Dear Dr. Harokopos,

Thank you for your comments on the 2nd line of my abstract. It seems that you object to standard terms of "real" and "space", and were unable to get any further. I take a more pragmatic approach, and pictures are an essential aspect of human imagination. I present a consistent realistic quantum picture, which is regarded as impossible in the orthodox theory. The quantum world need not be dramatically different from the classical world with which we are all familiar from direct observation.

Alan

General discussion of Marshall & Santos SED theory (Stochastic Electrodynamics) is at crisisinphysics website, particularly the pdc page is helpful.

There are several anti-photon items on the blog blog with validation of wave theory through optical experiments on the post can-we-celebrate-defeat-for-the-photon-by-maxwell-planck-theory-?

The Marshall & Santos SED theory (Stochastic Electrodynamics) is available in articles which include their The myth of the photon.

There are several anti-photon items on the associated blog including validation of wave theory through optical experiments on the post

    Dear Alan,

    I do not understand most of your essay but it looks consistent.

    None esoteric alternatives like yours seem rare.

    Regards

    Christophe

      Alan,

      Many thanks for an excellent read. I have read your essays in the past and found them to be enlightening. You are fairly consistent in your choice of subject matter.

      The part regarding solitons seems very plausible to me although one of the features of a soliton is the ability to be unchanged by interaction with other solitons. I have had an auto accident before, and I assure you that the soliton associated with my auto was very definitely altered by the interaction.

      Is it possible that the non-linear wave equation that you seek is actually a vector or quaternion version of the existing equations?

      If the emphasis in physics is to shut up and calculate as you say rather than understand then I think I am glad I went with engineering instead of math and physics. You conclude by urging the establishment to take off the blinders. I'm afraid that will be very difficult for many. It would be easier simply not to have the blinders to begin with. That is one of the good things about FQXI. Amateurs and professionals can interact. There is a muse here somewhere.

      Best Regards and Good Luck,

      Gary Simpson

        Dear Sir,

        With all respect due, have you send your paper to a journal for peer review? I think this contest was not for an essay on quantum mechanics but on math and physics and their relation. You have several references to your paper but none of them was published in a peer-reviewed journal bur instead are in the form of eprints. I suppose you have tried to publish but your peers found your ideas unacceptable and refused to do so. Thank you for your effort.

          Dear Alan,

          Very impressed by your insights I commend you. You are one of the few physicists daring to question the purely mathematical foundation of quantum mechanics and merit high ratings in this FQXI contest.

          Especially enlightening is your attacking of non-locality, immediate action at a distance and entanglement. I cite your example of math constructs leading physics into a trap, a mathematical prison not easy to escape from. "However, it was not initially realized that these abstract Hilbert-space constructions are incompatible with local realism, and should have been questioned on that basis. By the time this was realized, it was too late - these entangled constructions (linear combinations of product states) had been fully accepted into the foundations of quantum mechanics, and were no longer considered open to question by the theoretical physics community"

          It was not Hilbert's fault. But, who will lead us out of this trap cemented in all mayor physics textbooks and making QM non-understandable?

          Another eye-opener is your dismissal of quantum computers for the same "No entanglement" reason: "For many years, the foundations of quantum mechanics were viewed as an obscure field with no realworld applications. However, in recent years, there have been major theoretical and experimental efforts to design a quantum computer that could solve problems that are virtually impossible using conventional computers, such as factoring large integers, enabling one to break standard unbreakable codes [DiVincenzo 1995]. These quantum algorithms depend on quantum entanglement of N qubits, which yields an exponential parallelism as 2

            You are arguing that quantum mechanics is all wrong, and you are wroking on a theory to replace it. Is that right?

              Roger,

              Yes, that is what I am arguing. But the essence of the argument is that there are no separate microscopic and macroscopic realms with sharply different organizing principles. Such a separation in the conventional theory creates a major boundary problem, for which conventional theory does not have a clear and consistent explanation.

              In contrast, in my picture, deterministic causal equations apply at all levels - no boundary is present, and therefore no boundary problem. The only thing that is required for a complete theory are the equations governing self-organization of microscopic fields into solitons or domains with quantized spin (in units of h-bar), which act in certain respects as particles. Everything else follows from that. There are no quantum paradoxes required.

