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| I don't like it (standard quantum mechanics) and I am sorry I ever had anything to do with it. |
Sabine Hossenfelder with her blog BackReAction is in trouble from expressing her opinion as physicist about particle physics as the central subject for contemporary physicists:
- They don’t like to hear that their field urgently needs to change direction, so they attack me as the bearer of bad news.
- Everyone can see that nothing useful is coming out of particle physics, it’s just a sink of money. Lots of money.
- And soon enough governments are going to realize that particle physics is a good place to save money that they need for more urgent things.
This is a tough message. No wonder that Sabine is in trouble and that particle physicists are angry. But does Sabine have something important to say? Let's see.
In recent posts I have been seeking the origin of the present crisis of physics witnessed by (not only) Sabine, in the work of Einstein on particle nature of light (origin of particle physics) and special/general relativity as a cornerstone of modern physics (filled with never resolved mysteries/contradictions).
Let us now turn to quantum mechanics as the other cornerstone, with the crisis in full bloom from incompatibility with general relativity, which Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life to resolve in a fruitless search for a general field theory including both gravitation and electromagnetics/quantum mechanics.
Quantum mechanics is based on the (linear) Schrödinger equation for a (scalar complex-valued) wave function $\Psi (x1, x2, ..., xN,t)$ for an $N$-electron system/atom depending on $N$ three-dimensional space coordinates $x1$ to $xN$ and a time coordinate $t$, thus depending on $3N$ space coordinates and one time coordinate. Since physical reality has at most three space dimensions, the wave function can be given a direct physical meaning only for a system with one electron, that is for the Hydrogen atom. To Schrödinger as the creator of the Schrödinger equation this created deep frustration, since he required the wave function to be Anschaulich or possible to visualise (in three space dimensions). Moreover, as pointed out by Nobel Laureate Walter Kohn, already for a system with $10$ electrons the wave function is impossible to compute because its high dimensionality. This makes it possible to claim that the wave function can never be wrong.
In short, (standard) quantum mechanics as based on the (standard linear scalar) Schrödinger equation presents severe difficulties, which have never been overcome despite intense struggle by the sharpest minds over 100 years. The way out became to give up physicality/reality and give the wave function a statistical meaning as suggested by Born. In short, the (standard) wave function has no direct physical meaning and in addition is uncomputable, which physicists rationalise by saying (following Bohr) that since the wave function contains everything that can be said and correctly predicts the outcome of any experiment, it is not necessary to understand its real meaning. A physicist can handle this by confessing that he/she does not understand quantum mechanics (and nobody else either).
To sum up, modern physics is based on two theories (relativity and quantum mechanics) both loaded with unresolvable difficulties/mysteries, which together are incompatible/contradictory. No wonder a crisis has developed with ever more fanciful ingredients of multi-versa, string theory and dark matter/energy.
An understandable alternative to the standard linear multi-dimensional scalar Schrödinger equation is given in Real Quantum Mechanics in the form of a non-linear system of three-dimensional scalar real wave functions. Take a look and see that you can understand!
Bohr claimed that the objective of the theory of quantum mechanics (Schrödinger equation) is to (i) predict the outcome of experiments, not to (ii) explain the outcome of experiments as the real scientific objective. This is odd and adds to the mystery of quantum mechanics. The only role prediction of an experiment can serve is to support theory (if the prediction is correct) or falsify theory (if the prediction is incorrect). Since the wave function is uncomputable and thus unknown it cannot be used to make predictions. What can be done is, knowing the outcome of an experiment, to compute/design an approximate simplified wave function by reducing dimensionality, which always (miraculously) agrees with the experiment and so shows that modern physics is in perfect shape. For more, see 72 posts on Quantum Contradictions.
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Full agreement between relativity and QM has been obtained under QED, a relativistic perturbation theory of the quantum vacuum. It is essentially the quantum counterpart of classical electromagnetism, and gives a full account of matter and light interaction. Yes, it requires renormalization of infinities attached as corrections to mass and charge, those infinities absorbed in the constants empirically observed... something that Feynman wasn't exactly comfortable with. But this renormalization is necessary even if there aren't self-interactions to contend with... the measured mass and charge of an electron is affected by the cloud of virtual particles which surround and interact with that electron. In that case, renormalization would merely replace the postulated mass and charge with the empirically-observed values.
