors of physics. The experimenters have their names in many other experiments too. This experiiment was part of a series funded jointly by the National Science Foundation in the US and the Atoms Institute of the Austrian Universities. If anyone in the world understands neutron interference, it is one of the select group of experimenters who have actually done it themselves. So we can be sure they have thought of everything. If the analyzer crystal changed the coherence length, they would say so and it would not be anything remarkable. Studiot, I had no idea you wanted to back to such basics. Sure, this is a great idea - discuss the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW) from the ground up. Yes, elementary waves by themselves do not appear to be part of the current picture of mass and energy we look at in physics. On their website www.elwave.org they even describe the waves as not having energy at all. How do they interact with matter? A few ways. Firstly, a source of particles (like light globe or laser or electron gun) does not provide particles randomly. The source is providing particles in response to incoming elementary waves. So in a lighted room, waves come from all surfaces and go to the light globe which sends photons back. Why does Dr. Little believe this? Look at the neutron interference experiment I am debating here with Uncool. For TEW, the waves go from the detector through the analyzer crytsal and the NI (where they interfere) to the reactor. Where elementary waves interfere constructively in the NI and reach the reactor, then a neutron makes the return journey along those elementary waves. Notice how when we change the analyzer crystal we get neutrons with a different coherence length (which is a different spread of frequencies for TEW). So by changing the elementary waves going into the reactor, we get different particles coming out. There are other experiments that suggest the same thing - so TEW claims that sources respond to incoming elementary waves. So that's the first way elementary waves interact with matter. The second way is that a particle like a neutron or a photon is always following an elementary wave at all times. The elementary wave is like a railroad track for individual particles. When particles form atoms, it is because there are elementary waves in the nucleus (holding the neutrons and protons together) and other elementary waves wrapping around the atom holding the electrons in orbit. Somtimes atoms and molecules as a group can follow a single elementary wave too, when we see atoms or molecules forming interference patterns in the double slit experiment. Once groups of particles get too big, they don't follow an individual elementary wave, so the usual rules of conservation of energy and momentum apply. By the way, TEW explains those two conservation rules by the fact that they are conserved for an individual particle following an elementary wave. So since the components of matter have these things conserved, that's why bigger things also follow those rules. In TEW there is a great feeling of physics making sense at last. Why does Dr. Little believe that particles follow an elementary wave at all times? Because all the experiments of particle physics are explained in a local and deterministic way using that idea. He mentions the double slit experiment and about ten other experiments in the book as good examples. It's too much to go into here - I'm just letting you know his reasoning overall. The third way the elementary waves interact with matter is that many of the properties we think of as belonging to the particle are regarded by TEW as properites of the elementary wave. For photons, it is a particle, but the "frequency" and "wavelength" are properties of the elementary wave. In qm, the belief is "wave-particle duality", which means a particle is also a wave. Most importantly, that assumes the wave travels in the same direction as the particle (a much overlooked assumption in qm). In TEW, waves are waves and particles are particles. The particles are guided by elementary waves, but the two things are physically separate, and they are going in different directions. As I've mentioned, TEW believes the direction of the elementary waves is the opposite to the particles because of experiments like the neutron interference experiment being debate here. A final note. Elementary waves are always there. If you switch a light globe off, the source decides to send nothing. The elementary waves are still coming in and are always coming in. So there is no "switching on and off" of elementary waves. There is a lot more to it, but there is TEW 101. As for fields, you are saying a field refers to a place. I would be pedantic and say it refers to measuring something in many places. I think we're saying the same thing on this one. Eugene Morrow

