Farsight's QM

[ydoaPs]

I haven't told you the details swanson, but I've broken quantum mechanics. It's all classical after all. There's no multiverse. Things don't pop into existence just because you look at them. There is zero chance that a baseball can materialise on the other side of a brick wall. Strong stuff I know, hard to believe, but I'm not fooling.

 

Put up or shut up. I'll grab a bingo card while you browse photobucket.

[Farsight]

No problem. Here's an excerpt from the book version. PM me and I'll send you the whole thing or point you at the paper, which is online. The book's better. But note there's a lot of background you need to understand before you can appreciate how it works. You have to understand the photon, and to understand the photon you have to understand other things too.

 

 

QUANTUM MECHANICS

 

Quantum mechanics evolved during the early years of the twentieth century in response to the black body problem' date=' where the energy distribution of light from a cavity oven was charted as a hump rather than increasing continuously with frequency. Max Planck got the ball rolling in 1901, establishing that there was some kind of cutoff that prevented what’s now called the ultraviolet catastrophe. The emission of light seemed to be subject to some kind of discreteness or packeting. The energy was quantized in its relationship to frequency, such that E=hf always applied, where h was Planck's Constant.

 

But nobody knew why, and progress was slow. Einstein wrote his photoelectric paper in 1905. It was called [i']On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light[47][/i], and said the ability of light to knock electrons out of a metal plate depended on the energy of individual quanta rather than the intensity of the incident beam. This meant that light itself that was quantized, not its emission and absorption, and thus light was particle-like in its nature. But many were not convinced. Planck himself wasn't persuaded until 1911, and then the first world war put everything back. It wasn't until 1918 that Planck won his Nobel prize, followed by Einstein in 1921. Then Arthur Compton proved Einstein right in 1922 via Compton Scattering, and light really did seem to consist of particles rather than waves.

 

Hence in 1923 when Louis De Broglie proposed that matter is made of waves, it was totally revolutionary. De Broglie's hypothesis made a massive difference to the earlier Bohr model of the atom. Instead of billiard-ball electrons orbiting like planets, you move to an integer number of electron waves round the nucleus, like derailleur gears. Next came Heisenberg and Born with matrix mechanics in 1925, a purely mathematical approach which gave no picture of the underlying phenomena. Then Schrodinger came up with his wave equation in 1926, the name “photon” was coined by Gilbert Lewis, and then De Broglie's hypothesis was confirmed experimentally by Davisson and Germer via electron diffraction. At the same time Dirac was coming onstream with a relativistically invariant form of Schrodinger's wave equation, predicting electron spin and the existence of the positron. It was was a time of great excitement, but De Broglie got sidetracked by pilot waves, Schrodinger got talked out of classical wave mechanics, and everything went pear shaped.

 

The Solvay Congress of 1927 was perhaps the greatest meeting of great minds ever. There's Einstein centre stage, in the middle of the front row, sitting next to Lorentz on our left. That's Marie Curie next to Lorentz, then Max Planck. Sitting behind Einstein there's Paul Dirac and Arthur Compton, looking like brothers. Just to their right is Louis de Broglie, and on the back row behind them, there's Erwin Schrodinger.

 

Figure 90 – Solvay congress 1927

 

The Solvay Congress of 1927 was a great meeting of great minds, but it wasn't a meeting of minds. Because whilst Einstein and Schrodinger and Planck were in one camp, Bohr and Pauli and Heisenberg and Born were in a different camp. The wrong camp won, and the probabilistic Copenhagen Interpretation set in. It comes with the idea of the collapse of the wavefunction, leading to the notion that nothing exists until it is measured, and the fantasy of parallel worlds that we can never see. It also comes with the delusion that nobody can ever understand what's really going on, and that all attempts to grasp a picture of reality are doomed because they're classical and outdated, and can be dismissed out of hand.

 

That's not what we're seeking. That's no scientific dream. That's a nightmare of belief, of mathematical abstraction, one that has taken us on a random walk for eighty years. But it's over now...

 

Objects in the quantum world are "actions". This is why we have Planck's constant. When we talk about a photon, we express energy as hf and momentum as hf/c. The h is Planck’s constant of action, being 6.63 x 10-34 Joule-seconds. Action is energy multiplied by time, and also momentum multiplied by distance. The f is of course frequency per second, and the speed of light c is distance divided by time, which converts a measure of energy into a measure of momentum.