SvaraRaderaThis is, of course, complicated greatly by the fact that the Millikan and Fletcher oil drop experiment to determine elementary charge necessarily baked-in Earth's gravitational acceleration (they balanced electrostatic charge against gravitational acceleration to suspend tiny oil droplets)... so on other planets with different gravitational acceleration, the elementary charge (the coupling factor to all manner of electromagnetic interactions) must necessarily be different, as the Fine Structure Constant (which quantifies the strength of the EM interaction between elementary charged particles) shows. A gravitating body locally slows the speed of light (remember that while Special Relativity necessitates that c be a constant, Einstein reiterated many times that General Relativity necessitated that the velocity of light is not to be regarded as independent of the gravitational potential), which affects the Fine Structure Constant by affecting elementary charge, which affects Faraday's Constant, etc., etc., etc.
This wave / particle duality comes about because 'particles' embody the principle of locality. A local interaction satisfies the principle of relativity and gives rise to causal ordering.
Electrons are thought of as particles because they can be detected locally. However, photons can also be detected locally, yet light (the tensor product of many singular photons which are individually circularly-polarized either parallel or anti-parallel to their direction of motion) is considered a wave.
I like to think of it like this: entities which have no invariant-mass are inherently wave-like, whereas entities which have invariant-mass are inherently particle-like but are affected by waves.
So the photon is inherently a wave (the electric and magnetic interactions oscillating in quadrature about a common axis, a circle extended through space-time into a spiral by dint of the photon's necessary movement through space-time, which we sense as a wave because a sinusoid is a circular function, and we generally only sense either the electric or magnetic interaction, rarely both together). That we can detect a photon locally is because we can only detect photons by destroying them, by measuring the effect of that photon inciding upon a detector, by changing the form of the energy the photon carries.
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The electron is inherently a particle (ie: it has invariant-mass), but given that it's a point charge, it also has a magnetic dipole moment when it is moving (the electric field and magnetic field are two sides of the same coin... a static electric field viewed from a moving frame of reference will be sensed at least in part as a magnetic field... the proportion of electric and magnetic being proportional to the magnitude of that relative motion of that measurement frame; the electric field being mediated via photons, the magnetic field being mediated via virtual photons) and we detect that as a wave, and that wave affects how the electron itself moves when interacting with other waves from other dipole moments of other point charges.
RaderaIOW, some components of the fundamental interactions are inherently dependent upon relative motion. We discovered the speed-independent components first because the speed-dependent components are suppressed relative to the speed-independent components by v/c.
For electromagnetism, we call the speed-independent component of the electromagnetic force electricity, and the speed-dependent component of the electromagnetic force magnetism. They are, in effect, the same thing viewed from different perspectives. You'll note I use 'speed' here intentionally, not velocity... it matters not the vector of that relative motion, all that matters is the magnitude of that relative motion.
Even more fundamental than the particles are the fields, (a 'field' merely being a 3-dimensional (x,y,z) spatial and a 1-dimensional (t) time affine Euclidean grid upon which we overlay the magnitude of any given field at any given time).
Excitations of these fields are posited to be mediated by particles (I prefer to use the term 'entities', to avoid confusion between particles and waves). For example, the electromagnetic field is mediated by photons (the electric interaction mediated by photons, the magnetic interaction mediated by virtual photons). In reality, these 'particles' are persistent perturbations above the field average energy density, per QFT and QED.
Yes, the Copenhagen Interpretation's "Shut Up And Calculate" is erroneous... it assumes that QM has all the answers, that it is fully physical, that all we must do is calculate to arrive at the answers. But the computation is so complex for higher dimensions, with so many free variables, that pretty much any answer can be obtained, the result of the calculation can be fitted via renormalization to empirical observation (which may or may not be accurate given that we introduce uncertainties in interacting with any system to measure it). There's no check of the math with empirical observation and vice versa, it's a fitting of the calculations to empirical observation without ascertaining whether that empirical observation has introduced uncertainties of its own. There's no way of determining if causality and determinism has been upheld. That has devolved into the creation of a large zoo of particles and phenomena, some of which we've empirically observed in particle colliders, some of which we've empirically observed via detectors aimed at space, many of which we have not (dark matter being chief amongst them) and likely never will, likely because they're not physical (ie: they don't represent physical reality). But we have no way of determining apriori that it's not physical. All we can do is search for what the computations say should be there, and if we don't find it, we know we've messed up somewhere along the way. That's a problem.