Imatfaal, What is your example of flim-flam? The Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW) is a very different description of the quantum world than quantum mechanics (qm) - perhaps the different description seems flim-flam to you? You are also implying my responses are not at the level of the questioners. I am doing a lot of quoting of the developer of TEW - Dr. Lewis Little, and the experimenters in the Kaiser et al 1992 neutron interference experiment - the highest authorities to quote. I need you to be more specific on what is the problem with the case I am making for TEW. ACG52, Are you sure you simply don't like the answers I'm giving? If you expect TEW to be merely an intepretation of qm, then you will be disappointed. Uncool, We are discussing Kaiser et al 1992 neutron interference. As a reminder, here is the experimental layout: I discussed how the detectors measure a frequency for the neutrons. The analyzer crystal selects a subset of frequencies from the neutron beam, just like a prism selects a subset of frequencies from a light beam. You wrote: That's one way of looking at the function of the analyzer crystal. You challenged my knowledge of this experiment. I wrote: You wrote: Let's look at what the experimenters say. As a reminder, Table VIII on page 41 shows how the analyzer crystal determines the coherence length of the neutrons in the Neutron Interferometer: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ TABLE VIII. Calculated longitudinal coherence lengths delta x of the neutrons in the different analyzer configurations. Beam...................................Delta X (Angstrom units) Direct C3 (and C2)_______________86.2 PR analyzer, (111) parallel_________ 97.5 PR analyzer, (111) antiparallel______148 NP analyzer, (111) antiparallel_____3450 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Notice how much the coherence length changes - between the PR analyzer in the 111 parallel position and the NP analyzer in the 111 antiparallel position. A change of over 34 times. The experimenters admit that for qm the coherence length is determined in the NI, and the analyzer crystal affects that even though the neutrons in the NI have not reached the analyzer crystal yet. On page 41, they write (italics in the original): This is an admission that something must be happening backwards in time. They finish the paper discussing this issue, which is clearly what sets this experiment apart. The paper ends: You may like this explanation. For me, it is an admission they do not know what is causing the analyzer crystal to affect the coherence length of the neutrons. In summary, qm has calculated what they believe is the coherence length of the neutron "wave packets", and they cannot give a clear reason why the analyzer crystal affects it, apparently backwards in time. I throw the question back to you - what do you think the experiment is about? I recommend you download the experiment and read it to form your own opinion. I mentioned how FWHM was used in the paper. You wrote: On Page 41, they write: I wrote: You wrote: I shown how the placing of the analyzer crystal after the coherence length in the NI, so the neutrons in the NI somehow must know what analyzer crystal is ahead of them. For TEW, the explanation is easy. Elementary waves start at the detector and go in the opposite direction to the neutrons. The analyzer crystal affects those elementary waves if present. The elementary waves interfere in the NI, and some of them reach the reactor. The reactor sends back neutrons based on the incoming elementary waves, and those neutrons make their way to where the elementary waves started at the detector. So there are elementary waves going from the analzyer crystal to the NI - that's how the analyzer crystal affects what is happening in the NI. For TEW, qm is not measuring a coherence length of wave packets. Instead, TEW interprets the calculation as a spread of frequencies of elementary waves in the NI. Of course the analyzer crystal affects this - the elementary waves pass through the analyzer crystal first. You wrote: It is for qm to explain how the analyzer crystal affects the coherence length backwards in time. The experimenters (who are experts in qm) cannot do it, and it is very clear that you cannot explain this either. I had already pointed this out, when I wrote: You wrote: Then shortly after you wrote: You are not sure there is anything to explain? You can't see a problem? Think about it: the neutrons reach the Neutron Interferometer. Somehow they know that there will or will not be an analyzer crystal later on, and they behave diffferently. What if the analyzer crystal was placed slightly out of position, so the neutrons will never reach it? How will they know if the analyzer crystal is in the right position to affect them or not? This is a huge gap in the explanation given by qm in this experiment. Some of the world's leading experts on neutron interferometry cannot use qm to explain the hard numbers in Table VIII. This is an experiment that qm cannot explain. If you believe something happened backwards in time, how does that work? There is no mechanism given for cause and effect here. You found an abstract for the paper, and you wrote: Let's look at the two sentences you quoted: Notice how they say "after the mixing and interference has occurred in the last crystal slab of the NI" and then "this increases the coherence length". This is the whole problem - the coherence length in the NI is changed after the neutrons leave the NI. You are claiming this is what qm expects? They have described the results, but how can you argue that qm expects them? The reason the analyzer crystal was put in was to study the interference patterns in a narrower wavelength spectrum of the beam of neutrons. The experimenters call the interference pattern the "contrast' coming out of the NI. On page 34, the experimenters write: They are saying that the wider spectrum of neutrons may show no interference, but when you look at a narrow spectrum there is an interference pattern there. That is what they were investigating. What they did not expect was the change in coherence length caused by the analyzer crystal. It remains a big challenge for qm to explain. Eugene Morrow