              I hope you will read my essay in more detail. I have also proposed straightforward experiments that should clearly distinguish my picture from conventional theory. For example, the 2-stage Stern-Gerlach experiment is presented in many quantum textbooks (including Feynman's Lectures on Physics) as a model of quantum measurement, and generations of students believe that this experiment was done early on. However, I can't find any evidence that it was ever done; only Feynman admitted that it had not been done, at least by 1964.

              I noticed that your essay talks about randomness and causality, and I may have comments after a more careful reading.

              Alan

              Dear Susanne,

              Thank you for your careful reading of my paper and your kind comments.

              The theoretical physics community is in denial about the shortcomings of quantum theory, believing that it must be correct because there is a mathematical formalism. I am reminded of the story of "The Emperor's New Clothes," in which the emperor's new suit is in fact non-existent, but (almost) everyone claims to see it, because the authorities have convinced them that it is visible to anyone who is not stupid. The power of intimidation by authorities should not be minimized.

              Alan

              Dear Alex,

              I sent some earlier versions to several journals. The papers were rejected without review, with a polite comment that this was not the correct journal. This is the standard "crackpot letter," even though I am a credentialed physicist (PhD from Harvard). I also presented posters at several meetings of the American Physical Society (which does not screen papers). I had a number of interesting discussions with experimental physicists, but unfortunately theoretical physicists uniformly refused to engage in discussion. It seems that experimentalists regard QM as a useful tool, while theorists view QM as religious doctrine which is not to be questioned.

              Alan

              Gary,

              Thank you for your comments.

              Regarding your question about the nonlinear wave equation responsible for soliton formation, I'm not sure. A few years ago I looked at relativistically covariant gauge-invariant potentials (something like the electromagnetic potentials), and did some Matlab simulations, but they didn't seem to have the right properties, so I put this aside.

              Regarding your comment about FQXI allowing amateurs and professional to interact, there actually seems to be rather little of that. It is mostly amateurs talking to amateurs, and professionals to professionals. I have been posting essays in FQXi since 2012, and have yet to get a serious question from a theoretical physicist.

              Alan

              Dear Christophe,

              My alternative picture of QM seems like something that could have been proposed back in the 1920s, but I have looked thoroughly in the old literature, and I can't find any evidence that a consistent wave-based picture of this type was ever considered.

              Alan

              Max,

              Thank you for your comment about the Stochastic Electrodynamics theory of Marshall and Santos. I followed some of that work some years back, and corresponded briefly with both Marshall and Santos.

              Alan

              6 days later

              Dear Alan Kadin,

              Great essay, it starts with a clear and concise idea "it is argued here that pictures of real objects moving in real space provide the proper basis for physics, and that mathematics merely provides quantitative models for calculating the dynamics of these objects."

              Your conclusion that "pictures should guide physics" and more detailed comment "As a consequence of elevating abstract mathematics and denigrating realistic pictures, exploratory theoretical physics has wasted decades wandering in the desert, caught up in a tangled web of selfdeception. By removing the blinders and allowing ourselves to be guided by realistic pictures, we may find a path toward the promised land of understanding physical reality."

              Your approach to the essay contest is very close to my own. Although some of the structures I use do not quite match yours, I agree completely with your comment "A model that yields a valid result may be assumed to be correct, even if other explanations may also be valid."

              I hope you get a chance to have a look at the models in my essay as your comments would be very interesting.

              Your essay deserves a high rating and I wish you the best of luck.

              Regards, Ed Unverricht

                Dear Mr. Unverricht:

                Thank you for your encouraging comments. I have not yet had a chance to read your essay carefully, but I glanced at it quickly. I noticed that you address the Standard Model of Particle Physics. One of the things that I did not have space to address in my essay (although I have previously) is that all of the fundamental "particles" in the Standard Model can be represented as rotating vector fields carrying spin, except for the Higgs Boson, which alone is supposed to be spin zero. Within my picture, all spin-zero particles must be composites of two particles with opposite spin, similar to a meson which is a quark-antiquark pair. That would suggest that what has been detected experimentally may not be the desired Higgs Boson. So experiments are essential in physics, but the interpretations of the experiments are equally important. Simply obtaining agreement with the standard theory is not a proof that the theory is correct.