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QM is fundamentally correct at its base, in that we observe spectral emission from and spectral absorption to bound electrons, not a continuum emission or absorption spectrum (ie: not a blackbody spectrum... the mechanism for blackbody emission and absorption is transient inter-molecular oscillating dipoles induced by thermal vibrations within a material, whereas spectral emission and absorption is a resonance condition between the photon and the bound electron). The quantum jump is a physical reality... absorption of photons is a resonance condition, thus emission must likewise be a resonance condition. Bound electrons must have an integer number of de Broglie waves in their orbital, or a destructive-interference orbital is set up which reduces orbital radius until an integer number of de Broglie waves do exist in the orbital, the extra energy of the electron descending from a higher to a lower orbital emitted as radiation. If ambient energy density is high enough, then the bound electron cannot descend because it cannot rid itself of that excess energy via radiative emission, per 2LoT.
RaderaIt is my contention that while we got it correct for the hydrogen atom, we messed up the math for more-complex atoms. The model we've used isn't correct, the math we've used wasn't up to the task of calculating electron orbital radius and position, so we went to probability statistics.
It is also my contention that this is a result of being unable to measure the atom at a sufficient resolution and speed such that we can track the evolution of the position of the bound electron, while not interacting with the atom such that we introduce uncertainties which skew the measured results. If we were able to do so, we'd see the bound electron 'spiraling' around the nucleus, acted upon by Coulombic forces and centrifugal force in the high charge density in the vicinity of the oppositely-charged nucleal proton(s)... a spiral, spherically constrained; a balance of potential and kinetic energies.
We'd also see that at ground state, resonant quantum vacuum wavemodes feed energy to the bound electron to sustain it at its ground state orbital as it emits Larmor radiation (a point charge undergoing acceleration (angular acceleration, in this case) relative to its electric field will emit Larmor radiation in the form of virtual photons), and thus it is the ground state energy density of the quantum vacuum which underpins the meta-stability of all invariant-mass matter.
It is local excitation of the quantum vacuum which causes bound electrons to ascend to higher orbitals than ground state, they are always attempting to emit energy in the form of radiation to reach the lowest possible energy state, but this local excitation energy prevents it per 2LoT. When that excitation energy is removed, the bound electron may emit radiation to fall to a lower orbital. If quantum vacuum energy density is at ground state, the bound electron will fall to its ground state, but cannot fall below it.
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If we sufficiently suppress resonant quantum vacuum wavemodes sustaining the bound electron at its ground state (as in, for example, a well-shielded Casimir cavity), we can induce an artificial Lamb shift, causing the bound electron to emit radiation and fall to a lower state than its usual ground state. If we were able to completely block resonant quantum vacuum wavemodes, the bound electron would have nothing sustaining its orbital radius, the bound electron would thus 'spiral in' to the oppositely-charged nucleal proton(s), the element would undergo electron capture decay, the bound electron would combine with a nucleal proton and a neutrino to form a neutron, causing transmutation. This would occur until the nucleus becomes unstable and spits out some of the neutrons (which would decay with a half-life of 879.6 ± 0.8 seconds into a proton and W- boson (which would decay into an electron and electron antineutrino). Thus electron capture decay transmutes the element up the Periodic Table of the Elements toward Hydrogen, eventually unwinding matter back into energy. I've done such a decay chain for Cesium, the most-dense element, if you want it.
RaderaThus all invariant-mass matter is meta-stable, not inherently stable, dependent upon the ground-state quantum vacuum for that meta-stability.
You'll note this differs from the conventional Copenhagen Interpretation take that ground-state bound electrons do not emit any radiation, which is ludicrous. Think about it... all elements exhibit some form of magnetism (usually diamagnetism or paramagnetism, although certain valence electron configurations allow ferromagnetism to override the underlying para- or diamagnetism) even at ground state, and it is virtual photons which mediate the magnetic interaction. Thus all elements must emit virtual photons at all quantum states, including the ground state.
Under the conventional take, all elements are inherently stable, not meta-stable. While the conventional take talks of the Lamb shift being due to "vacuum energy fluctuations", it doesn't make the connection that quantum vacuum ground-state energy density underpins the metastability of invariant-mass matter. While the conventional take can describe the relation between mass and energy (E^2 = p^2 c^2 + m^2 c^4), it cannot explain how energy became mass nor how mass could be converted back to energy. Under the conventional take, elements exhibiting magnetic properties even at their ground state cannot be explained, as the conventional take claims ground-state elements do not emit any radiation... although later iterations of the conventional take change that a bit to state that ground-state elements have net-zero emission (which just proves my point that all elements emit Larmor radiation at all quantum states, just at ground state the energy emitted is exactly balanced by energy from the quantum vacuum).
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