Essay Abstract

The aim of this essay is to try to provide an open-minded look at some of the problems in fundamental physics which resulted from the idea of quantization. The sole reason for this attempt is to examine whether those problems might have been caused by an implicit exclusion of the correct, but radical and counter-intuitive research directions. Three topics will be discussed -- (i) the nature of the quantum object, (ii) quantum gravity, and (iii) whether or not the Planck scale implies discreteness of spacetime itself.

Author Bio

Vesselin Petkov received a graduate degree in physics from Sofia University, a doctorate in philosophy from the Institute for Philosophical Research of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and a doctorate in physics from Concordia University. He taught at Sofia University and is currently teaching at Concordia University. He wrote the book "Relativity and the Nature of Spacetime" (2ed, Springer 2009) and edited the books "Relativity and the Dimensionality of the World" (Springer 2007), "Minkowski Spacetime: A Hundred Years Later" (Springer, 2010), and "Space, Time, and Spacetime: Physical and Philosophical Implications of Minkowski's Unification of Space and Time" (Springer, 2010).

Download Essay PDF File

Dear Vesselin

I enjoyed very much your essay. I agree with many of your objections about widespread notions but I think you are missing a fundamental point that it will close all your reasonings and I think it can enrich your ideas. I invite you to read my essay to understand what I think you are missing and I would like to hear your opinions.

J.Benavides.

    • [deleted]

    Very well written. Many thought provoking questions. Feynman would be proud.

    With regard to your double slit explanation: if the electron is in different times as opposed to spaces, how is it (assuming random nature) that it always takes a path in time that produces an interference pattern? Why wouldn't the electron sometimes land in a spot permitted by single slit and not double?

      Dear John,

      Thank you for both your comments and your invitation to read your essay. I will certainly do it.

      Thank you for your comments, Chris.

      Regarding your question, let me first say that I would not call what I described an "explanation"; I simply wanted to demonstrate that it is not unthinkable to imagine a quantum object that is both always registered as a localized entity and is going through both slits. That idea needs to be tested and further developed; the initial proposal (back in the eighties) described the constituents of an electron as appearing where the maxima of a somewhat real de Broglie wave are. So you asked the most relevant and essential (but still open) question, which follows from the discussed idea.

      5 days later
      • [deleted]

      Vesselin,

      I find your concern regarding "the nature of the quantum object" very interesting. You have a very thought-provoking essay that touches on the ideas that I have proponed in my own essay.

      Therefore, I am also giving you my vote.

      I hope you will also read my essay and also give me your vote.

      Rafael

        Thank you for your comments, Rafael. I have freed my weekend to continue reading the essays here and will certainly read yours.

        • [deleted]

        Vesselin,

        1. A well written essay (perhaps another prize) good work.

        2. I agree with you about particles and how they manifest discontinuously.

        You are obviously sticking your neck out and you have my admiration.

        3. My work is more into the speculative realm (maybe much more) but you may find things of interest there that may aid your work. If you have the time take a look at:

        a. this essay contest: Making Waves

        b. last essay contest: Gravity from the Ground UP

        c. My web site: www.digitalwavetheory.com

        Wishing you the best,

        Don Limuti

          Vesselin

          I've only just read your essay and wish I had sooner. A very clear and well written analysis with pertinent questions, worth a good score. But I also see it as a precursor to mine, which reports on a model seeming to answer the most key questions, and falsifiably! - effectively a quantisation of both space-time and gravity. I initially assumed it incorrect, but have failed to prove that, and no-one else has yet been able to help. http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/803

          Your own view would be much appreciated if you have time. But you can't get the value from just 'scanning' it. Be prepared for a 'coal face' logical reality approach, and to stretch your dynamic visualisation skills beyond previous limits.

          Best of luck in the contest.

          Peter

          • [deleted]

          Dear Dr. Petkov,

          Beautiful essay. In it you tell us: "(t)he assumption that electrons (and quantum objects in general) do not exist continuously in time appears to provide unexpected but reasonable conceptual answers to probably all

          quantum puzzles."

          In my essay is a generalisation of the energy of a photon, which renders your assumption superfluous, but does raise the question of whether or not it will eventually answer all quantum puzzles. Being a physicist you may be able to answer that question.

          All the best,

          Robert

            • [deleted]

            Vesselin,

            Your essay is an oasis in the desert of confusion. Thanks!

            Hope you get a chance to read mine, too.

            Tom

            • [deleted]

            Dear Dr. Petkov,

            If I may, I would just like to add that it follows - from what I said above - that the 'Nature of the Quantum object' at the 'quantum' level is Light.

            Once again thank you for your thoughts,

            Robert

            Hi Vesselin,

            these are some comments on three passages of you essay.

            Adolfo.

            "I think everyone would agree that we will never gain deep understanding of the

            world if legitimate physical questions - such as those of the nature of the entities living

            at the quantum scale - are ignored by labeling them metaphysical or philosophical"

            I go further in this regard. I think we will never gain a full deep understanding of the world (Reality), however we will keep asking questions and trying to understand how Reality works.

            "We, as species, would not have survived if Dirac's analysis and

            conclusion were wrong because in such a case photons reflected by different objects

            would interfere before hitting our eyes' retina and we would be unable to see the world

            properly."

            This type of argument makes me think that Feynman was not joking when he said nobody understands Quantum Mechanics. The type of argument is " The results are correct because if they are different then I would not exist" In this type of arguments we disregard the possibility that the model is wrong or incomplete.

