The Nature of the Wave Function by Edwin Eugene Klingman

Hello again,

I've digested more of your paper and glanced at Ulf Klein's and Stanley Reiter's - noting connections across a common theme. I'm putting together a brief paper reviewing my conceptual approach to decoherence, and comments about the wavefunction, so I don't end up recreating the same information in 3 or 4 places.

Expect some comments soon, regardless.

Jonathan

Hello Edwin Eugene,

Here is some food for thought; the first few pages of the document promised above, with thoughts on decoherence and the wavefunction. It may turn into something that can be published, when complete, but now is just a draft of a Physics letter.

I'll likely have some specific comments on your paper later or tomorrow.

JonathanAttachment #1: DecoherenceReviewDraft.pdf

Hi Edwin,

I cannot help making some further corrections in your view of my model. You wrote: "I buy it as a math approach to kill unwanted terms, but not as a theory of the physical universe."

This sentence is wrong and misguided on several counts. To being with, the idea that I am somehow "killing unwanted terms" is offensive to me. As I have said before, it shows that you have fallen for the mischaracterizations of my work by Gill and Moldoveanu, and that you have not understood---or understood only very superficially---what my program is all about. I am not killing any unwanted terms, but calculating the physical correlations among the physical events occurring within our physical space. The term you call unwanted, namely a /\ b, is actually the most wanted term in my model. It represents the torsion within the physical space, modelled as a parallelized 3-sphere, and hence it is responsible for the violations of the Bell-CHSH inequality (I explained this to you in one of my very first responses to your questions on the Disproof blog). Moreover, 3-sphere is a solution of Einstein's field equations of GR (it is one of the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker solutions of the standard cosmology), and thus my model can hardly be called "a math approach." I am aware of your strong prejudice against what you consider extra dimensions, but there is nothing "extra" about the dimensions of the 3-sphere, which is a three-dimensional physical space. When it comes to quantum correlations more general than the EPR correlations, all seven dimensions of the 7-sphere do come into play, but the correlations like those exhibited by the GHZ state are a direct physical evidence for these "extra" dimensions. In fact, even in this case I see nothing extra about the dimensions of the 7-sphere. Thus, the way I see it, your reservations are based on some misunderstandings of my framework as well as on your insistence on separating what you consider physical from what you consider mathematical. In short, in my view, your sentence I have quoted above is completely unjustified.

Best,

Joy

Hi Edwin,

Thanks you for your reply. I am of course grateful to you, both for defending my work against some unjustified attacks and for taking active interest in it. I also understand that my work is by no means easy to understand. It requires understanding the foundations of quantum mechanics very deeply. And here I have an advantage of some 30 years over most people on these pages. I have been privileged enough to learn and practice the subject at the feet of some of the best experts in the world, including John Bell himself. Moreover, my work requires understanding several other branches of prima facie unrelated physics and mathematics. There are two other factors that may be obscuring the understanding of my work. First is the fact that it has emerged in separate papers, written over the period of some five years, rather than as a single, continuous monograph. And secondly it has been obfuscated beyond recognition by some of my uninformed and unqualified critics, for their own unscientific purposes. I recognize that all of these factors can be a hindrance to the correct understanding of my ideas and results. The only thing I can do about this is correct any misunderstanding whenever I can, and that is what I have been doing.

In any case, I stress again that I am indeed grateful to you for both defending my work and taking an active interest in it. I know you are only trying your best to make sense of it. Not surprisingly, I myself see it as a transparent painting of Picasso, not requiring a single additional stroke.

Best,

Joy

Hi Edwin,

Topology is global and continuous. You wrote,

"Your idea that ' ... all possible quantum correlations is derived from the maximum of parallelizing torsions within all possible norm-composing parallelizable manifolds", is understandable as English, but doesn't do it for me as physics.'"

It isn't my idea. The words are quoted from Joy. They physically describe the limit of the topology that compels quantum correlations to be real and local. In other words, the discrete local measure is a direct consequence of the continuous global structure. I don't find that obscure -- to use a metaphor, my body's global structure forbids certain local actions, like touching my right elbow with my right hand; it facilitates other actions, like crossing my right and left arms across my chest. The right and left are correlated.

"When trying to understand the basis of our disconnect I've wondered if it's as simple as: you try to fit physics to math, I try to fit math to physics. It's probably nothing so simple."

