Remove the Blinders: How Mathematics Distorted the Development of Quantum Theory by Alan M. Kadin

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?

Congratulation for such a brilliant essay. You deserve the best.

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

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

Alan,

A brilliant analysis, well presented. I see it's flushed out some Lord Kelvin believers; "physics is all sorted so we can stop thinking." They clearly have. I still see the problem as how to speed intellectual evolution. Certainly pictures not just numbers should resonate.

To that end I've built dynamic physical models, very much on our common these, and just posted a short video; http://youtu.be/KPsCp_S4cUs

I suspect if the complete solution is presented well in the right medium we may succeed. Shifting the paradigm may be impossible, but I conceived a plan 40 years ago to place everything around the paradigm in a new inertial rest frame which evolves (sneaks) away from the old beliefs leaving them behind! It will take a team, and it seems you're key (planned departure 2020). I suggest that may finally be just 'crazy enough' for Neils Bohr!

I have no compunction applying top marks to your essay but do suggest neither of our pictures is yet quite complete. I hope you may find additional value and insight in some aspects of a recent co-authored paper recently rejected which reproduces QM's predictions in full with a quasi-classical model, identifying the specific false assumptions.

https://www.academia.edu/9216615/Quasi-classical_Entanglement_Superposition_and_Bell_Inequalities._v2

Please do also comment on the video and paper.

Excellent job, and hope your essay hits the top.

Peter

Alan, (I am really sorry about the length of this, but give it a chance)

I just opened your essay page this morning and it said different things from what I had expected.

(Not being a Physicist) It would be remiss of me to say technical things about your model. But perhaps I can comment on a theme that motivates (you can correct me here, if you wish) your essay. It is your claim that..."On the contrary, 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..." (Btw, I did read the whole thing.)

As I went through various observations I could make regarding your main thesis, it became evident that those would be the same that I made yesterday on Ken Wharton's essay page. Being the author of it, I felt sanctioned to copy certain parts of it here.

"...perhaps physicists' intuition ought to be given greater weight... The reason for that is that in the absence of patterns, paradigms, structures, etc. that make sense to us and which we can manipulate in our minds, physics may become a (proverbial) victim of its own success.

Here is how it would work. Say that things get so esoteric that only computers can generate theories and proofs (by now you know where this is heading), and humans can no longer see why any of it makes sense, nor can they follow the proofs. Computers may propose new theories, but those will still have to be tested against the real world. Given that there can be a myriad of computer-generated theories, and that we will not know which ones to follow up on first, it will present us with various quandaries. Experiments take time, and may only get more expensive in the future. We will not be able to afford to test all of the new theories, nor be able to pick only viable ones for experimental confirmation.

Unless we come up with a ToE to program the computer with before switching to autopilot, we will become dependent on the computer to divine the correct theory solely from mathematics. I am extremely skeptical about any claims that "mathematics alone" can figure out the universe without checking with it (the universe), and I am not getting on an airplane without a human pilot sitting somewhere near the front.

I would also like to draw your attention to a part of Sophia Magnusdottir's essay. You may have already seen it. She proposes that an "analog" method might obviate the need for mathematics in at least parts of physics, perhaps even those not well matched to known mathematics. An example might be adiabatic "computing" already in use. This could certainly work in principle, but since you will still have to measure at least the relative "scale" between the two systems (one being the subject, and the second being the solver) to get the result or prediction you are after, it may not provide all the tools to do physics.

Your central point appears to be unassailable. For at least any foreseeable time horizon, mathematics will be indispensable for physics."

I think all readers would benefit from going to Ken Wharton's essay page (and, for that matter, to Sophia Magnusdottir's).

This next part is solely to follow up on your response to Ed Unverricht:

Alan M. Kadin replied on Mar. 8, 2015 @ 21:33 GMT: "...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..."

Alan, you have some company in your contention that the putative Higgs Boson might not be what it is purported to be. Now, you may not want to be associated with some of them, but they deserve a second look. Already, on Wednesday, 04 July 2012 13:41 (European time), almost immediately after the big Higgs announcement, Peter J. Carroll (on www.specularium.org/component/k2/item/58-higgs-or-not) made this statement (among others): "This particle could well consist of a composite entity like a top-antitop meson rather than a truly new fundamental particle."

Now, I have to warn you, you will be turned off by Carroll's other interests - but you ought to look for the "diamond." Carroll has some interesting physics, and less interesting "magic."

Now, for a more comprehensive argument "against the Higgs" you ought to look up Eli Comay's webpage(s). At the very least, you might discover that he is really smart.

It is easy to label those with whom you disagree "cranks." Yes, some people's systems are internally inconsistent, and/or not based on reasonably established facts about the world. But if a model or theory is internally consistent and not convincingly contradicted by "facts" (which can keep changing), the most one could say is that he/she was wrong.

Calling proponents of coherent and consistent ideas cranks would be like calling Bohr a crank should his ideas be disproved or simply superseded in the future. Bohr was a serious scientist, and I am quite sure he was sincere in his quest to find the "truth" about our universe.

En