Uncool, You asked about the neutron detector in the Kaiser et al 1992 experiment. How does it assign a frequency? Helmut Rauch and Sam Werner (two of the experimenters) wrote a book "Neutron Interferometry". Page 34 says that they use "He3 gas proportional detectors". They give the reaction when a neutron is detected as: n + He3 ---> H1 + H3. Hence a neutron and a helium atom become a hydrogen and a tritium atom. This reaction produces a photon of energy and that tells us the kinetic energy of the neutron (and the momentum). Thanks to de Broglie a frequency can be calculated. Hence the detector assigns a frequency to the neutron. I had written: You replied: The experiment presents figures for neutron coherence length, and qm cannot explain why analyzer crystal affects them. I know what the experiment is about. I had written: You wrote: In general, the qm description of "wave packets" uses Fourier Analysis to describe a group of waves of slightly different frequency all adding together to form the packet. That is qm's description, and I leave it to them. The letters FWHM appear in the Kaiser et al 1992 paper when they discuss the calculations for the coherence length, and it makes sense to be talking about a range of frequencies for the neutrons. I think it is clear that Full Width at Half Maximum is being used. I had written: You replied: I have explained the experiment clearly from the qm point of view and the TEW point of view. It is qm that has not explained the central effect of the experiment. I had written: You wrote: The problem for qm is explaining how the neutrons in the NI know which analyzer crystal is ahead of them. How can they know and why does it affect what the neutrons do in the NI? The calculations show the analyzer crytal has a huge effect on the coherence length. The problem belongs entirely to qm. It is qm that believes in wave packets that have a coherence length, so qm has to explain the values calculated. For TEW, the calculations are not of coherence length but of a spread of frequencies passing through the NI. It makes complete sense that the spread changes - the waves pass through the analyzer crystal first and then reach the NI. For TEW, it is obvious why the analyzer crystal affects the NI frequencies. univeral theory You wrote: The 1996 paper on TEW gives the mathematical equivalence to qm, as does the book on TEW. Since qm is accepted on its maths, then TEW should be accepted on the same basis. You wrote: Well said. I am looking forward to the experiments that distinguish between qm and TEW. It seems very unlikely we will prove anything one way or the other here until we have some experimental results that show which theory is supported. I can't wait for the results. You wrote: Again well said. The whole qm-TEW choice is about this. As you can see with me and Uncool, we are looking at the neutron interference experiment, and coming to quite different interpretations about what the experiment is showing. For me, the experiment clearly shows the quantum waves travel from the analyzer crystal to the NI, whereas Uncool sees no such conclusion, and is questioning whether I understand the experiment. That's physics - we can see reality, but what does it mean? You then wrote this: I think you are saying that qm makes accurate predictions, which means the theory must be accurately described, so the multiple interpretations are not a problem. You are also saying that somehow TEW is failing to make accurate predictions. Firstly, if only maths is an accurate way to describe a theory, why does qm have so many interpretations? The multiple interpretations are proof that the maths of qm is not really precisely describing what is going on. That is why qm focuses on calculations, because the maths gives the "answer" very accurately. However, the maths does not definitively say how or why we get that answer. For TEW, there is only one interpretation, because the physical description is much more precise. The same "answer" now has a single physcial interpretaton. To me, a huge improvement on qm. You mentioned the phrase "still failing with TEW". Are you saying TEW does not successfully predict the same experiments that qm does? TEW makes the same predictions (apart from the few that we are awaiting to be done). For example, TEW makes exactly the same predictions in the double slit experiment. Many qm supporters assume that means TEW is just another interpertation of qm (which TEW denies). Why did I say "keep the good bit of quantum mechanics"? Because