                When I have time, I will read your essay more carefully, and I will post a comment if I have any questions.

                Thank you again, and good luck with the competition.

                Alan Kadin

                Sorry but the fact you are "credentialed physicist" is no evidence that your ideas have any kind of validity, and actually they haven't. Bureaucracy turned out to be more often than not a good filter of competence in science, and, as I explained, scientific research cannot survive without any proper filter whenever a collective dimension of research and/or a discernment of useful public money spending are needed, but failures in the current bureaucratic system of credentials distribution may occur as well. I have extensively studied another case of a highly "credentialed physicist" with nonsensical ideas that even became popular and the author mistaken as the genius of the century in the French public, due to the lack of understanding of physics from the part of editors of scientific popularization magazines.

                Now the fact is, the wide acceptance of standard quantum theory is not the result of any dogmatism, even though I do observe that some dogmatic behaviors, an effect of inertia, also occur in the academic community, namely as concerns the details of undergraduate curriculum, the precise way in which fundamental theories are introduced, and due to which I found the necessity to leave the system and thus virtually throw my painfully acquired math PhD to the toilet in order to develop my work in this field. Nor is it due to any kind of social acceptability of the "shut up and calculate" attitude and the current formulation of physics by Hilbert spaces, or any comfort with the lack of classical realism, which are absolutely not the case, as we do find lots of high level physicists with the very same loud discontent which you express about this current state of science, and thus dedicating their research to their dream of restoring such a classical realism, especially in the form of Bohmian mechanics.

                No. As incredible as it may sound, the rude fact is that the acceptation of quantum physics with all its non-realistic abstraction was forced by the physical reality itself upon our rebel community of usually classical realist physicists, most of whom remain desperate about this discrepancy of Nature's verdict with their deeply rooted philosophical expectations. And notwithstanding this body of knowledge, many of them are still pushed by their philosophical prejudices to keep dreaming that this verdict of Nature may be not final and that an opposite one should be expected for some utopian future. The real situation is that they found themselves obliged to accept quantum theory by its incredibly amazing success in correctly predicting the results of about any physical experiment that may be thought of, and by the evidence they do have of how desperate is any try to explain these experimental results in "realistic" manners.

                In this circumstance, any idea, as what you suggest, that the true laws of physics would be so totally different from accepted quantum physics that local realism would be true (so that, for example, quantum computers would be fundamentally impossible), is absolutely ridiculous, because, logically, it is just absolutely impossible for any 2 so widely different theories to have any sort of accurate agreement on any significant range of predictions. Such widely different theories might accidentally coincide on 2 or 3 cases of experimental results ; however such agreement would quickly fail as soon as things are checked in significant accuracy and other experimental conditions are considered, and this idea of accidental coincidence of some range of predictions between widely different theories is obviously unable to account for the amazing systematic accuracy of the verifications of quantum physics in millions of widely different experiments that have already been made until now.

                Now what I just explained here, and this unfortunate phenomenon of abundance of so many people who cannot admit scientific results but wrongly and confidently accuse the physics community of dogmatism and so on due to their ignorance of the current state of science, is things well-known by the physics community. That is the phenomenon of crackpot. Please document yourself (my text first linked above is just an example, many other scientists such as John Baez wrote about it as well) on what "crackpot" means and how scientists have very legitimate reasons to be upset and just reject without further discussion these popular expressions of proud ignorance, this popular cult of stupidity, this mental pollution that is the worst enemy of the progress of science. (On a related aspects of things, that article is also interesting).

                Alan,

                I am amused regarding your interpretation of amateur and professional. I guess everything is perspective. I was thinking of YOU as the pro and myself as the amateur. I also consider Dr. Gibbs and Dr. Klingman to be professionals. I suspect that I get more out of these interactions than you guys:-)

                Best Regards and Good Luck,

                Gary Simpson