Ordinary Analogues for Quantum Mechanics by Arjen Dijksman

Given: a monochromatic laser with a Brewster window that outputs TEM_00 100% linearly polarized light with a long coherence length. Run said beam throught a 50:50 beamsplitter. One arm has a quarter wave plate converting output to 100% left-circularly polarized light (LCP). The other arm has a quarter wave plate converting output to 100% right-circularly polarized light (RCP). A double slit is placed in each beam. Are the separate diffraction patterns unremarkable?

Remove the two double slits. Mirrors reconstruct a still-coherent bifilar beam that impacts a double slit. RCP goes in one slit, LCP goes in the other. What diffraction pattern results?

Circularly polarized photons and electrons are both trivially obtainable. Fly them through vacuum. Use solid state polarized electrons, e.g., spintronics. "The surrounding needles will evolve in phase with the needles of the beam" No waffling! We know how to arbitrarily close to 100% polarize a beam. Shave away the dross. "Pilot waves" as a richer description of what is observed compared with mundane QM would not survive the first benchtop reduction to practice.

Linear polarization suffers from transmissive anisotropy of the slits vs. orientation of the plane of polarization. The linearly polarized beam is 50:50 split, then one half rotated +45 degrees and the other -45 degrees. Recombine into the coherent bifilar single beam and simultaneously hit the open double slit, one rotation through one slit and the other through the other. Photons or electrons. QM is wholly sufficient. As you have illustrated, "pilot waves" require excess baggage but do not evince excess testable prediction. Can they? How? What new observable is predicted?

Mr. Dijksman,

Thank you for an interesting and clearly written essay. You wrote, "Lee Smolin identified five problems in contemporary physics. The second problem deals with the foundations of quantum mechanics and might be resolved 'by making sense of the theory as it stands'."

As I'm sure you probably know by rote, Smolin wrote in a subsequent paragraph that, "There are unfortunately not many physicists who work on this problem. This is sometimes taken as an indication that the problem is either solved or unimportant. Neither is true. This is probably the most serious problem facing modern science. It is just so hard that progress is very slow. I deeply admire the physicists who work on it, both for the purity of their intentions and for their courage to ignore fashion and attack the hardest and most fundamental of problems." (pp. 8-9, 'The Trouble With Physics')

Judging from the clarity of your essay, I've concluded that you must be one of the "handful of smart people" who are working on the problem. Good luck! We certainly can use all the clarity that you and others can muster in this area.

Cheers

Hi Arjen.

I must say I truly like how you are approaching all of this and I wish more would try to gather what stands as being uniquely relevant from all the models, rather than focusing on simply one. I thus have always founnd it somewhat ironic that the more a physicist takes QM seriously, often the less seriously what they say is considered by their peers. I'm also intrigued by the recent particle/wave macro experiments you draw note of in your essay, as I've always imagined the actions of nature being in many respects the same regardless of scale. Perhaps one day such invariance may in itself be considered as a postulate of physics, as it being also a conserved quality.

Best,

Phil

Hello Mr Arjen Dijksman,

I read your essay ,very interesting your extrapolations and aims .

Congratulations for this whole point of vue.

I didn't know these 5 problems and the pilot wave ,very relevant all that .

I am going to learn more about that .It's interesting .

The light becomes mass ...

good luck for the contest .

Best Regards

Steve

Dear Arjen and Uncle Al,

Beam splitter experiments or more general "superposition" experiments do not require quantum mechanical explanations at all. You just need a wavelength for a photon.

I could try to describe it in a long post, but it can all be found here: Superposition again.

Best regards,

Steven Oostdijk

Dear Arjen,

My congratulations on well written and well comprehensible article. It is slightly out of focus wrt. to the contest challenge, but no less relevant.

Have you ever considered that the spins described by QM could be real stacked spins? A spherical particle would normally spin over an axis, but on top of that one could add three levels of "head to tail" spin, one for each dimension. One could even consider a fifth spin level relative to the linear motion of the particle.

Good luck with the contest,

Steven Oostdijk

Dear Arjen Dijksman,

Arje Oostdijk's link "superprosition again" claims a lot.

While I do not claim dealing with quantum theory, I collected what I consider evidence for implications of a very basic arbitrariness, affecting quantum theory too.

I would in particular appreciate an explanation concerning Gompf et al.

Please find attached a manuscript "A still valid argument by Ritz" the major part of which hopefully makes more understandable what might be wrong in QM before questionable guesses of mine are added.

Regards,

Eckard BlumscheinAttachment #1: Ritz09.pdf

Dear Arjen (Beste Arjen),

Thank you for your interesting essay. It is different from many others in the pack in the sense that it is 'creative' and mostly avoids speculation.

Louis de Broglie suspected the co-existence of two phenomena in a single particle: the 'pilot' wave and a highly non-linear pulse-like corpuscular behavior, which is currently designated as wave-particle duality [1]. He became discouraged by the disapproval of mathematical physicist like Heisenberg (as I recall) and, as a consequence, discontinued his research for many years. Unfortunately, he was not able to complete his research.