TEW keeps the same accurate predictions of probability (which is the good bit of qm). TEW has none of the multiple interpretations of qm (which are the tricky bit of qm). Studiot, I did use the word "sinusoidal". I was referring to the shape. I will think about a new word or phrase for that. The next thing you wrote is worth a lot of discussion: I only agree that a wave is a form of motion. Dr. Little has made it clear that our normal concept of energy does not apply to the propagation of elementary waves. The waves are there, but they are not created or destroyed and are not powered by some source. They are this infrastructure to the universe and are not, by themselves, moving anything around. A particle can follow an elementary wave, of course. We think of the particle as having energy, and sometimes mass. However, the elementary waves by themselves are not doing anything other than propagating themselves. If you are really cynical, you could say that TEW does not really know what the elementary waves are - only that they are there. That's a fair enough view. That puts our attempted discussion on this in a difficult situation. I'm not sure how we can proceed with this. On fields, you wrote: I am happy to go with these Wikipedia sentences on a field in physics: Where shall we go with this? Eugene Morrow

Studiot, I think a simple wave can be described as a sinusoidal oscillation with a fixed frequency and wavelength. Waves can change their frequency and wavelength, but the basic idea of a wave has that basic oscillation. Dr. Little wrote this in the 1996 paper on the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW): I say this to underline there is no medium. This is relevant because you then asked how "field" applies to this. The answer is that field is not relevant to the description of elementary waves, as shown in this passage from Dr. Little in Section 15 of the 1996 paper. He is talking about TEW (all bracket comments added by me): Three paragraphs later, he writes: As for velocity and interference, I will get to that in another post. Uncool, The detectors assign a frequency to a neutron that is detected. Those frequency values are turned into coherence lengths by quantum mechanics (qm). As I don't believe in qm, I will not be drawn into how qm does the calculation. All I will say is that I believe qm uses results from Fourier Analysis and Full Width at Half Maximum (FWHM) as a basis for the calculation. The experimenters, who are qm experts, give their calculations of coherence length in Table VIII on page 41 of their paper, as I posted earlier. For qm, the coherence length is determined in the Neutron Interferometer, and they have shown that the analyzer crystal changes that coherence length, apparently backwards in time. I am simply making everyone aware of qm is claiming in Table VIII. It is their problem to explain their own calculations. univeral theory, You wrote: You can see in my reply to Studiot how Dr. Little claims that field equations are not necessary, nor are differential equations. The whole argument in favor of TEW is that TEW claims to explain reality better than qm - because TEW is local and deterministic, and TEW doesn't have the multiple interpretations that qm does. That's quite enough for me. I know that's not impressed anyone in this current debate. I'm not impressed by qm quoting lots of maths, so the two sides are arguing in very different ways. I think it comes down to a choice - what sort of answer makes sense? For some, it's all the maths of qm that is convincing. For others, it is the explanations of TEW that are convincing. It's good to have a choice. Eugene Morrow

Studiot, Thanks for persisting on your point about wanting to discuss the basis of elementary waves. I have not been addressing this. Dr. Little called the "elementary" waves in the same sense that a photon is an elementary particle - there is nothing smaller. So we can't have a gas law for elementary waves - there is nothing underneath them that we know of. Of course there will always be some level where we can't go any lower. I can quote Dr. Little on this. In the 1996 article, in Section 7, there are three passages that sum this up: So Dr. Little defines elementary waves in terms of their behavior in experiments. That is why he says "One can only say for sure that the waves objects exist". What do you think of this basis for elementary waves? Uncool, I will leave you to describe frames of reference for wave-particles in quantum mechanics. Not sure the point you want to discuss on that one. You pointed out that saying the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW) "predicts" special relativity is an inappropriate use of the word. I was repeating a claim by Dr. Little on this. On page 85 of the TEW book, he writes: To be precise, Einstein did say that all frames of reference measure the speed of light as c. TEW explains this very neatly - every measuring device sends out elementary waves traveling at c (in that frame of reference). The photon comes back along that wave at c. So all measuring devices get the same result - c, no matter what their frame of reference is. You pointed out that saying c comes from elementary