            Still with Feynman. I also think he wasn't joking because knowing how a black box behaves does not mean we know or understand what it is inside. In this respect Quantum Mechanics it is just a model for what we think it is inside a black box and we are still trying to understand what is it inside.

            "The Eleatics believed that being (what exists) is continuous

            and that nothing can come into or go out of being because it would contradict a basic

            postulate - being exists, non-being does not exist - which can be deduced from what

            we perceive"

            Existence and Non- Existence are not separable, because Non-Existence is a function of Existence. We always need an object to say that there is "nothing". I think of an empty box and say that there is nothing in there. Well, I can look closer and say there is air in there. On this sense we can keep looking for smaller scales and look closer as we can. In the same context, we define Existence for what we do perceive and Non Existence for what we do not perceive. In this way Reality could be Digital.

            Vesselin,

            You make clear the esoteric. My essay is clear but perhaps too fanciful.

            Jim Hoover

            • [deleted]

            Hello Vesselin,

            I enjoyed your essay. One of the things I enjoyed about it most is that it obviates the difference between how a scientist views and interprets phenomena differently than an artist. If I take for example the Feynman experiment that perplexes science. The fundamental problem with a "science" view of light is that it views photons as things that area zipping through space. The analogy I always draw is that if you look at a body of water and observe the waves in it, the molecules in the water are not moving through the water. They move back and forth and up and down to maintain balance in relation to the forces that are acting upon them. The Feynman experiment supposes that space is nothing when it is not. Science should view space as a photonic energy field that is structured such that photon density increases in relation to its proximity to mass, and it should view mass as a point in space where time turns from 3D to 4D. The interference in the Feynman experiment is not the individual photon that is injected into the space, but rather the behavior of the "potential" photons that already exist in the space of the experiment that are "pushed" discretely.

            As for quantizing gravity, in my mind the quantization of gravity is the same as the quantization of time. Time is the only singular force at work in the universe that all forces delineated by science stem from. The problem with using the Planck scale as a measure in all of space is that it will be observable because the observer observational model will create it. Unobserved the planck scale can only be used relationally. Time is the only constant, and the concept of distance or scale or mass or energy are all defined in relation to it.

            If you get a chance I would be interested in what your view is of how I tend to view these scientific models. If you are interested in where I am coming from you can take a look at my essay here.

            Thanks for your essay I enjoyed it and will be giving you high marks in the community rating.

            Pete

            Dear Vesselin

            I enjoyed your essay and learned some interesting things from it. Many years ago when proposing a scheme to cancel diffraction effects, I quoted Dirac's saying that a photon only interferes with itself; now thanks to you I see his reasoning for this conviction. Your essay presents with great expertise a number of fundamental questions that I have already answered in 2005, albeit with a great deal less expertise, relying for the most part on my physical and geometrical intuition and imagination as an inventor. I would greatly appreciate it if you can look at my ideas to reconstruct physics both in the fqxi essay, and in my earlier 2005 Beautiful Universe paper on which it is based.

            With best wishes for your success, Vladimir

            • [deleted]

            Dear Vesselin,

            Thank you for an essay that is really understandable, even for a non physicist like me, and moreover you are the first who is touching the problem of the Planck scale, scientists have thought about all possible kind of things happening after this scale , so the for example the points of the disintegrated world line of the electron that are ^robabelistic scattered over a spa

              • [deleted]

              sorry Vesselin, I touched a wrong button, so I continue now my post :

              (and could not read it twice in order to change the errors...)

              probabelistically sctattered over all over space time " is a sentence I really like, because I place all that scattered points (not only from one electron but from all partcles in our universe and also of all possible paralel universes in a total simultanaeity (essay : realities out of total simultaneity (http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/913).

              I liked also your reasoning that because a falling object does not resist its fall means that it is not subjected to gravaitational force, but second thought gave me the idea that it does indeed not resist but as it falls towards a body with a great gravitational force the velocity increases, the subject itself may not be aware of that fact when it is in for exemple an elevator falling down, the subject is staying at the same velocity as the elevator ... (same with a space ship) See also the article by George Gamow Gravityin Scientific American march 4 1961 (now available as special Archive article (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gamow-gravity), how do you see that ?

              best regards and good luck

              Wilhelmus

              • [deleted]

              I read the "theory of heat radiation" by Plank and translated by Masius and the formulas and how Plank came up with the stuff you show it as though Plank used those formulas. My question is whether the "Theory of Heat Radiation" by Plank is the document in which he shows how he got quantization. Didn't Plank take Wien and Raleigh and Boltzmann and put them in his concept of black radiation. Is there another work of his that deals with the entropy of Einstein fields or G? Your formulas are correct and are expressions for Freedman universes or some kinds of universal entropy we recognize in our physics books. However, the roads to the Planck scale are different for Planck, but you imply that his was Adler's. I get your point but do not follow back from those formulas directly to Planck's work or what he "noticed" in his work. As an editor and writer would you make such a correction to reflect that we construct natural units and attribute them to Planck as Planck units based on his quantization hypothesis? It is important for me to know what a scientist notices and what is constructed afterwards. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think Planck constructed those formulas. But if you have and more references for how that came to be characterized in 1899, I would like to know.

              It was interesting to hear you explain how inertia of one object (a planet) is separate for the system of objects but that there is some greater generalization in terms of helicity or helix, but not dependent on the sun. The world tube is composite of geodesics? I have always assumed like Mach that inertia and spin etc. are all related, but wil we have the sensitivity yet to measure world tube differences? I always assumed that the vacuum encompasses all objects so that the true absolute free fall does not exist.