More recently, Andrei P. Kirilyuk originated a theory, called Quantum Field Mechanics (QFM), which shows the co-existence of the two mentioned alternating phenomena caused by interaction between two entities. This interaction results in a highly non-linear internally random pulsation. The existence of such behavior has never been recognised, since a mathematical analysis of state equations is normally simplified and, therefore, cuts out this phenomenon. In Kirilyuk's approach, the state equation is linear such that the superposition principle applies for solutions. However, oddly enough, each solution is highly non-linear and has 'hidden variables'. I.e. dynamically created eigenvalues which drive the non-linear state transitions, but which are inaccessible to measurements.

The dynamically created interaction object is identified with a massive particle, which exhibits internal randomness due to random state transitions (reduction states, see my essay). The corpuscular aspect is present in case of a stationary particle and when a particle is in motion. Wave behavior is only present when a particle is in motion and is caused by 'coherence' of the internal states of the particle (intermediate states).

In QFM, a photon can be viewed as a massive particle lacking internal random motion. Interestingly, for high speeds, the behavior of a massive particle resembles a photon. Quantitatively, this can be understood by considering the relativistic expressions for energy E and momentum p of a massive particle. They relate as Ev = pc^2, where c is the speed of light and v is the particle's speed. For v -> c, this gives the well-known photon relation E = pc. Thus, a massive particle can also be viewed as a 'wrapped up' photon, which gets 'unwrapped' as its speed in creases.

These results can never be obtained in current 'linear' physics, which seems more interested in discovering abstract symmetry principles and uses equations that could be viewed as best guesses.

In QFM, the 'needles' that you are talking about on page 4 are repeatedly dynamically created and subsequently destroyed resulting in an unceasing pulsation, and do not need a 'computational tool'. Rotation of the 'needles' results from the fact that two media with different mobilities are attracted to one another, such that any perturbation in the media caused by the attraction must 'rotate'. You also say "we could apply the whole quantum mechanical machinery to this system.'" In consider this explanation after the fact, but for now suffices to get the point across. In truly universal approach, theory should obey reality (well said Eckard Blumschein!), i.e. fit like a glove on a hand. It should explain Planck's constant, and the character of space, time, energy, momentum, charge, spin, the wave function etc. and avoid introduction of non-observed entities. Kirilyuk maintains that QFM is extensible to compositions of particles and could be used as a Universal Science of Complexity which may also be applicable to the experiments you describe.

More details on QFM can be found in my essay (which took a number of artificial postulating shortcuts to limit content), extra notes on the page where you can find my essay, and in a slide deck on my website.

1. L. de Broglie. Non-linear wave-mechanics - A causal interpretation.

Author's emphasis on intution and commonsense in working out Physics is commendable. His earch to find simple examples to illustrate quantum aspects is welcome too. But the difficulties Quantum mechanics faces in combining with other approaches still presents difficulties. An alternate search can materialise if one has some phenomenon to investigate which is neither ideal for classical nor for the Quantum mechanics. For example, let us look for cases where putting h to zero is not practical but at the same time the quantum picture too is not entirely valid. Large mass structures open to experimental basic studies may be searched. One possibility may lie with large ensemble of nanostructured material crystals where we can study diffraction and compare the results with same sample composed of ordinary atomic configuration or lighter nanostructured configuration. The problem of coherence effects as sample gets affected by environment may be tackled by preparing such samples in a parallel chamber in UHV and then tranfering to a coupled but another chamber where the samples may be studied experimentally. Author's response in this regard will be highly useful!

Dear Arjen Dijksman ,

You are welcome .

To all

very interesting thread ,relevant .

Best Regards

Steve

Dear Arjen,

This is such an important, clear and well written essay. I am jealous.

I would like you to take a glance at "Gravity from the ground up" in this contest. I also feel that deBroglie has the best key for unlocking QM. I found the pilot wave awkward and went with a digital wave instead. Perhaps another view of similar territory may give you some insights. And you may be interested in how I got gravity into Broglie's equation?

I believe we are uncannily close in outlook and interests and approach.

Best of luck,

Don L.

i eagerly await the response of the author to my post of Oct 11 where i suggest possible experiments , in view of the ideas he has expressed in the essay.

Dear Arjen Dijksman,

congratulations for a lucidly written Essay! I particularly like your pointing out of the work of Couder's group, i.e., about the existence of classical pilot waves, and your statement that the latter are a means to get better intuitions about quantum systems. Actually, I have tried throughout the last 25 years or so to model quantum systems by exactly that mutually causal relationship between "particles" ("drops") and waves. (See my monograph, "Quantum Cybernetics", Springer, New York, 2000, on that.) In recent years, however, I believe I have come even closer to an adequate modelling, and the works by Couder et al. could not illustrate this approach better. In this regard, I recommend two recent papers of mine (Foundations of Physics Letters 17, 4 (2004) 343-362, and Phys. Lett. A 372 (2008) 4556-4563), where I derive the Schroedinger equation from slightly different perspectives, but still very similar in spirit to what you say. The said papers are available at arXiv:quant-ph/0311109 and arXiv:0711.4954 .

Best wishes,

GG