waves is just putting the question back. That's true. I still prefer the explanation of TEW, because the constancy of c is now explained in terms of a physical reality - elementary waves - rather than explaining the constancy of c as being true by observation or a simply a postulate. I stated that most qm supporters believe their is communication between the particles in entanglement, and it must be faster than c. I also said you are rare to not require that communication. You stated: There are experiments where the only qm explanation available is communication between the particles, and even backwards in time. The experiment is written by qm experts. One example is: S. P. Walborn, M. O. Terra Cunha, S. Padua, C. H. Monken, "Double-slit quantum eraser", Physical Review A, Volume 65, 033818, Feb 2002. A free copy of a PDF of this experiment is found as follows: Go to Wikipedia DSlit QEraser Under “External links”, look for “The original paper on which this article is based.” Let's look at the quantum mechanics (qm) point of view for this experiment. The basic idea is that there are two entangled photons created: call them Photon P and S (perhaps named Partner and Slit). Photon S is put through a double slit experiment to create interference. Then we put a quarter-wave plate in front of the double slit. The quarter wave plate gives a different polarization to Photon S going through the different slits, so we can know which slit Photon S passed through. That polarization information stops interference of Photon S (according to qm). Now we get to the interesting bit: we put a polarizer in front of Photon P, which changes the polarization of Photon S (which is the qm claim that there is communication between the photons). After all, only Photon P reaches the polarizer - how does Photons S know? By putting the polarizer in front of P, we suddenly start getting an interference pattern with photon S (with the quarter wave plate still there). The qm explanation is that there is communication between the photons, and that Photon P "erases" the polarization data we had on S (from the quarter-wave plate), so Photon S is now free to interfere. The experiment is called the "quantum eraser" becuase of the information that is "erased" by the entangled partner. Even more interesting, the polarizer for P is placed a distance away so that Photon P reaches the polarizer AFTER Photon S has been detected and no longer exists. So Photon P "erased" the information about Photon S backwards in time. From the qm point of view, this explains the results of the experiment. So according to qm there is communication between the entangled pair, even backwards in time. My explanation here shows how TEW can explain everything in a local and deterministic way - nothing being erased and nothing happening backwards in time. See http://www.scribd.com/doc/99753535 When I get around to Bell's theorem, I will explain it by the usual physical description of the processes. For TEW, it is not necessary to use maths. If you want maths, you will be totally unsatisfied by my explanations. In the neutron interference experiment, the calculation of coherence length is given, along with the results. As you ponit out, I'm not a qm expert, so you should read the paper. It is only USD $25 from http://pra.aps.org/. You are looking for: H. Kaiser, R. Clothier, S.A. Werner, H. Rauch, H. Wölwitsch, “Coherence and spectral filtering in neutron interferometry”, Physical Review A, Vol 45, number 1, Jan 1992. The analyzer crystal is like a prism for light - it breaks up one beam into constituent frequencies. So the analyzer crystal is like a filter - selecting a subset of the neutron beam. This is taken into account in the qm calculation of wave packet size, which is given in the paper. I think you are thinking that the analyzer crystal has changed the coherence length on the way through. The experimenters are qm experts - they either were already or later became professors of physics. If there was a possibility of the analyzer crystal affecting coherence length, they would have considered it. Instead, they are clear that that the coherence length is determined in the Neutron Interferometer. Their claim says it all: They knew that the analyzer crystal was affecting the interferometer, but they clearly did not know why. At the time, qm was the only theory to choose from. Now there is TEW, which does explain why the analyzer crystal affects the interferometer. We have a choice of theory now. You can still choose qm if you prefer the explanations. univeral theory, We seem to agree that TEW uses a single frame of reference: the one for the elementary waves. You then wrote: This is a really important philosophical question. My answer is that I think you have a limited imagination - there is at least another choice: 3 - two phenomena, where the waves are always there and propagate in one direction, and optionally a particle travels backwards along that wave. TEW is presenting a new physical description that has not been considered before. The idea of the wave and particle being separate physical entities in the same frame of reference is something that Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and even Einstein did not consider. It is a different answer to the usual qm picture, and hence will take some getting used to. Eugene Morrow