 

What's important is that the photon isn't some "billiard-ball" particle. It isn't an object. It's an action. It's akin to a kick. OK now, try measuring a kick. You know it isn't an object, you don't expect it to have a shape or a surface. Because it's an action. And an action is only an action if there's some motion involved, so you can never pin down the location of a kick. You can only say where you detected it. Ouch! Another action is a shout. There's no specific place where it can be located at some point in time. It's a spherical compression wave in air expanding outwards, and whilst it has a centre, you can't go and stand next to my mouth and say "this is where the shout is". Instead, when you hear it, you say "the shout is here". And then somebody else hears it and says "the shout is here", and it's like it's in two places at once.

 

That's what the quantum world is like. Everything is like this. Not just the "objects", but the things you detect them with too. That's why things are uncertain. Once you understand that you aren't dealing with objects, it isn't mysterious at all.

[Klaynos]

I wonder if Farsight realises that the quantum world is exactly the same as the real world?

 

And how do you define action here, mathematically?

[Farsight]

I realise it. Emphatically so.

 

How do you define action? Momentum times distance. Or energy times time. See post above. Or see:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_constant

 

Ah. I see I've been censored again. Remember I've been working on relativity, I'm in line with Einstein, this had to come in the end. I can step up to the plate and tell you why we observe light quanta, why quantum mechanics is not spooky after all, and why this means teleportation is pseudoscience. But I'm booted into pseudoscience. Sorry, I will not carry on a conversation with this label stuck to my head.

[Reaper]

Ah. I see I've been censored again. Remember I've been working on relativity, I'm in line with Einstein, this had to come in the end. I can step up to the plate and tell you why we observe light quanta, why quantum mechanics is not spooky after all, and why this means teleportation is pseudoscience. But I'm booted into pseudoscience. Sorry, I will not carry on a conversation with this label stuck to my head.

 

That's because you have yet to provide math, and predictions, and physical evidence for your "hypothesis". If you want to get rid of that label, put up or shut up!

[swansont]

Ah. I see I've been censored again.

 

Excuse me?

[foodchain]

No problem. Here's an excerpt from the book version. PM me and I'll send you the whole thing or point you at the paper, which is online. The book's better. But note there's a lot of background you need to understand before you can appreciate how it works. You have to understand the photon, and to understand the photon you have to understand other things too.

 

I think the thing with math is its just a formalism. For instance I doubt particles are actually squaring themselves or dividing on some interaction or what not, its just that any particular formalism of math can represent a pattern or a system, and if you can get an equation that allows you to repeat/demonstrate something like the math to relativity then that’s what is desired, simply put it works with modeling/predicting reality. Not that it provides some end all description of everything, for instance can relativity model why I like to drink soda? Should I think relativity bunk because it cant explain why I like to drink soda?

 

Don’t get me wrong. I think its easy to see with say issues like string theory to start with that it can run away on you and become some horrible monster that cant be tested, but science or physics for instance also tests the math against reality, and it puts in the textbooks the stuff that currently works. Another example, according the classical physics atoms should not work as they do or for that matter even exist, does that mean classical mechanics is wrong? I think it simply means we don’t know everything yet, and then people made QM. Another example would be the standard model, which does not include gravity, what does that mean? It means we don’t know everything yet.

 

With QM I think you have a fine example. You have some math and experiments that reveal aspects of reality, such as entanglement. Since then you have had more math and experiments, with variation of course. Some work in some situations others don’t. So its not so much some obscure issue primarily caused by math, though I don’t know how or to what extent currently you can test such, its just the current state of affairs things happen to be in. The person that teleported information for instance using BECs was told by a great deal of her peers that light cant do what it did and that the experiment would be impossible, so reality proved them all wrong. She did this though with math and experiment, just like the rest of physics.

 

So if you have something to prove, you have to prove it. For instance I have a crackpot idea that decoherence and einselection or QM can help model the origin of life, I am learning currently more on the subject all on my own. I cant present anything but that’s all that means. The difference I think is that I call it an idea and I state that’s all it is, which is different then simply claiming this is reality and the rest is bunk, which is what you do sometimes, and why I think people get ticked off with you stuff. Personally it does not bother me as much as others.

[Klaynos]

QM is one of the most experimentally tested theories in physics.

[ydoaPs]

What is acting and on what is it acting?

[Graviphoton]

Farsight

 

Do you even understand the complexities of physics without a non-classical model??

 

In your attempt to make things easier, you are making them much harder.

[ydoaPs]

Farsight, are you okay?? Where have you gone?