I don't try to fit physics to math, nor math to physics. I do math for its own sake, and I find that language (no matter whether natural or mathematical) is independent of meaning. The science is in the correspondence of mathematical theory to physical result.

Tom

A Great paper!

I enjoyed reading your essay very much, Edwin Eugene. I thought I'd have to put it aside, but then could not put it down and found myself at the end. I will need to read pages 6-9 again, and maybe more too, before I can determine whether you have proved your point or not.

There is certainly a lot to like, in your paper, content wise. You have chosen to champion several insights I favor; so how could I complain? I guess I could wish your theory was more even-handed, as some other folks have commented. I am uncertain where the C-field handedness comes from, but I do recall it is integral to your construction.

Very interesting ideas, and worth a little digging to flesh out my understanding what they are about. More feedback after I re-read and digest, compare notes, and so on.

All the Best,

Jonathan

Thank you for addressing basic issues concerning the wave function. It is a long-standing scandal that so many physicists have stated that QM cannot be understoo - not stated as a humble confession that problems remain, but rather as a point of pride: "We 'understand' that we don't understand! And we tell our students to follow our fearless lead to forget about that old idea of 'understanding' and just go ahead and apply the formalism!" It is another scandal that professors teaching what they don't understand has not been seen as the crisis in academia that it represents. Wikipedia is not always a reliable guide, but it is instructive that fully seventeen, mutually incompatible "common" interpretations of QM are listed there. They all have philosophical attractions of one kind or another, but most end with an insoluble paradox. So, it will be interesting to see if the Klingman solution can convince others to follow-up on the physical implications of a wave function that does not allow "superposition" and does not demand "collapse". Good luck in the contest...

Hi Edwin,

Very nice summary! I agree with every word of it, and more importantly, with the spirit of it.

However, what you have not yet appreciated (and this I know from our previous discussions and from your "physics based disproof") is that Bell did not make a silly, easy to overcome mistake. He made a profound discovery and a very instructive mistake. You have not yet understood either his discovery or his mistake. Bell discovered that quantum correlations are stronger, and hence more disciplined than the correlations we usually encounter in the classical world. This is a non-trivial discovery. Consequently, meeting Bell's challenge requires a non-trivial understanding of quantum correlations. It requires understanding what they are all about and where do they originate from.

Your "physics based disproof" does not come anywhere close to disproving Bell's theorem or even recognizing his error---because, as I have said before, you have no understanding of what Bell was concerned about. With all your good intensions, you must first understand Bell's theorem correctly before you can challenge it. The community of physicists who believe in Bell's theorem may be somewhat dogmatic, closed-minded, and naive, but they are most certainly not stupid. They believe in what they believe in for very good scientific reasons. Until you understand these reasons you have not understood Bell's theorem. You cannot disprove that which you haven't understood. I say this with the best of intentions because I know your heart is in the right place. I hope you will use my words for your own benefit.

Best,

Joy

Hi Edwin,

The scientific community has been asserting it's unquestionable authority that human beings have no soul, there is no hereafter, and that psychic phenomena doesn't exist on the basis that everything is explainable with science. You said,

"Aharonov claims that "the only *reasonable* resolution seems to be that ... the weak measurement's outcomes anticipate the experimenter's future choice, even before the experimenters themselves know what their choice is going to be."

Here you are trying to bring down an accepted theorem, Bell's theorem, on the grounds that weak measurements somehow know what the experimenter will chose. You make it look as if Bell's theorem has to be wrong, because if it's right, it means something spooky and paranormal is occurring.

I am not criticizing your point of view in the least. I am merely injecting my opinion that when science tells us there is no paranormal, no psychic phenomena, no soul, no ghosts, nothing unknown, that science can explain everything, that science is really feeding us a load of crap. Suddenly the choice of the experimenter is now part of some unknown variables. Clearly, quantum mechanics destroys all classical belief that we are soulless biological machines. I'll take back my faith, thank you.

Hi Edwin,

A lot of physicists have undertaken to explain why action at a distance isn't "spooky." Aharonov's and everyone else's explanation necessarily relies on a probabilistic interpretation of reality. (Richard Gill is also among those who do not think that nonlocality is necessary to quantum mechanics -- that probability alone determines measurement outcomes.)

All of these explanations end up assuming what they intend to prove, for at least one very elementary mathematical reason (a), and one very elementary physical reason(b): a) the measure space is made of a continuous range of variables, while the measurement result is discrete (this is what makes Lamport's discovery profound); b) given that relativity is true, there can be no probabilistic distinction between past and future, which is equivalent to assuming a privileged coordinate frame.