univeral theory, I have re-read the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW) on special relativity. I realise that I my last post was wrong on the frames of reference. Re-reading the TEW book and the 1996 article, I realise that the particle travels in the frame of referecence of the elementary wave. So the elementary wave travels in it's own frame of refernce, and the particles travels back along in that frame of reference. The source is in it's own frame of reference, and that's fine because the source simply receives the elementary wave and issues a particle - the source doesn't care what frame of reference the elementary wave is in. Studiot, I apologise that you are feeling bad treated by the way I have answered your posts. Your line of reasoning seems to have been much the same as everyone on this thread - you are clearly thinking in the quantum mechanics (qm) approch, which starts with maths. By asking for maths you are making an assumption that reality follows from maths, whereas TEW has it the other way around - maths follows from reality. There was always going to be tension on this point, and it is very appropriate we are having this disagreement. It is the Reciprocity theorem that allows TEW to use largely the same maths as qm and reach such different conclusions. Dr. Little states that the Schrodinger equation is still valid for TEW. You are pointing out that Dr Little is not using equations to model everything. It's the same issue as in my last paragraph. The equations that qm uses in Schrodinger describe a result that TEW describes using reality. The qm equations are compatible (via reciprocity) with the TEW desciption of reality, so TEW is comfortable. However, the TEW description of reality does not fit with the qm assumptions behind the qm maths, so qm is not comfortable with this. So by asking for equations we are seeing the stark differences between TEW and qm. There is no avoiding the tension on this point. Uncool, You wrote: I was pointing out that since a particle in qm is regarded as both a wave and a particle moving together, the particle and the quantum wave share the same frame of reference. Do you disagree with that? What I wrote was: Of course TEW was after special relativity - by about 90 years: that's why the word predicts was in inverted commas. Dr. Little says the above statement to show how strongly TEW agrees with special relativity - if TEW had been developed first, then it would have predicted special relativity. It's just a statement of the strength of agreement between the two. Regarding whether Einstein made an assumption about the speed of c, I think you are being a bit pedantic. Your quote is effectively saying what I was saying. Dr. Little claims that TEW gives a physical explanation to Einstein's postulates, and I very much agree. You are clearly happy with the qm field theory reason why c is the speed limit. I am not convinced by the qm case, as usual because it is derived from maths, rather than from a description of reality. As I was discussing with Studiot, TEW and qm have a big difference in the relationship between maths and reality, and I much prefer the TEW approach. About entanglement, you wrote: You are rare in interpreting entanglement this way. Most qm supporters I encounter favour the interpretation that something really is being communicated between the particles, and even backwards in time. I have an example of entanglement where the only explanation for qm is that there is communication between the particles backwards in time. I have written a TEW explanations that is local and deterministic - everything happens in normal time. Both the TEW and qm explanations are free downloads. You may not have time to look at them, especially since we are still debating the neutron interference experiment at the moment. I will give you the link in case you do have time: http://www.scribd.com/doc/99753535 Bell's theorem is more complex that just entanglement. There are double delayed varations that make analyzing the results more complex. TEW can still account for all the results in a local and deterministic way. I will have to deal with that in another post. You asked some more questions on the neutron inteference experiment: I must point out I made a mistake on numbering the detectors C1, C2, and C3 in the diagram I gave showing the inner parts of the Neutron Interfereometer. C2 is top right. C3 is bottom right and C1 is the "analyzed C3 beam" with is bottom middle (below the analzyer crystal). I had C2 and C3 mixed up. The short answers to your questions are as follows: (a) The analyzer crystal should not affect the coherence length at all (it just redirects the neutron). (b) There is no maths for the analyzer crystal given by qm or TEW. You are doing the same thing as Studiot - asking for maths, and my reaction is the same. © The detectors give a measure of the momentum of the incoming neutron for that detector. A spread of momentums is found by comparing many neutrons. The position is just the location of that detector. Eugene Morrow