Like Joy Christian, Aharonov et al propose nonlocality as only apparently true: " ... what appears to be nonlocal in space turns out to be perfectly local in spacetime." So far, so good -- except that it is impossible in principle to perform a probability measure on the spacetime continuum. The difference between purportedly entangled discrete particles and demonstrably correlated continuous wave functions is a strict constraint; spacetime can't be discretized without assuming either nonlocality or a privileged frame of reference. If considered to be a complete theory, quantum mechanics *cannot* discard the assumption of nonlocality, or else the theory is incoherent.

Joy does away with the conundrum, by allowing a natural, constructive, and globally continuous topological condition (all proofs of nonlocality are nonconstructive, and all topology is global) to be realized in the local discrete measurement outcomes -- without invoking probability or time, which in turn shows that quantum correlations do not result from particle entanglement, and both nonlocality and entanglement are illusions.

In other words, while Bell's theorem explicitly demonstrates that no classical theory can be derived from the principles of quantum mechanics -- it does not forbid quantum mechanical results from being derived on classical principles. This latter is what Joy has demonstrated, and which satisfies the completeness criterion for a physical theory; i.e., every element of the mathematical theory corresponds to every element of the physical measure.

Tom

Nice, Tom; nice. Very nice.

Joy

Dear Edwin

Sorry for the delay in commenting on your essay; I have been giving your essay some thought.

As you saw in my essay, I agree with you that the wave function captures a real physical wave and not just some sort of mathematical probability wave. In the example of wave interference for electrons, it is possible to take such a purely mathematical view of the situation far from the slits causing the interference pattern. The alternative is to take the view of a physical wave, where the focus is then on the slits. As these must be on the scale of the wavelength of the particle, physical intuition leads to focusing on what is going on at the scale of the wavelength of the particle - as you do in your essay. I also make the same choice of physical intuition over the mathematics as you do, and consequently agree with you on the assumptions that you challenge. The problem is that the maths doesn't agree with our choice. So either we abandon our physical intuition and go with the abstract maths, but as Roger Schlafly discussed in his essay, this could be a major source of the problem physics has had. I point with which I agree.

Models with causal linkage between the particle and wave property generally have problems with Bell-type analysis, or re-analysis. Quantum Theory has a very peculiar form of non-locality, with what can be called non-locality of identity which is confirmed by wave interference and quantum entanglement experiments. However, this is strangely not accompanied by non-locality of causation such that it could be practically used to send a signal faster than light. Unfortunately because your model has causal linkage between the wave and particle properties, when you obtain the non-locality of identity required for comparison with QT you also acquire non-locality of causation. So Joy Christian is right and the model as given in the essay does fall victim to the non-locality issue, as encountered via Bell-type analysis.

However, our physical intuition is based upon the assumption that the physical concepts we use are absolutely defined, whereas they are actually defined relative to a background, as is explicit in GR. This generally doesn't make any difference as the normal space background on which our physical intuition is based generally doesn't change dramatically enough. There is however one scenario in GR where the change in the background metric of space-time is dramatic enough to upset our expectations, and that is the ergo-region of a rotating black hole where the time component of the metric reverses sign. This change would affect what we define as being local and non-local. Consider two events with time separation dt and space separation dx - such as a causally linked particle and wave property - which would have a time-like separation ds2 = -cdt2 dx2 < 0 in normal space. Now change the background metric by simply reversing the sign of the time component - as occurs in the ergo-region - and the separation becomes space-like ds2 = cdt2 dx2 > 0. The actual time and distance separations haven't changed, but the change in the background metric has changed local causation into apparently non-local causation. So in a compound model of particle and wave with what our physics intuition would call local causal linkage in normal space, the inclusion of this sign reversal effect on the scale of the wavelength of the particle would give a non-local identity to the compound object. But because the metric is as per normal beyond the wavelength of the compound object, it wouldn't have non-locality of causation and so could be expected to avoid falling victim to Bell-type analysis.

My essay discusses this effect in the context of deriving quantum field theory via a change in mathematical representation because the wave expansion about a particle-like black hole on the Planck scale can be proven to be mathematically incomplete in terms of countable particle (black hole) numbers. However, it does suggest that an approximate causal model of a particle-wave compound object could be possible if it included this effect of sign reversal in the time component of the metric.

Hope this is helpful.

Michael